A new round of deficiency notices for Illinois craft grow, infuser, and transport licenses were sent out by the Illinois Department of Agriculture (IDOA) on Tuesday, making it likely that those license types will not be awarded until mid-July, at the earliest.
According to a posting by IDOA, the agency that regulates these licenses, the deficiency notices were sent to “top scoring applicants who were missing documents required by statute”. The notices requested additional documentation for unscored application sections, such as organizational charts, proof of property ownership, and documentation of liquid capital.
Craft grow applicants are allowed to start with 5,000 square feet of canopy space, and up to 14,000 square feet, stepped up over time in a process still to be defined by state regulators. The state is set to award 40 craft grow licenses, 40 infuser, and an unlimited number of transport licenses. State official emails obtained by Grown In show there were 459 craft grow applications, 115 infuser, and 253 transporter licenses.
Recipients of the deficiency notices have ten calendar days to “cure” the errors, until June 11. In the past, it has taken the state and its scoring contractor, accounting firm KPMG, about two weeks to score a round of notices. That, combined with the waits and delays typical of government and politics, makes it likely that craft grow, infuser, and transport license applicants will have to wait six more weeks to see who obtained their licenses, putting the delay a full year past the original July 1, 2020 deadline.
One new addition to the deficiency notices were instructions on how to replace an applicant team principal officer who may have died since they first submitted their application on April 30, 2020.
“The applicant must submit an original or certified copy of a death certificate showing that one or more principal officers died,” says the official notice from the state.
