Lexington's second medical cannabis dispensary is being built at 130 W. Tiverton Way, Suite 100 — one of 16 addressed suites in a strip center just off Nicholasville Road, near Fayette Mall. The city said Thursday that the build passed a framing inspection on Aug. 18, that no further inspections have been scheduled, and that the certificate of occupancy a store needs before it can open to the public has not been issued.

The store is High Profile Cannabis Shop, the retail brand of C3 Industries of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Lexington issued a commercial remodel permit on July 9 for a 4,100-square-foot remodel with a declared job value of $820,000. It issued a commercial electrical permit on Aug. 3 and a sign permit, for a single internally lit wall sign, on Aug. 4.

The company has not announced the location. C3 Industries did not respond to three emailed requests this week asking where the store would be, whether an October opening was firm, and why two other Kentucky stores opened first. The requests went to the company's published contact address and asked that they be forwarded to the media contact named on both Kentucky news releases.

The opening would end an unusually long wait. Kentucky capped nearly every county at one dispensary, then made an exception for Fayette, which has an urban-county government, and Jefferson, which has a consolidated local government, giving each two. Fayette's lottery was held Dec. 16, 2024. One of those licenses reached an open door in 395 days, after its original winner sold it. This one has taken 620 days so far.

How the records identify it

Kentucky Secretary of State filings list DHK KY LLC — the Fayette license holder — with managers Ankur Rungta and Vishal Rungta, C3 Industries' co-founders. On July 15, 2026, DHK registered an active assumed name: "HIGH PROFILE CANNABIS SHOP - LEXINGTON."

Lexington's permit records name it directly. A zoning compliance permit issued April 21 describes the project as "DHK KY LLC Medicinal Cannabis Dispensary." The remodel permit lists the occupant as "HIGH PROFILE." The August sign permit is plainest of all. Under "Sign Will Read," it says: High Profile Cannabis Shop.

City address records place the store in an unremarkable retail row. The 4.1-acre parcel, 22017902, carries 16 separate suite addresses at 130 W. Tiverton Way, numbered 100 through 180 and spanning about 400 feet, in a row of storefronts set between Nicholasville Road and a Walmart. Suite 100 is the east end. The permits record the subdivision as Fayette Industrial Park, a name off the plat; what stands there is a strip center in the Nicholasville Road retail corridor.

The state has published the address all along. The Office of Medical Cannabis Find a Dispensary page carries a directory that renders every licensee in a settled location, open or not, and it lists DHK KY LLC at 130 W. Tiverton Way, Suite 100. The page warns that "not all dispensaries are open and operating yet." The record was last updated July 6. What no public source connected was DHK KY LLC to the High Profile brand.

A build with a paper trail

The permits sketch a sequence. City staff approved a zoning compliance permit for "DHK KY LLC Medicinal Cannabis Dispensary" on April 21. The Office of Medical Cannabis approved a change of licensed location within Fayette County on May 6 — 16 months into the wait. Plan review opened June 8. On June 24 a city planner, Stephanie Cunningham, approved the zoning review with a one-line description: "Interior remodel for medicinal cannabis dispensary in the B-3 zone." The state updated its dispensary directory July 6. The remodel permit issued July 9. The Lexington assumed name was filed July 15. The electrical permit issued Aug. 3 and the sign permit Aug. 4.

The review left one small mystery. On June 10 Cunningham sent the plans back, noting that the site plan showed an "existing drive-thru" where aerial and street-level photography showed none, and where the certified development plan showed none either. Cunningham did not respond to emailed questions about the review, sent Thursday with a Friday afternoon deadline.

How far along that leaves the store is a question the permits alone cannot answer, so The Lexington Times asked the city. Tara Gentry, a senior administrative specialist in the Division of Building Inspection, answered each question in writing on Thursday.

"A framing inspection was performed on 08/18/26 and it passed," Gentry wrote. "No other inspections have been scheduled." A final inspection remains. The certificate of occupancy, she said, "will be issued once the final inspection has passed." Asked whether a business needs that certificate in hand before opening to the public, she answered: "Yes."

Framing is not the last step of an interior buildout. It comes before the finish work. As of Thursday, nine days after that inspection passed, the city had nothing else on the schedule.

