Page 2 - Tim Fair News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Jahala Dudley with a hemp plant Just two years ago, hemp looked like a crop that could inject some life into Vermont's flagging agricultural economy. At Statehouse meetings, entrepreneurs, lawmakers and regulators who were giddy with optimism talked of harnessing the profits of the fast-growing industry for societal good.  One of them was Carl Christianson, who had just set up a hemp processing facility and testing lab in a newly purchased 10,000-square-foot former bread bakery in Brattleboro. But a nationwide rush to plant in the summer ...

Illustration When Vermont lawmakers left the Statehouse last March amid the worsening pandemic, they weren't the only ones evicted from their stately digs. The army of lobbyists who work to influence the legislative process was also driven from those corridors of power. Unable to buttonhole senators in the halls or grab lunch with committee chairs in the cafeteria, lobbyists found their working lives disrupted by the pandemic as profoundly as any bartender's or bed-and-breakfast owner's. And yet even as their stock-in-trade — access to lawmak...

Hartford Selectboard won’t put retail marijuana before voters at Town Meeting Modified: 1/20/2021 10:48:02 PM WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — As towns across Vermont consider whether to allow dispensaries following a new state law legalizing the sale of recreational cannabis, Selectboard members have decided Hartford isn’t ready to answer that question. “I’m extremely apprehensive about putting something on the ballot where we don’t have as much information as we should have,” board member Joe Major said at a special virtual meeting held Tuesday night to discuss the upcoming March Town M...

Luke Eastman Vermont's new law establishing a retail marijuana market does too little to recruit people of color to the legal cannabis industry, racial justice advocates say. They are calling for changes to ensure that members of groups disproportionately targeted by past enforcement of cannabis laws would be poised to benefit when the legal market comes online in May 2022.  "For those seriously and genuinely interested in justice who look at this [law], it is clear that it needs work,...