GRAND RAPIDS, MI --- A community meeting will be held Wednesday, Oct. 23, where residents and business owners can discuss what a potential medical marijuana provisioning center could look like in the Southtown area.
Input is welcome at the meeting, which will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Linc Up Gallery, 341 Hall St. SE.
“Linc wants to make sure the community is part of the conversation,” said Willie Patterson, engagement director at Linc Up, a nonprofit community development organization.
The proprietor of C3 Industries, the proposed provisioning center, will go before the Grand Rapids planning commission at either its Dec. 12 meeting or the following meeting on Jan. 9, according to senior city planner Landon Bartley.
Ankur Rungta, CEO and co-founder of C3 Industries, is seeking zoning approval for the first proposed medical marijuana facility in the Southtown area. Southtown includes the business districts of Franklin and Eastern, Alger Heights, Boston Square, Madison Square, Seymour Square and South Division Avenue between Wealthy and Hall Streets.
As a part of the planning commission’s approval process, Rungta must gather community input before being approved to have a dispensary at the proposed site, 1316 Madison Ave. SE. He then plans to purchase the building from its current owner.
The proposed location for the dispensary is at 1316 Madison Avenue SE, where Urban Roots is currently housed. The medical marijuana company, C3 Industries, said they intend to share the space with Urban Roots.
Rungta said the location reflects the kind of “neighborhood dispensaries” that exist under C3 Industries, which owns four other Michigan retail locations already open or in development.
“I think what we’ll find is our customer base, our patient population, will be very localized, a lot of folks may walk to the location,” Rungta said. “I just think it’s a little different of a customer service approach and a little bit of a different feel to the store and the customers.”
Rungta is a Michigan native. His company, founded in 2016, is based in Ann Arbor and has additional locations in Detroit, Grant, and Weberville, near Lansing. He also has a large-scale facility in Oregon, and a facility being constructed in Massachusetts.
In Madison Square, the provisioning center, or dispensary, will sell medical marijuana products with a “thoughtful approach,” he said. Rungta expects regular customers who will use cannabis to treat chronic pain and illnesses.
“I think it’s all about customers having the choices, having the right information, having access to the highest quality products,” Rungta said. “That’s really what we believe in more than anything.”
The proposed site is where Urban Roots, a community farm, market and education center, is also located. Urban Roots President Levi Gardner said the center spent the summer not knowing what was going to happen to their space but are now “cautiously exploring” a shared space with the new provisioning center.
“We were not excited about the potential of being displaced by this company,” Gardner said. “After meeting with them, their intentions to not displace us became really clear.”
Rungta said his intentions from the beginning have been to share the space.
"The only way that we will be operating there is if we’re sharing the building with them,” Rungta said. “We’re not looking to take away a key community organization there, we understand how important they are.”
The building has a main floor, basement and upper level, and Gardner said he estimates each floor is about 2,400 square feet. Right now, Urban Roots uses all the main floor and the area outside for farming and gardening.
Gardner said Urban Roots has been trying to buy the building from their landlord for years, and continually was told that the landlord didn’t want to sell. Recently, they got a phone call that the landlord was selling to C3 Industries.
Gardner said as the marijuana industry becomes more prevalent, he’s seen the stigma start to slowly change. But he has been thinking about how Urban Roots hosts groups of kids throughout the year.
“We host over 4,000 visitors a year here, many of which are school age kids,” Gardner said. “I’ve had to ask myself questions about my own kids and how I would feel about them being in this space."
The site is 528 feet away from Madison Square Christian Reformed Church.
The city’s medical marijuana ordinance requires a separation distance of 1,000 feet between medical marijuana facilities and schools, day care centers, public parks, religious institutions and licensed substance abuse disorder program centers.
Except in the case of schools and day care centers, proposed medical marijuana businesses can request waivers from those restrictions. Bartley said C3 Industries will “indeed” need a waiver in order to operate.
Patterson said the church has expressed some concern about the dispensary being on the block. A representative of the church did not immediately respond to MLive for comment.
Madison Square Church is located at 1441 Madison Ave SE, and is 528 feet from Urban Roots, at 1316 Madison Avenue SE.
Rungta said he is in the process of scheduling a community meeting with the church, and intentionally chose the farthest available location from the church on the block.
“I understand that our use is controversial, and people may think that there are negative aspects to our business,” Rungta said. “For me, it’s about trying to figure out how can we try to mitigate our offsets and those negative aspects in hopes that we get to something that’s adding some kind of value to the community.”
Bartley said ultimately, the waiver will be granted or not granted by the city planning commission.
“The church can object or support the granting of the waiver, if they would like, and the planning commission would take their position into account, but the decision is still up to the commission,” Bartley said.
As part of the various incentives offered to prospective marijuana business owners in Grand Rapids, Rungta has made a formal commitment to hire locally and to hire minority employees.
Rungta looks forward to discussing more with community members at the meeting Wednesday evening.
“The whole goal for me is to understand what are the community’s priorities, what are the concerns, is there a way to approach this that gains more support versus less,” Rungta said.
The Southtown area is seen as an up and coming business district in Grand Rapids, with community leaders envisioning it being a “second downtown.” City leaders say there’s a need for more development in the area to make that happen. Of its 500,000 square feet of total retail space in Southtown, about 21 percent is vacant. Additionally, about 15 percent of its 13,000 households are vacant, according to city data.
