Beacon Hill lawmakers are weighing a call from the state’s inspector general to take the unusual step of placing the Cannabis Control Commission into receivership to “steady the ship” after months of internal turmoil and questions around the agency’s governance.
“I understand that building an agency and an industry from the ground up is complicated, but the issues we are seeing are beyond what one would expect,” Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro told the Cannabis Policy Committee Tuesday. “Even accounting for the initial start-up issues for a new commission, it is dysfunction unlike anything we have seen before.”
Committee Co-Chair Rep. Dan Donahue invited Shapiro to make his case to the committee’s House members, after Shapiro last month sent top lawmakers a letter urging them to swiftly pass legislation that would put a receiver in charge of the CCC.
Donahue, a Worcester Democrat, said that while the timing of Shapiro’s message — as lawmakers are entering their chaotic final weeks of formal legislative sessions for the two-year term — may have come as a surprise, the content “was not a shock and also echoes concerns that we have heard from other avenues.”
He said the concerns Shapiro raised will be “part of this committee’s deliberations in the coming weeks.”
In his letter, Shapiro described a “leadership crisis at the CCC” and asked lawmakers to authorize the appointment of a receiver before their formal sessions end on July 31.
“The time to act is now,” Shapiro said Tuesday. “I respectfully suggest appointing a receiver this session will steady the ship while the legislature takes some time next session to consider the statute and make the necessary changes to provide clarity and definition of roles.”
The letter and the hearing come as the CCC is operating without a permanent chair or executive director. Treasurer Deb Goldberg is still deciding whether to fire Chair Shannon O’Brien, whom she suspended from the job last September amid allegations of inappropriate behavior, which O’Brien denies.
O’Brien’s suspension was one of several examples Shapiro cited of “governance-related and governance-impacted issues” that prompted his recommendation, along with a June meeting where commissioners changed the acting executive director’s responsibilities, disagreement over who should serve as acting chair during O’Brien’s suspension, and the abrupt 2022 resignation of O’Brien’s predecessor, Steven Hoffman.
Shapiro said the underlying problem is not with any specific individual, but with vague language in the statute that created the commission after Massachusetts legalized adult use of marijuana at the ballot in 2016.
The CCC has pushed back on Shapiro’s criticisms.
Acting Chair Ava Callender Concepcion has said the CCC “is already in the process of addressing the Inspector General’s chief concern relative to producing a charter that would help us clarify governance questions in statute.” Introduction of a governance charter is among the agenda items for the next CCC meeting on Thursday.
“The challenges at the Commission are far from secret. We are committed to resolving them,” Callender Concepcion wrote in her own letter to lawmakers. “In fact, we have a blueprint for a governance structure that is in its final stages of legal review and will be taken up at a public meeting. Going back to the drawing boards with the [inspector general’s] proposal of receivership (a concept undefined and with no statutory basis provided) is ill-advised.”
Lawmakers said that while various local entities — including cities, school districts and, at one point, the Chelsea Housing Authority — had been placed under state receivership, the move would be a first for a state agency.
Rep. Rob Consalvo, a Boston Democrat and vice chair of the committee, called receivership the “nuclear option.”
Rep. Michael Soter, who has previously called for more oversight of the CCC, said he worried about the precedent receivership would set, but sees a need for lawmakers “to do something very drastic” with the agency.
“I think there has to be a lot of changes there,” said Soter, a Bellingham Republican. “I don’t think just internally. I think we have to look at appointments and things like that that are being made. I think it needs a revamp.”
State lawmakers could have a chance to vote on a receivership proposal as soon as Thursday.
An amendment Sen. Michael Moore proposed to a sweeping economic development bill teed up for Senate debate would authorize Gov. Maura Healey to appoint, to a one-year term, a receiver tasked with developing a turnaround plan for the CCC.
