SANDISFIELD — Tucked away in the far reaches of the remote southeastern corner of Berkshire County, on the Connecticut line, this tiny town of fewer than 1,000 is about as quiet as they come.
But sometimes small towns have big problems, as when the construction of a natural gas pipeline through Sandisfield State Forest in 2017 tore up town roads, damaged wetlands, and attracted hundreds of protesters, almost all of them from out of town.
Now the town of Sandisfield is grappling with another matter involving out-of-towners. This one, however, threatens to divide the community over even thornier matters such as taxes, land use, and commerce.
To wit, a proposal by a company from out of state to build a large cannabis grow facility near the intersection of Abby and Town Hill roads. If approved, the project proposed by Sama Productions LLC would include the construction of a 5,000-square-foot processing building and 23 greenhouses on concrete slabs, totaling 100,000 square feet on 46 acres of vacant land — some of it forest, some of it overgrowth.
“The atmosphere here is what you might expect: the need for revenue for the town versus quality of life; second-home owners versus longtime residents,” Sandisfield resident Edward Brozman told The Edge. Brozman, along with other like-minded town residents such as psychotherapist and second-home owner Leslie Garwood, has formed an opposition group called Sandisfield Neighbors for a Pot-Free Forest.
The group has hired a Springfield attorney, Jesse Belcher-Timme, and launched a GoFundMe campaign to pay for legal expenses. Belcher-Timme is a familiar face in the local cannabis industry, having successfully represented residents of New Marlborough who were opposed to a sprawling cannabis production facility proposed three years ago for 106 acres near Lake Buel and abutting the Sandisfield State Forest. Now Belcher-Timme will argue against a proposed marijuana facility.
The divisions in the town seem to fall roughly along the lines Brozman described. Longtime residents and pro-business types embrace the project — perhaps reluctantly — in the face of scarce economic development in Sandisfield, coupled with sharply rising taxes caused mainly by the town’s membership in the tiny Farmington River Regional School District (FRRSD), where spending increases far outstrip those in the town government.
Indeed, as recently as 2019, Sandisfield voters rejected the district’s budget in the face of an 8.4 percent increase in the town’s assessment. A regional school review committee also began meeting at the end of January to evaluate the worthiness of the town remaining in the FRRSD, according to the Sandisfield Times, the weekly nonprofit community newspaper founded by Simon Winchester, the award-winning British nonfiction author who lives in the town.
Ironically, at nearly 56 square miles, Sandisfield is geographically the largest town in Berkshire County, but economic development generating substantial revenue is hard to come by, not only because of the town’s isolation but because it lacks critical infrastructure attractive to businesses, such as town water, a municipal sewer system, good roads, and reliable high-speed internet connectivity. An effort to bring broadband to Sandisfield is still reportedly in the works.
In addition, large portions of Sandisfield are fully or partly off the tax rolls, including state forests, land-trust owned parcels and so-called Chapter Lands — forest, agricultural/horticultural, and recreational lands classified, valued, and taxed at a lower rate, as allowed by Chapter 61 of Massachusetts General Laws.
As the town’s website explains, “Sandisfield boasts a thriving logging industry, numerous small farms, nurseries, an apple orchard, and the historic New Boston Inn.” None of them, however, provide jobs or tax revenue in substantial amounts, so Sandisfieldians must seek employment elsewhere and the town must look largely to its homeowners to fund services for town residents.
There are also those who are opposed to the proposal because of the presumed negative effects of the cannabis facility, such as odor, noise, and the impact such a large-scale facility would have on property values. Others have questioned whether there would be adequate security at the site and raised questions about potential contamination of the aquifer.
Wealthy outsiders can easily afford the taxes, so the town’s lack of economic development is not a big deal to them. After all, if you’ve moved here from a Manhattan co-op, everything in Sandisfield seems cheap.
“I have lived in Sandisfield since 2015, all as a full-time resident,” said Carl N. Nett, who lives on Town Hill Road about 0.3 mile from the proposed site. “We have never really had any significant businesses express serious interest in locating here, until recently, to my knowledge.”
Nett has been active on Connect Sandisfield, a community Facebook page where battle lines on this issue have been drawn and lively exchanges posted. Nett, who goes by the Facebook handle “Carl Nicholas,” is an executive coach and a systems engineer with a Ph.D. in engineering.
