West Stockbridge — A year ago, Wiseacre Farm co-owner Jon Piasecki was working to combat what surrounding West Stockbridge and Richmond neighbors described as “skunk-like” odors emanating from his cannabis facility, smells those residents decried as negatively impacting their quality of life. Using technology developed by Byers Scientific, a California-based company that focuses on eliminating air-quality and odor issues, he deployed a costly novel fan system together with a plant-based agent to neutralize the odors released from his growing site at 42 Baker Street in West Stockbridge. Piasecki also added a website for those neighbors to check in, informing him when smells were particularly bad, including the fall harvest season that is typically the worst for such odors.
Fast forward a year, and neighbors claim the tactics seem to be working, as far as the offensive odors are concerned. But a new problem has since cropped up: The fan used in the program is noisy.
On February 14, through his attorney Aaron Dubois, Piasecki filed Wiseacre’s required annual report with the town, detailing the past year of operations.
A copy of that report can be found here.
The matter was brought before the West Stockbridge Select Board at their Tuesday, February 18, meeting, and the group voted to take the issue under advisement, stating they lacked the time to review the document filed on the Friday before a Monday holiday.
Addressing the dais on behalf of nearby homeowner Joanne Yurman, attorney Bill Martin said that Yurman and other neighbors met with Piasecki the previous week. He asked board members to set a separate hearing to discuss the filing due to the report’s large volume as well as to reengage the group’s consultant, Tech Environmental President Mike Lannan, who attended the session remotely.
“While we acknowledge that we’ve made some progress, we’ve made good progress, we’ve traded one problem for another,” Martin said. “The fan noise is as problematic as the odor.” He advocated “trying to find a correct balance” between the odor-mitigation methods and the resulting distracting sounds, with Piasecki telling the neighbors that he could take other measures to dissipate the noise but that those may be “cost prohibitive.”
Even though community impact fees are being challenged in the judicial system, Piasecki continues to pay the town those funds totaling three percent of the business’s gross revenue. The fees are intended to diminish any negative impacts to a municipality when a cannabis facility is in place. Martin, on behalf of Yurman and her group, proposed working with Piasecki to dedicate at least some of those community impact fees toward specific measures to combat the new noise concerns, possibly including baffling the large fan used in the odor-mitigation project.
“From our point of view, we would see that the community impact fee might, as potentially, [be] a source to try to help him help the neighborhood by further reducing the impact,” Martin said. “It’s a situation where, at the end of the day, nobody is going to be perfectly happy but we’re working toward making sure we can encourage him to do everything he possibly can do. He’s indicated a willingness to do that, and we think that the town ought to help us hold him to that promise.”
According to Dubois, Wiseacre employs 40 individuals, including nine West Stockbridge residents, and has paid more than $50,000 in community impact fees to the town during the past year and more than $300,000 on odor-mitigation measures. He said the large fan sound was recorded at 44 decibels and, in comparison, a freight train at the same location measured at 86 decibels.
Speaking at the Select Board session, Piasecki said he believed his team could make some adjustments with small electric fans focused on Dean Hill Road during the three or four days annually when the smell is exaggerated in that direction. He said he could also add noise-reduction measures on the large fan via a baffle system, with the latter funded by the community impact fees Wiseacre pays annually.
Additionally, Piasecki said he is planning to implement a training session this summer for residents who have had trouble operating the odor-reporting system implemented to log their complaints.
Select Board member Andrew Krouss told Piasecki that he would like to hear from the neighbors “that they’re happy with the transparency [he] has provided” and is obligated to do in reference to the fan and noise.
Select Board Chair Andrew Potter pointed out that fan noise, as opposed to odor mitigation, should be reported to the town’s zoning enforcement officer.
In a February 20 email to The Berkshire Edge, Piasecki stated that the Select Board is in violation of several of the Commonwealth’s regulations pertaining to Host Community Agreements (HCAs)—agreements between town and cannabis facilities governing how the business will operate within the municipality—since Piasecki hasn’t received details of how the town has spent Wiseacre’s community impact fee as required. Additionally, he clarified that Wiseacre’s annual report isn’t due until five days after the Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) issues its yearly license which hasn’t occurred yet, but he has already submitted that document “out of a sense of civic responsibility and an effort to act reasonably.”
Piasecki noted that his consultant, Byers Scientific, reported “a significant reduction in the completely harmless plant odors associated with cannabis agriculture on our farm” amounting to less than one part per billion, reflecting a plant compound concentration reduction of, on average, 99.5 percent.
Wiseacre functions within West Stockbridge’s pre-existing manufacturing zone, and Piasecki stated that two CCC agents measured the fan’s sound from the deck of a Richmond neighbor who alleged the noise emanating from the program woke him and shook dust from his home’s rafters, with that measurement registering only 44 decibels “in the ambient range.”
With his filed report, Piasecki included notes taken in conjunction with neighbor complaints, including concerns over fan noise, with one noise complaint reported in September at a time when the fan was not turned on. (See attachments to report.)
“The fan produces the same amount of noise as a distant lawnmower at 300 meters, roughly 1,000 feet from the fan,” Piasecki’s notes indicate.
