Pubdate: Sun, 18 May 2014
Source: Seattle Times (WA)
Copyright: 2014 The Seattle Times Company
Contact:  http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/409
Author: Bob Young
Page: B1

A PORT FOR POT ENTREPRENEURS

Once a logging and fishing town, this job-hungry community can't 
afford to sniff at the fledgling legal pot industry as affluent towns do.

RAYMOND, Pacific County - fter voters legalized marijuana in 
Washington, Seattle nightlife entrepreneur Marcus Charles went 
hunting for a depressed timber town. Owner of the Crocodile Cafe and 
co-founder of the Capitol Hill Block Party, Charles wanted to jump 
into the emerging pot industry. His first impulse was to find a city 
with vacant industrial space and a hearty appetite for new jobs. That 
led him away from the booming communities around Puget Sound.

His first stop was Shelton in sleepy Mason County. But Shelton's 
elected officials were divided about hosting pot merchants in the 
hamlet. So Charles moved on to the Port of Willapa Harbor in Raymond, 
a city of 2,900, about 25 miles south of Aberdeen.

Most young people leave Raymond - where Nirvana played its first gig 
at a house party - after high school and don't come back, said Port 
Manager Rebecca Chaffee. "We were a logging and fishing town and 
those jobs have largely disappeared," Chaffee said.

But Charles has become a pied piper of pot producers and Raymond a 
magnet for marijuana businesses, with pending applications for 31 
state-growing licenses on Port land. And that's made Raymond 
emblematic of job-hungry communities embracing legal pot merchants 
while more affluent areas such as King County's Redmond Ridge turned them away.

When Charles first met Chaffee, he told her he'd like to turn the 
Port's vacant sawmill, and 20 surrounding acres, into a pot-business campus.

Chaffee, who said she's never seen a marijuana plant, was astounded. 
Although 54 percent of the electorate in both Raymond and Pacific 
County voted for legal weed, Chaffee said she never imagined the new 
law would "have anything to do with us."

She took the idea to Port commissioners. They chuckled, she recalled, 
and said "really?"

The Port had just lost its biggest tenant, Halosource, a 
water-purification technology company that moved to Bothell, leaving 
five vacant warehouses to fill. A pot campus couldn't be dismissed.

Next stop was the office of Mayor Bob Jungar. A retired high-school 
teacher, Jungar, 75, said he was expecting Charles, 39, to be 
"seedy." But Charles, who has an MBA from the University of 
Washington, came across as anything but the stoner stereotype.

Jungar consulted other city leaders. "Like me, they thought we might 
as well take advantage of it," Jungar said.

Officials called a public meeting to gauge opposition. Chaffee 
thought it should be held in an auditorium under the watch of a 
police officer. But only seven people showed up. Just one objected, she said.

City officials held another hearing. This time no one showed up.

The Port sold the 20 acres Charles was eyeing to developers who plan 
to carry out the plan for a pot campus, where Charles would be one of 
the tenants. The Port now has leases with 11 businesses at three 
different facilities, bringing in $16,000 a month.

The state's recent lottery for retail pot stores even broke the 
Port's way: the lottery determined that the only two retail locations 
in Pacific County will be on Port property.

Pot has provided Raymond a new sense of hope. "I was afraid for the 
Port and the future of the community," Chaffee said, "and this 
changes that dynamic."

Charles, though, has pivoted to another strategy.

He's not seeking a state license to grow, process or sell marijuana. 
He thinks he's got a better idea.

"Tokeland" jokes

Richard Montoure is one of the growers who followed Charles' lead to Raymond.

Montoure, 39, had owned a small contracting company in Shoreline for 
13 years. He also liked to smoke a little weed. When the recession 
hit, his remodeling jobs all but stopped. He got into a 
side-business, building grow tents for medical-marijuana cultivators.

He heard through a friend about growing opportunities in Raymond, 
went down for a look, is now renting a 4,000-square-foot warehouse 
for $1,300 a month, and also moved to the town. "I pretty much packed 
up everything and came down here," Montoure said.

Like others with Port leases, he's applied for a state license to 
grow recreational marijuana under Initiative 502. In the meanwhile, 
he's cultivating strains with names such as Girl Scout Cookies for 
medical-marijuana patients. "The idea is to have the medical 
(business first), paying taxes and essentially funding the 502 
business without having to let go some of the company to investors," he said.

The aspiring growers are at three Port facilities: the Dick Taylor 
Industrial Park, the Raymond Port Dock, and the South Fork Industrial 
Park, the 20-acre parcel sold to developers for $400,000.

These properties are not to be confused with the Port's marina in 
nearby Tokeland, where no pot businesses are proposed on Port 
property. "We hear a lot of jokes about Tokeland," Chaffee said.

Raymond officials hope the pot businesses employ a couple hundred 
people. "We've had people coming by every day looking for jobs," 
Chaffee said, "including a lot of middle-aged women like me trying to 
get jobs as production workers, which I think is cool."

Mayor Jungar said he isn't worried Raymond will become known as a pot 
haven, a sort of Amsterdam on the Willapa River. "So many cities are 
getting involved that I don't think we will be seen as a marijuana 
town," he said.

Rejuvenating ideas

Not long after impressing Raymond officials last year with his savvy, 
Charles veered away from his initial plan of becoming an 
industrial-scale pot grower.

As the state began drafting rules for the new pot industry, Charles 
worried the growing business would be dominated by a few big players.

The federal prohibition of pot also created serious questions for 
Washington's wannabe growers and investors: Would the Obama 
administration allow the state's experiment with legal pot to go 
forward? Would future administrations?

At the time, Charles couldn't foresee that the U.S. Department of 
Justice would give its conditional approval to legalization, as it 
did in August; or that state officials would not initially cap the 
overall number of growing licenses, essentially creating a small 
decentralized industry.

Bottling vendor model

Instead of growing plants, Charles found what he considered a safer niche.

Familiar with liquor-industry regulations as a bar owner, he opted to 
become the pot equivalent of a bottling vendor.

He spent more than $100,000 on a sophisticated machine to extract 
concentrated THC - the key psychoactive chemical in pot - from plants.

Then, he and his partner, Rick Stevens, came up with a design for 
disposable cigarette-sized vaporizers they call JUJU Joints, which 
they're having manufactured in China.

His idea? As a vendor, he plans to drive up to growing and processing 
facilities with his mobile-extracting machine. For a fee, he'll let 
growers use his extractor to produce lucrative hash oil from their 
plants. Then he'll offer to sell them empty electronic JUJU Joints or 
"sticks," that they'd fill with their oil. They could then sell the 
disposable e-joints to recreational-pot retailers.

"We sell them the empty sticks. That's where our profit center is," 
he said. "They mark them up and take them to market."

His model appears legal, said a spokesman for the agency implementing 
the state's legal pot law. "His equipment, of course, would need to 
meet the specifications in our rules," said the Liquor Control 
Board's Brian Smith.

JUJU Joints are available at 30 medical-marijuana dispensaries in 
Seattle and five in Everett, he said. Because it's technically 
illegal to sell medical marijuana, the "suggested donation" for each 
joint is $24.

It's a business model Charles thinks could be replicated in other states.

He remains the president and spokesman for a new Raymond-based trade 
group, the Washington Recreational Agricultural Industrial Association.

And members of the group are already making $2 million in building 
improvements to Port warehouses.

"I think it's going to rejuvenate the town with new people and new 
ideas," Chaffee said.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom