Hyde Park cannabis producer to move after neighbor complaints

To Maynard, the complaints from some of his neighbors amount to harassment, levied by those with moral objections to cannabis production and have unfairly made him into a target.

While the compliance crusade led by his neighbors ultimately led to the Vermont Cannabis Control Board hitting Maynard with a small monetary fine after discovering violations involving recordkeeping, product packaging and fungicide, the town of Hyde Park has backed Maynard at every turn and recently approved the permit for his cannabis facility though he failed to apply for one prior to obtaining a production license from the state.

Despite the backing of town officials, the perceived hostility of his neighbors has led Maynard and his family to list their home for $1.9 million and take their business elsewhere.

“As the harassment and the other things that are happening up there continue to unfold, that’s the point you draw the line,” Maynard said. “We moved out there on a Class 4 dead-end road, to live in peace and harmony with nature and raise our family.”

Cindy Riddle, an adjoining landowner was, along with other neighbors, has pushed the town and state to ensure that Maynard, who she sees as a bit of a scofflaw and perpetual rule-flouter, was compliant with the law to ensure the well-being of her own property and the preservation of their bucolic neighborhood.

Riddle said she never wanted to force Maynard out of the neighborhood; she just wanted to compel him to be a better neighbor.

“All I was trying to do was get this town to come up and do a site visit and go, ‘Hey, Tyler, what are you doing? Can you tell the neighbors? Can we all talk about it?” Riddle said. “I was not trying to get him to move. That was not my intent at all.”

History of violations

When Maynard purchased the 19 acres of land on Diggins Road in the northeast corner of Hyde Park in 2011, he thought he was purchasing a little piece of unspoiled, out-of-the-way land off a Class 4 road.

But everyone has neighbors, no matter how separated the actual homesteads, and Hyde Park happens to be one of the Vermont towns with zoning laws homeowners are required to follow.

Maynard ran into his first taste of neighborly concern when he sought the town’s blessing to establish a carpentry business at his home. Though it was ultimately approved by the development review board, neighbors at the time turned out with concerns about a commercial enterprise setting up in their backwoods.

Maynard established a pattern of building first and seeking permission later. In 2016, he was required to pay a settlement to the town after failing to properly seek permits for a new driveway and woodshop on the property.

Perhaps the biggest infraction, in the eyes of his neighbors, was the construction of his home on land he didn’t technically own.

In a May 2018 letter, then-Hyde Park Selectboard chair Susan Bartlett wrote to Maynard and the adjoining Kusserow family indicating that the Kusserows asked the town to bring zoning enforcement against Maynard after they alleged his home was partially built on their property. Instead, the town found both parties in violation of the town’s zoning laws and demanded they resolve the issue.

According to Maynard, he was the victim of a dispute between members of the Kusserow family and the incompetence of his lawyer. Several years after the home was built with approval from one member of the family, a different member of the family attempted to force Maynard to pay up or tear the house down.

The matter was eventually settled in 2020 after Maynard purchased the small piece of neighboring land his house is partially built upon, according to records.

But for Cindy Riddle and her husband, Michael, who purchased the remaining land after the Kusserows settled with Maynard, this was a wakeup call that Maynard needed monitoring.

“When we found out Tyler had done this to the Kusserows, we knew we had to keep an eye on him because he told us he was friends with the Kusserows and all of this was upfront and legal,” Riddle said. “So, when we found out it wasn’t, we started keeping an eye on it.”

Cannabis concerns

The regulatory structure in place to monitor Vermont’s nascent cannabis industry and Maynard’s upstart business ended up offering the most responsive process through which Riddle and the Diggins Road neighbors could have their complaints heard.

In summer 2021, Riddle asked Hyde Park town administrator Ron Rodjenski if the commercial greenhouse that had sprouted up on Maynard’s property was properly licensed.

The next spring, Rodjenski began exchanging emails with Maynard and his partner, Shannon Oram, requesting they seek a change of use permit if they intended to convert the carpentry business into a cannabis business.

Around that same time, the Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department launched an investigation into Maynard’s grow operation. Though Riddle had pushed the town to enforce their zoning laws, she never involved the police.

In a text exchange from that time, Hyde Park selectboard chair Brian Shackett discussed the sheriff’s investigation with Rodjenski, inquiring whether the town had any processes in place to deal with Maynard if he had begun growing marijuana before acquiring the proper permit. Rodjenski said he would handle it.

According to Det. Kevin Lehoe with the sheriff’s department, the investigation never went anywhere because neither the town nor state were concerned about the matter and there was no violation of federal law.

Maynard would ultimately not receive his permit for a tier-one indoor cultivation operation, which allows for a 1,000-square-foot canopy, from the cannabis control board until September, but as August rolled around, his crop required harvesting.

Riddle submitted a complaint to the board concerning the smell from the operation.

