COVELO, 11/18/18 — A major new cannabis company is coming to Covelo, and is near closing escrow on several properties worth $6.2 million, but this has spurred controversy and questions within the Covelo community and especially among local small cannabis farmers. Indeed, in the past week dozens of people have taken to Facebook to question, decry and gossip about the big corporate player, CordovaCann, a Canadian company, with American owners and a California LLC subsidiary.
In response the manager of the California subsidiary, CordovaCann CA, Beau Milner, agreed to meet with the Covelo Cannabis Advocacy Group’s founder, Monique Ramirez, at the future site of their processing and extraction site, which is currently occupied by Covelo Machine and Tool Trade Company. Milner, who grew up in Covelo, then attend a lengthy community meet at the Round Valley Public Library, at which he fielded questions and attempted to explain the plans for the cannabis development — which include greenhouse cultivation, manufacturing, processing, distribution, and a third-party tissue culture and testing lab.
We attended and filmed the meeting and will have detailed coverage of the meeting, as well as CordovaCann, in the coming days, but for now, please enjoy these videos of the meeting. We apologize for posting these so late at night, we encountered variety of technical difficulties uploading the videos.
There are two videos. The first segment is is about 1 hour long and the second a half hour long. At times the camera is pointed at a wall instead of the speaker, this is because some people preferred not to be filmed, and to respect these wishes we only filmed half the room, though we recorded all the audio. Finally, we did not begin filming till about 5 minutes into the meet of the Covelo Cannabis Advocacy Group, and as such the beginning procedural matters of the meeting, as well as Ramirez’s presentation about various policy matters, are not included.