By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
Yachats has its first pot shop.
Yachats Cannabis Company opened for business Tuesday afternoon in the long-vacant blue building at 430 N. Highway 101 across from City Hall and the Commons.
The store is one of 609 licensed by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission; there are 25 retail marijuana shops in Lincoln County.
The store is owned by Kati and Aaron Bishop of Alsea, who also run a state-licensed marijuana grow operation called Dankside Farms.
“It’s been very welcoming,” Kati Bishop said of the Yachats community. “We just want to help people who want to buy cannabis … and if they don’t want to, that’s fine.”
The store got its license Jan. 11, but the opening was delayed as landlord Nathan Bernard, owner of the nearby Yachats Brewery and Farm Store, worked to fix a sewer line damaged during sidewalk reconstruction two years ago. The Bishops also had to wait until Tuesday’s arrival of a state-required sticker that must be put on all products sold.
The store will be open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week. Bishop has hired four employees, including manager Erin Maas.
The Bishops have been working on the inside of the store since last summer to meet detailed OLCC requirements for security – cameras, safes, steel doors, reinforced walls and alarms — and to build shelves, display cases and spruce up the floor and ceiling. While there is a new roof — Aaron Bishop also runs a roofing company – the exterior still has to get cedar siding and landscaping.
The Bishops are planning a grand opening Feb. 8.
Kati Bishop said they had been searching for a retail outlet since 2016, when the OLCC began licensing stores. They looked in Corvallis and Philomath and talked to Bernard before he bought the building a year ago.
“We looked everywhere,” she said, before settling on Yachats.
Because of over-production – there was a reported 1 million pound surplus in Oregon in 2018 — and price drops since personal marijuana use was legalized in 2014, Bishop said cannabis growers have to get into retail to survive.
“You have to vertically integrate or you’re just not going to survive,” she said.
Their Dankside Farms grows in one indoor facility, three outdoor greenhouses and produced about 215 pounds of cannabis last year, she said. They sold to wholesalers and to companies which process cannabis for extracts or edibles. Oregon growers cannot legally sell outside the state.
The farm is not close to its OLCC limit for production, she said.
“We are way under what we can actually do,” Bishop said. “We have room to grow … quite literally.”
The state has a 17 percent tax on all sales; Yachats voters approved a 3 percent city tax in 2016.
Like server permits for bars and taverns, employees of cannabis dispensaries have to go through training and get an OLCC marijuana worker permit.
Oregon voters approved marijuana for medicinal use in 1998, but rejected a retail measure in 2012 while similar proposals passed in Washington state and Colorado. That outcome changed in 2014, when Oregon voters changed direction and approved retail sales to anyone 21 years or older.
In 2016 the OLCC assumed control of licensing, first allowing medical marijuana retailers to sell recreational pot. A year later it began licensing stores for retail sales.
Bishop said they are still waiting for outdoor signs and window treatments.
The store will offer marijuana grown at Dankside and by other producers, pre-rolled joints, extracts and CBD products. While the OLCC has restrictions on giveaways and discounts, Bishop said locals will get 10 percent off.
“We’ll have a little bit of everything,” Bishop said.
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