“Tyler Maynard and his partner are growing hundreds of cannabis plants on their property and do not have town and highway or zoning to have a business on their property. The skunk smell is very strong, and I can smell it on my front deck and in my home when the breeze is right,” she wrote.

Riddle visited Maynard’s home and took pictures of the plants, which she believed outnumbered the amount of marijuana that his license allowed him to grow.

Complaints triggered multiple investigations into the Green River Cannabis’ operations. After a December investigation by the cannabis control board, it was found Maynard wasn’t properly reporting his inventory, using non-plastic caps on his pre-roll joints and had fungicide present at his grow facility.

A cannabis producer in Holland was recently shut down by the board for their use of outlawed fungicide, but Green River’s product never actually tested positive for any fungicide, which contained different compounds than the ones the Holland producer was using, and has never been prohibited from sale.

Still, Green River Cannabis was slapped with a $5,000 fine, most of which has been deferred with the requirement that Maynard clean up his books and throw out the fungicide.

Maynard claimed his errors were due to his not being technologically or administratively savvy but praised the cannabis control board for its education-first approach.

“We’re not computer people,” Maynard said. “The information was there. We just had a hard time finding it.”

Meanwhile, Maynard’s application to properly permit his cannabis operation under Hyde Park’s zoning policy was still winding its way through the development review board throughout last fall.

Riddle submitted a letter detailing her concerns about Maynard’s business prior to a November meeting. Though she said she was not protesting Maynard’s business because of any moral opposition to cannabis, Michael Riddle, who volunteers as an EMT and works as an airline pilot, publicly stated his opposition to it and called it a “dangerous drug” at the meeting.

The Riddles were not alone in their concerns. Another neighbor, Bill Barton, expressed concerns about how cannabis production might affect water quality in the area and requested the town issue a cease-and-desist letter to Maynard for producing cannabis prior to the permitting of his business by either the state or town.

“Thank you for advocating for us,” Adam Barton, another Diggins Road neighbor, wrote to Cindy Riddle after the meeting. “I can see the amount of research that has gone into this fight. Although we are not yet fortunate enough to be on Diggins full time, we have tremendous love and respect for the land and neighbors. In our absence, your commitment to protecting this very special place is so appreciated.”

Development Review Board member Mary Walz pushed for a site visit to survey the operation, but after Maynard protested, it was never scheduled. Another hearing was held in December and Maynard’s permit for cannabis production was issued, months after he received approval from the state and long after he had started growing and processing marijuana.

Development review board chair Mac Teale, who unsuccessfully ran for a House seat last November, said he saw the concerns from neighboring residents as driven mainly by an animus toward cannabis while lamenting Maynard felt compelled to leave town.

“They’re leaving town, which makes me sad,” Teale said. “I don’t think that anything that Tyler has done rises to the level where he and his family should feel that they have to move.”

Though Riddle is adamant that her campaign was simply about protecting the character of the neighborhood and her own property, Maynard also said the situation has become untenable.

“I’m receptive to the fact that people don’t approve of (cannabis) and don’t like it. We’ve tried to be cognizant of that fact and respectful of it,” Maynard said. “But it seems that though the town has been OK to us, there’s been more slight and vengeance and hate coming from all angles. We just don’t want anything to do with it and don’t want to be involved in it and want to kind of kill it with kindness.”

“I was not trying to run them out. I was really hoping we could have all been friends and he could have said, Come on over and look at the greenhouse I’ve got, this is what I’m doing, all the permits are in place,) Riddle said. “We just know he doesn’t follow any rules, and so I was just hoping that, with the town knowing that he doesn’t follow rules, they would at least keep a little bit of an eye on him. I was trying to do it as gently as I could.”

Green future

Aside from Green River Cannabis, five other cannabis production businesses of varying sizes, including a wholesale operation, are currently licensed and operating within Hyde Park, a town of just over 3,000 people that has not held a vote on allowing cannabis retailers to operate within its borders.

The word cannabis does not currently appear anywhere within Hyde Park’s zoning laws. Though Riddle brought her concerns about regulating such facilities to the town’s planning commission, board chair Bob Malbon said the board is not currently looking to implement new bylaws to regulate where cannabis is allowed within the town, as Stowe has.

If anything, the commission is simply hoping to establish a cannabis control commission, as other towns have already done, or install a process where residents neighboring potential cannabis producers will at least be alerted to the fact that they’re there.

“We want to make people aware of what is coming in their neighborhoods, so I think we do want to put something together, but I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight,” Malbon said. “There was definitely a lot of discussion with the board, but there was no consensus.”

This article was updated on Feb. 20, 2023, to clarify that Michael Riddle volunteers as an EMT and works as an airline pilot. It was also updated to reflect that Tyler Maynard owns 19 acres of land, not 175 as previously reported.