Off busy Minot Avenue, down a road that didn’t exist until last year, Cliff Miller is ready to oversee a cannabis empire. After millions in startup investment, the first plants start arriving later this month. He’s calling it, to his knowledge, Maine’s “first and only cannabis business park.”
“I want to be the biggest, the best, the cleanest, the most high-end we can be,” said Miller, 34, a Lisbon native. “Typically if I can envision it, if I can put some milestones and goals and rationalize how to get there, I will make it happen. It’s going to be cool.”
Mystique Way, a group of three Portland-based businessmen, last year bought 32 acres off Minot Avenue, remnants of a 1960 industrial park that hadn’t yet been developed. They applied to build a greenhouse on the site, then connected with Miller, head of Atlantic Cannabis Collective, who is building two more greenhouses and consulting on the first.
The projects, on a road since named Mystique Way, have already been approved or have pending city permits for more than $3.1 million in work. Miller is forecasting that investment at the site will hit $6 million to $7 million by the end of this year.
“Just the (grow) lights from my two facilities were $225,000,” he said. “We’re not putting up little hoop houses, we’re putting up state-of-the-art facilities.”
The area is zoned for industrial use, which allows cultivation, though the city is in the final stretch of creating an ordinance specific to medical and future recreational marijuana sales and growing in town.
“The council’s going to have to vote on that in May, but the previous council was very open to it as a piece of our economy,” said Eric Cousens, Auburn’s deputy director of economic and community development. “It is creating jobs, it’s creating new taxable value — these are substantial investments that are entirely because of that industry.”
Miller isn’t stopping at Mystique Way: Once the state hammers out recreational marijuana rules, he has plans for across the street.
Read the full story at sunjournal.com
