CityState: Reporter l by Ellen Liberman
Seeing Green
With legalization stalled at the state level, Rhode Island officials are banking on medical marijuana.
In the early evening of June 22, the Rhode Island House of
Representatives passed the state’s $9.9 billion budget for fiscal
2020. Among the high-profile provisions in the 488-page spending
plan was Article 15, which significantly reshaped the state’s medi-
cal marijuana industry. After six years of three dispensaries, the
General Assembly expanded the marketplace to nine, and doubled
the price of a license to $500,000.
In his budgetary post-mortem, House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello
expressed his satisfaction with the final product: “There is some-
thing in there for almost every segment of society. I would guess
that everyone in this chamber [got] something they liked, but not
everything they liked.”
For his part, Mattiello got something he liked very much: nine
words added to Article 15’s rulemaking section, which mandated
that any new cannabis or hemp rules promulgated by the Depart-
ment of Business Regulations “shall be subject to approval by the
General Assembly prior to enactment.”
In the hullaballoo over the licensing fee hike and the jockeying
for the six new licenses, this power shift from the governor to the
ILLUSTRATION BY BRENDAN TOTTEN
speaker of the House went largely unnoticed. Providence Senator
Josh Miller, one of two point people in the General Assembly on
cannabis legislation, says he found out about it either just before
or just after the budget passed, but generally “it was not well-known.
I was surprised, and I’m not easily surprised at this point.”
Four months later, Governor Gina Raimondo sued Mattiello and
Senate President Dominic Ruggiero in state Superior Court, alleg-
ing that the General Assembly’s attempt to take this regulatory
authority away from the executive branch violated the state con-
stitution’s separation of powers.
“It’s basic checks and balances,” Raimondo said at the time, “to
make sure that we move away from the old way of doing business.
Let’s have this be a place of transparency, equal footing and no more
special deals for special people.”
Mattiello immediately back-pedaled. He promised a legislative
fix and took umbrage at the “unnecessary expense by the governor
of state taxpayers’ dollars and judicial resources,” according to a
written statement by Mattiello’s spokesman Larry Berman. The
legislative veto, Berman wrote, was originally enacted “to ensure
RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY
l JANUARY 2020 29