Committee lays over several cannabis bills as Office of Cannabis Management seeks grant-timing, testing and equity changes

Eric Taubel, interim director of the Office of Cannabis Management, told the Senate Commerce and Consumer Protection Committee on March 18 that the office seeks four relatively small budget and implementation changes and that a package of cannabis-policy bills before the committee largely contain technical fixes and clarifications.

Taubel introduced the office's four requests: an operating adjustment to cover rising labor, insurance, space and technology costs; an extension of the CanRenew grant expenditure deadline; a variance to the current ISO-certification requirement for testing facility licenses; and an adjustment to the social equity verification criteria to account for people whose adjudications were stayed or adjudicated in juvenile court and therefore do not produce convictions for verification purposes.

"We are currentl…