CENTRAL LAKE — Kelly Young’s plan to open a cannabis shop in her hometown first germinated after a Dollar General outlet opened just outside village limits and her family’s grocery store’s profits went poof.
“In 2017, just as we were ready to break a profit — we were like $10,000 short — they opened and we were crushed,” Young said, of the Village Market’s store on Old State Road.
On Wednesday, she’ll host the soft opening of Torch Cannabis Co., Antrim County’s first recreational marijuana retailer. And the only permitted shop of its kind allowed inside village limits.
“I got a medical card in 2008, I studied state and federal law, I paid attention to the cannabis market and I went to almost all the town council meetings,” Young said. “Opening any new business is hard work and I was ready for that.”
When Michigan legalized recreational marijuana in 2018, Young was already a pro.
She’d run a mobile CBD oil extracting business out of a 39-foot fifth wheel she drove up and down the West Coast.
After former President Donald Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill, legalizing hemp, Young said she learned how to grow the plant in Michigan’s climate on her own land.
She developed her own recipes for cannabis-infused topical creams, whipped up sample batches in her kitchen and sold her house to help finance Torch Cannabis.
“Ready,” however, turned out to mean a lot more for Young than renovating a shuttered butcher shop on Old State Road, moving into the apartment upstairs and following all of Michigan’s Marijuana Regulatory Agency’s laws and rules.
Young said she felt ready to sell cannabis to customers; what she wasn’t ready for were the unforeseen local, regional and even national legal tangles.
“Trump was tweeting about it, the election drew a bunch of attention to the village and I just wanted to open my business, serve customers and help people,” Young said.
Young was successful in getting a proposal on the November 2020 ballot that, if passed by locals, would allow one recreational marijuana retailer in the village.
Then Antrim County held its presidential election.
“So the vote came in and we had a tie,” Young said, of the initial tally on the marijuana ordinance. “And then began that whole era of things.”
The first event in that “era of things,” as Young refers to the controversy over Antrim County’s 2020 election results, started with a hand recount of ballots cast by village voters.
The recount showed the ordinance didn’t end in a tie, it actually passed by a single vote — 262 to 261.
Young said she was thrilled, but then three weeks later, another unexpected turn of events.
An area voter, Bill Bailey, filed a lawsuit accusing Antrim County of voter fraud, the suit referenced passage of the village’s marijuana ordinance. That lawsuit quickly swept the rural county into a national campaign of election misinformation Trump’s opponents now refer to as “The Big Lie.”
“I understand we’re in a very red county and I’ve always fallen on both sides of the spectrum,” Young said, about her own political leanings. “But what I don’t understand is, we as taxpayers are paying for Mr. Bailey’s disgruntlement towards me opening.”
Bailey did not return a request for comment made via his attorney, Matthew DePerno.
Records show he is registered to vote in Central Lake Township, and only voters registered in the Village of Central Lake were eligible to vote on the marijuana ordinance.
The fact that Bailey couldn’t have voted on the marijuana ballot issue didn’t surface until the case already was in progress. But in May a circuit court judge dismissed the case, and Bailey appealed and the Michigan Court of Appeals has yet to weigh in.
Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy said as of Thursday the county has so far spent about $90,000 in legal fees defending against the lawsuit.
Young said Bailey was a regular customer at her family’s grocery store, her exchanges with him were perfunctory but pleasant, they never talked about marijuana and so the lawsuit came as a surprise.
“We never had any issues, not a one,” she said.
Also a surprise — the last-minute denial of Young’s permit application, after she paid the non-refundable $2,500 fee, by officials who said her building was too close to the local high school by 79 feet.
Then something else unforeseen. Green Pharma, a larger retailer, had also applied for the village’s only permit, and soon rumors swirled over who in the village owned property and was trying to sell to make room for the competing applicant.
Daniel Till, head of business development for the company didn’t return a call seeking comment.
“I knew the grocery store was the cut off and my building was even further away from the school so I thought I was fine,” Young said of the state’s standard 1,000-foot from a school rule, used by officials in the event a municipality didn’t state a setback.
The Village of Mancelona, for example, which is also in Antrim County, has a 100-foot rule, their ordinance states.
Young hired lawyers, sued the village in 13th Circuit Court and in July the case was settled out of court.
Records show the village agreed to use the radius method, rather than the straight-line method, when measuring the dispensary to school distance, putting Young’s building outside the setback.
“The voters voted for this in 2020,” said Village President Rob Tyler. “I think it’s great we have a local person, who is invested in the village, rather than a big conglomerate coming in.”
Tyler said Young attended a council meeting where discussion centered on the deteriorating condition of the three “Welcome to the Village of Central Lake” signs. Then paid $3,000 to have an artist repaint and repair them.
“She’s pretty humble so she doesn’t talk about that kind of thing much,” Tyler said.
Young said in mediation she agreed to shorten the hours her shop will be open and not allow loitering outside, which she said she planned to do anyway.
Central Lake Police Chief Scott Barrett said marijuana retailing is all new for the village and he was aware of the no loitering rule.
“This is uncharted territory for us,” Barrett said. “We used to have two part-time officers plus me but now I’m a one-man band. I’m crossing my fingers that everything goes well.”
The Village no longer funds three officers, though Young, who spent $30,000 herself in attorney fees, says officials missed out on state money when her permit was rescinded, then re-granted.
She said the village could have received about $52,000 from the state in a sales tax share if her shop had opened before the state’s fiscal year ended Sept. 30.
Still, she tries not to dwell.
“This has been a very spiritual process for me, even my logo has sacred geometry,” she said. “If I stay fixated on something that’s negative — well, let’s just say I’m doing the best I can to cut out all that negative stuff.”
Instead, Young has been working 16-hour days to buy stock and finish renovations so the building and her 10 part-time staff, all meet training requirements, the building is up to code and she follows state MRA rules.
At least one expert says the work has paid off.
“She’s top tier,” said Denny Corrado, of Regal Security Consultants, a firm with 40 recreational marijuana clients between Saginaw and Wisconsin.
“Kelly is going over and above what she is required to do,” said Corrado, who trained Young’s staff and helps both municipalities and business owners comply with state marijuana law.
The MRA requires cannabis be tracked from seed to product to customer. Young is beta testing a system developed by Orland Yee, a former Microsoft software engineer from Colorado who also worked for NASA.
Not all of her systems are that high tech, however.
A glass case holds Petoskey stone pipes and other handmade items. The former butcher shop’s old glass-paneled wooden wall Frigidaire displays the company’s swag.
“And people like to sniff jars of stuff,” Young said, holding out a clear plastic cube connected to a wire tether stored inside an old cigar humidor that used to be at the grocery store.
“I could have loose jars but then I’d have to keep my hand on it,” she said. “With Covid, I’d just rather have people hold the jars themselves and be able to go, ‘Mmm, yeah I like that.’”
The grocery store was saved when it was purchased by a local man, Chris Corbett, who also owns the Blue Pelican bed and breakfast, Alden Lumber, the Bellaire Hardware and some area golf courses.
The Young family still owns Village Market stores in Elk Rapids and Rapid City, Young said.
What Young calls the “sacred geometry” of her logo – two partial circles turned vertical with a cross in the center — informs her business decisions and reflects the challenges she’s faced, she said.
“It’s the yin and the yang, the light and the dark, we’re each both of these things melded together,” Young said. “The soft opening Sunday is for anyone who wants to come in, talk, ask questions and meet us during our trial run.”
The official open date is Nov. 23, she said.
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