Original Article By: Gloria Lloyd, St. Louis Business Journal 

Clayton is set to get its first marijuana dispensary, after the operator recently received approval from the city.

Good Day Farm plans to convert a single-story retail building at 118 S. Hanley Road in downtown Clayton into a dispensary, at the site of a former Palm Beach Tan location.

The company received approval in May from the Clayton Board of Aldermen for a conditional use permit to operate the dispensary. The property, occupied by a 3,611-square-foot building that will be converted to the dispensary, is owned by University City-based Burch Properties.

It’s unclear what the target opening date is for Good Day Farm’s new Clayton site. The company declined to comment. Good Day Farm has one year to open from the approval of the site’s conditional use permit, according to Clayton officials.

Little Rock, Arkansas-based Good Day Farm operates more than 30 marijuana dispensaries in Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Most of its locations are in Missouri, where it has 21 sites overall, with five of those already open in the St. Louis region: the Central West End, University City, Imperial, south St. Louis County and O’Fallon, Missouri. In 2023, the company added adult-use sales to its branded retail medical-use dispensaries in Missouri when recreational sales became legal.

The Clayton site, which is in a high-density development district and an overlay zoning district, is located between Carondelet Plaza and Bonhomme Avenue. Inside the building, the new dispensary will by state law have to include a security vestibule, a sales floor and private employee spaces, representatives of the operator said.

City officials last year gave the nod to a different dispensary operator that wanted to open at the same site, Kansas City-based Sunrise Dispensaries. But that deal later fell through due to state regulations, Clayton City Manager David Gipson said.

The property at 118 S. Hanley is one of the few areas in Clayton that qualify to host a dispensary under state law, which prohibits dispensaries within 1,000 feet of churches and schools. Clayton law goes farther and prohibits dispensaries within 500 feet of those types of institutions.

“There are very few places in Clayton that we can actually have a dispensary because we’re not a big city and we have a lot of churches and schools,” Alderman Bridget McAndrew, the aldermanic representative to the cityc’ Plan Commission and Architectural Review Board, said at the panel’s May 20 meeting.

McAndrew said at the meeting that she had received emails from some residents who were uneasy with any type of marijuana sales in the city other than medical. The state constitutional amendment passed by voters in 2018 legalizing medical marijuana prohibits cities from banning marijuana dispensaries altogether, McAndrew noted.

“Clayton would be in contravention of state law if we prohibited the use or allowance of dispensaries in Clayton, so as long as you’ve gotten your state licenses and you’ve complied with the regulations and security is what it needs to be, then it’s hard for us to disallow the use,” she said.

The security plan for the site was approved by the Clayton Police Department, officials said. In the vestibule, customers will show their government-issued photo identification cards or patient cards to a security guard, who will check them on a VeriScan system to see if the cards are legitimate. Customers will only be allowed into the store in a 3-1 ratio, Paul Rockers, director of compliance for Good Day Farm, said at the Plan Commission meeting.

Another security manager will constantly monitor the dispensary’s security cameras, which by state law will have two camera angles on the product at all times, along with cameras on the front of the dispensary and the parking lot, among other areas, Rockers said.

By state law, no one can consume marijuana on site, even in cars, and that is something security is watching for and “would be handled swiftly by staff,” Rockers said at the meeting.

The allowed hours of operation for Good Day Farm’s Clayton dispensary will be 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sundays.

The site owner has applied to consolidate the property with the retail site next door also owned by Burch, at 112 S. Hanley Road, according to a staff report.

Since the buildings share a parking lot, the owner wants to consolidate them into one property, according to the report. City staff recommended the change, which is on the agenda for the Board of Aldermen’s July 23 meeting.