When Josh and Tess Fellman opened Flipside, an East Harriet store that sells Delta-9 and CBD products, late last year, they weren’t too concerned about their future selling cannabis. They had every intention of turning their store into a cannabis dispensary but their primary concern was getting to know the neighborhood.

City and State officials also encouraged Flipside to do the same. “Get established, get good community relations, let people know who you are,” Josh Fellman explained Wednesday afternoon at Flipside. “This was a run-up for us to let our customers know what we do.” The Fellmans live in Northeast Minneapolis.

Now Flipside is rushing against the clock as newly released zoning regulations put the store's location just outside of a “CM2” business district where a cannabis dispensary can operate. The cannabis dispensary zoning regulations follow the City’s liquor store regulations established in the 1950s.

Despite their location at 36th and Bryant’s bustling business corridor, the City doesn’t have it zoned as such. The closest CM2 zone is at 40th and Lyndale, which has an almost identical amount of businesses and commercial square footage as 36th and Bryant, Fellman pointed out.

A CM2 zone technically needs to be on 5 acres. The business hub at 36th and Bryant sits on 3.8 acres. A few houses between Bryant and Lyndale avenues prevents that area from being a full 5 acres.

Flipside is asking the City to include specific commercial nodes that fall outside of CM2 zoning to the proposed zoning regulations. Fellman said it’s important for some of the neighborhood business nodes to be added because of storefront scarcity.

“There's only so many spaces for cannabis stores,” Fellman said. “It's now going to go to the highest bidder.”

The City’s Planning Commission is holding a public hearing on Monday at 4:30 p.m. on the City’s cannabis regulations. Flipside has a petition on its website asking the City to amend the proposed zoning laws.

A proposed cannabis dispensary zoning map with a 500-foot buffer around Minneapolis Public Schools

The State told the Fellmans that zoning regulations would happen at the City level, but the City didn’t have any draft regulations when Flipside opened. Fellman also said the City was being supportive of new hemp stores opening without any warnings of potential zoning regulations in the future.  

“When you announce that you are taking over and renovating a space, they're very supportive of that,” Fellman said. “They're not saying, ‘Well, wait a minute, you should wait.’”