Complicating the issue is that, unlike most other towns in Berkshire County, Sandisfield currently has no bylaw in its zoning code that regulates cannabis facilities, either because of a failure on the part of town leaders to foresee the need for it, or because no public pressure has been applied until now.
The town’s zoning bylaw, such as it is, totals fewer than 19 pages and sets forth a table of uses and only one district, the Base Zoning District, which encompasses the whole town. Sandisfield is a so-called Right-to-Farm community but state law does not recognize cannabis production as agriculture. Most other uses aside from agriculture, including commercial and industrial, require a special permit, for which Sama must apply to the Board of Selectmen, which, in this case, is the special-permit-granting authority.
“In fact, most any significant development in town requires a special permit application be submitted and approved,” Nett explained.
But, as the signs of protest that dot the town clearly attest, many, including Garwood, think the matter should be put to a vote of Sandisfield residents, not in the hands of three men on the selectboard.
In the absence of a zoning bylaw specifically regulating cannabis facilities, the Planning Board has scrambled to draft one. Click here to view it. Nett said he views it as “way too restrictive.” Of the Sama proposal itself, Nett said, “I think it will have minimal, nearly non-existent adverse impact on the community” — though he quickly added that there are other sites in town that would be more removed from abutters than his largely residential neighborhood.
A public hearing on the proposed bylaw will be held on March 11. Click here to find out how to join the virtual meeting. The proposed bylaw must be formally endorsed by the selectboard by March 15 in order to be included on the warrant for the May 15 annual town meeting, where it would need a two-thirds majority to become law.
“It’s not clear whether they really want to do this in time or not,” Brozman said of the selectmen. “We’ve seen some willingness to do it, but over the last two weeks since they said they wanted to do it, nothing much has happened.”
Brian O’Rourke, who chairs the Board of Selectmen, did not return a message seeking comment. Board member George Riley told The Edge he was unavailable for an interview. But, in a column for the March edition of the Sandisfield Times, Riley asked residents to “keep an open mind” about the proposal and insisted that, in considering Sama’s application, the selectboard “will work to protect our environment and natural resources.”
“If we can do this and at the same time bring in much needed business revenue for the town, then we will all benefit,” Riley wrote.
Others, including town Finance Committee chair Roger Brown, argued in a column headlined “We Need The Money,” that the Sama proposal was “relatively low-impact” and that new sources of revenue were crucial in order to diversify Sandisfield’s tax base.
No one seems to know how much revenue the Sama proposal would generate if the special permit were granted and the facility became operational. Sama principal John Heck told The Edge it was not yet clear how much Sama would be contributing to town coffers, but 3 percent of gross sales is the norm and was stipulated in the host community agreement Sama signed with the town last year. Click here to read it.
“In addition to our property taxes, our annual Community Impact Fee (CIF) will be calculated as a percentage of our gross sales, although it’s too early to offer actual projections,” Sama manager John Heck said in an email. “Also, we have agreed to make an Annual Donation of $15,000, over and above our CIF, that will be distributed, according to the preferences of the town, towards town highway maintenance, the town Recreation Committee, and the town library.”
Heck also emphasized that his operation “will be substantially different from a retail operation.” If approved, Sama’s cultivation and manufacturing business will be closed to the public and have no retail visitors. As such, Sama will use minimal town services such as police or schools, and will pay for private security services itself.
“Our traffic counts will be less than what would be normal for a residential use of our location,” Heck added. “The low impact of our presence will be an added benefit to the Town of Sandisfield.”
The Times pegged the revenues at “hundreds of thousands of dollars.” The paper quoted O’Rourke as estimating the project would generate revenues equivalent to approximately 110 new homes built on Sandisfield land.
The Sama project, however, would demand less in services than 110 homes, whose owners would presumably need town services and add to the amount Sandisfield pays to the aforementioned regional school district.
Nett, who has consulted for CEOs, boards, and venture capital firms on business strategy and analysis, has come up with his own estimate: “I can easily see it doing at least $15 million in gross revenues each year, on average, once steady state operation is achieved, and quite possibly as much as $30 million a year in gross revenues as the operation is learned out and optimized.”
So, in community impact fees alone, Nett projects the facility will provide annual revenues to the town of between $300,000 to $450,000, not including the property taxes on the greenhouses and the land.
