Carson City’s Miles Construction sees hemp industry as opportunity

By Kaleb Roedel

Inside the greenhouse of the cannabis facility Miles Construction built for MedMen in Mustang, Nevada. Courtesy Miles Construction

The sound of Cary Richardson breaking into a smile can be heard over the phone.

“We continue to see cannabis as a strong market,” says Richardson, vice president of business operations at Carson City-based Miles Construction. After all, Nevada saw more than $100 million in marijuana tax revenue over the 2019 fiscal year, which set a state record, according to the Nevada Dispensary Association. “We continue to build in cannabis. We’ve still very much engaged.”

Richardson isn’t kidding. With roughly 12 cannabis and hemp projects planted in Nevada and California that are either being designed, under construction or completed, Miles Construction has become “the go-to contractor” for the marijuana industry on the West Coast, Richardson said.

The company got a foothold in the budding industry in 2014 when it was asked to build a $15 million marijuana factory east of Reno for MedMen, a Los Angeles-based cannabis company. As the story goes, after its initial contractor dropped out, MedMen turned to Richardson and Miles Construction to reignite the project. Outside of working in construction, Richardson holds a Nevada license for marijuana cultivation and production with MedMen.

“Given our advanced manufacturing background, it made sense, so we stepped in partway through,” Richardson told the NNBV.

Completed in April 2018, the 45,000-square-foot MedMen Mustang factory is the biggest pot plant in the Silver State. The complex facility boasts a 26,000-square-foot Dutch greenhouse, a 19,000-square-foot extraction and production wing, a tissue culture lab to clone strains, and a test lab. At the grand opening, MedMen CEO Adam Bierman declared the facility as “the most high-tech marijuana factory in the world.”

Read the rest of the story at nnbusinessview.com.