Who is a member?
Our members are the local governments of Massachusetts and their elected and appointed leadership.
The Cannabis Control Commission has issued a memo regarding its decision to not review any compliance requirements pertaining to host community agreements until it promulgates final rules pertaining to these contracts.
This notice has been a priority for the MMA, to recognize the fact that more than 1,000 mutually agreed-upon host community agreements are currently in effect.
A number of municipalities with host community agreements are reporting that they are facing challenges collecting their agreed-upon community impact fees from recreational cannabis licensees. To this point, the CCC memo states, “the commission is not preventing the Department of Revenue from collecting appropriate taxes, including the local tax option, or municipalities from collecting host community impact fees in the regular course.”
The recent cannabis law, Chapter 180 of the Acts of 2022, which went into effect in November, includes a number of new provisions that affect municipal host community agreements, including a requirement that the impact fee be “reasonably related” to the cost imposed upon the municipality, and the elimination of community impact fees after the first eight years of a licensee’s operation.
The law allows the commission to review host community agreements and their compliance with these new provisions on a yearly basis at license renewal. The MMA, meanwhile, continues to advocate for the existing terms of host community agreements and impact fees to be honored until they expire.
The new law gives the Cannabis Control Commission until November 2023 to promulgate final rules.