The town has other cannabis manufacturers eyeing it as a host, but they are either pending or have yet to succeed. “There’s been a total of three people who have indicated they want to cultivate marijuana and another person who wanted to put a dispensary in,” said Brozman.
What makes Sandisfield so attractive to cannabis entrepreneurs?
“It’s precisely Sandisfield’s unique characteristics of massive amounts of land and extremely low population density that is making it attractive for cannabis cultivation,” Nett added. “Developers started with other towns that had better infrastructure and services, but nowhere near as low a population density or remote, undeveloped land as Sandisfield, and only after they hit roadblocks/opposition did they consider Sandisfield.”
Two towns to the west, officials in Sheffield have embraced cannabis production as a means of economic development. Sheffield has a marijuana retail outlet and grow facility, The Pass, on Route 7, two more active grow facilities elsewhere in town, and at least two more proposed.
Sama was one of those companies that encountered stiff opposition in a previous try. A little more than a year ago, Sama, then known as Fulcrum Enterprises, initially proposed to construct 15 enclosed greenhouses, totaling approximately 80,000 square feet, on VanDeusenville Road in the Housatonic section of Great Barrington. In the face of fierce criticism from nearby residents, Sama later scaled back the plan to nearly 59,000 square feet, then withdrew the proposal under withering pressure.
Asked why he and his partners changed the name of their company, Heck replied, without elaborating: “Tax benefits. We’re still very much the same in many ways; it’s just a name change for tax benefits.”
In its special permit application, Sama says the project “will create job and career opportunities” and “will be hiring an initial full-time staff of approximately four employees and additional part-time staff, creating an estimated $300,000 of new payroll and benefits per year.”
“The idea of hiring locally is an important part of our plan,” Heck told The Edge. “To the extent that we find people in Sandisfield that have the skills that we need, they’ll have preference to our hiring them.”
Nett conducted an unscientific poll on Sandisfield Connect asking respondents whether they approved of the proposal. The respondents overwhelmingly approved.
In addition to Nett, others who support the Sama proposal include Brigitte Ruthman, a journalist for the Republican American newspaper in Waterbury, Connecticut, who owns a 36-acre farm on Dodd Road near the Sandisfield State Forest.
“I’m the town’s only dairy farmer, one of just a handful of small farms in a place without adequate Internet, roads or traffic, and steeply rising taxes — not exactly a formula to attract small business,” Ruthman said in an email.
Like Nett, Ruthman thinks the town needs to broaden its tax base so that it doesn’t rely so much on homeowners for local revenue. Ruthman did not object to the natural gas pipeline expansion and also sees nothing wrong with the removal of trees needed for the Sama project.
“Unless you’re a logger, agriculture depends on open space,” Ruthman continued. “Resistance to tree clearing is a red herring for resistance to marijuana, which is a crop after all.”
Others, however, remain unalterably opposed. Asked for his reaction to the proposal, longtime town resident Ron Bernard, who volunteers for the Sandisfield Times and, with his wife Jean Atwater, opposed the expansion of the Kinder Morgan/Tennessee Gas pipeline, offered to write a letter to the editor of The Edge, which can be found here.
Unlike other opponents of Sama’s plan, Bernard has a different take. He says, it “is primed to follow a classic pattern for feverish ‘gold rush’-type development” — one in which the owner strikes “while the market is hot and undeveloped,” but cannot ultimately make a go of it and declares bankruptcy.
“Think of it as musical chairs, only the last contestant standing will be the town of Sandisfield, which is stuck with back taxes, legal bills, a big hole in the budget, and a facility that is not easily marketed or repurposed.”
Of the opposition, Heck said, “Lack of familiarity with the details of our plan might cause concerns and, frankly, not everyone thinks marijuana legalization should have happened. But the fact is that we are no longer litigating the approval of marijuana; it already happened in the state of Massachusetts and I don’t ever accept 100 percent agreement on anything.”
It is also worth noting that a 2016 ballot initiative legalizing recreational marijuana in Massachusetts passed by almost 7.5 percentage points statewide and by nearly 32 percentage points in Sandisfield. Neighboring Connecticut and New York are expected to legalize soon. That will diminish the demand for the product in Massachusetts.
The Sandisfield Planning Board will hold a public hearing on the proposed marijuana bylaw, to begin at 6 p.m. on March 11 via video and dial-in conference.
Edge intern Janey Beardsley contributed to this story.