Measured against C3's other Kentucky stores, October would not be slow. From the date the state approved each store's final location to the day it opened, London took about 12 and a half months and Wilder about eight and a half. Lexington's location was approved May 6. An early-October opening would be roughly five months — faster than either.

The closest comparison is in Fayette County itself. The other Lexington licensee also moved its site within the county, winning approval May 7, 2025, and opened 253 days later. Counting from its own May 6 approval, High Profile would reach an Oct. 1 opening in 148 days.

Three explanations, and they do not match

No one has given a site-specific account of the first 16 months, and the explanations on the record this month point in different directions.

On Aug. 18, C3 announced its Wilder opening in a news release that described Kentucky as going well. London, it said, "has outpaced the Company's expectations for a new store opening and pointed to strong, sustained demand for medical access in Kentucky." It added: "High Profile plans to continue its expansion with Lexington next, followed by Shelbyville before the end of the year."

On Aug. 26, Rachel Roberts, executive director of the Kentucky Cannabis Industry Alliance, told The Lexington Times, for a story published Wednesday, that "High Profile Lexington, it is scheduled to open this fall, (early October tentatively)." Asked what had taken so long, Roberts cited landlords who will not rent to cannabis tenants and "the challenges our industry faces without access to traditional financing for construction."

A landlord did say yes. The Tiverton Way property is held by FD Tiverton, LLC, a Kentucky company organized in 2017 whose sole listed manager in state corporate records is Equity Management Group, Inc., at the same East High Street address in Lexington. Neither responded to a request for comment. When the lease was signed would date the company's site decision more precisely than any filing now public.

The company has been staffing the store since summer. C3's own hiring portal has advertised two Lexington jobs — a budtender and a dispensary shift lead — since July 10, the day after the city issued the remodel permit and five days before the company registered the Lexington trade name. Neither posting gives an address or an opening date, and the company has still not announced the store.

C3 has not named a month for Lexington in any news release. But the date did come from the company. Asked where "early October" originated, Roberts answered: "That timeframe came from the licensee." So C3 has given an opening window to its trade association, which gave it to a newspaper, while declining to give it to the public or to answer three requests for comment. Asked separately about the relationship between the Alliance and C3, Roberts said only: "The next High Profile dispensary set to open is in Lexington." C3's most recent news release on any subject is the Aug. 18 announcement, which said only that Lexington is next, before the end of the year.

The state will settle it. The Office of Medical Cannabis publishes an "open since" date for every dispensary that has opened — Jan. 15 for the Lexington store already open, May 5 for London, Aug. 17 for Wilder. When the Tiverton Way store starts selling, that page will say so.

The company did publish one Kentucky date, in the boilerplate at the foot of its May 5 release: additional Kentucky locations were "scheduled to start opening late July 2026." The next store opened Aug. 17. By the Aug. 18 release that line had been changed to "opening throughout 2026," without noting the change.

A disclosure

Roberts is not a disinterested observer of this company. Eight days before giving The Lexington Times the financing explanation, Roberts was quoted by name in C3's own Aug. 18 press release, describing a partnership: "KCIA organizes patient drives across the state to meet that need... We're glad to host these drives at High Profile's Wilder location every Friday." A High Profile district manager is quoted in the same release saying the Alliance and another group "have been strong partners in helping patients complete the certification process."

That does not make the statement untrue. Roberts answered our questions within an hour, supplied underlying figures when we challenged a statistic in a news release, and is the only person who has told the public anything about when this store might open. A trade association appearing in a member company's release is ordinary practice. But readers should know the relationship, and The Lexington Times has asked Roberts to address it.

What the federal argument is worth

The general version of Roberts' account is well founded. Federal law at 21 U.S.C. 856 makes it a crime to knowingly lease property for distributing a controlled substance, and it reaches mortgage holders — which is why lenders write cannabis exclusions into loan covenants. Small Business Administration guidance bars lending to businesses that "grow, produce, process, distribute, or sell marijuana or marijuana products," and says so applies "even if the business is legal under local or state law." That guidance took effect in June 2025 and the agency has not publicly revisited it since the April rule. Congress has not passed a cannabis banking bill: the SAFE Banking Act of 2026, S. 4942, was introduced June 24, and its only recorded action is that it was read twice and referred to the Senate Banking Committee. And Kentucky forbids nearly all dispensary advertising under 915 KAR 1:090.

The delays are not unique to Lexington, either. Of Kentucky's 48 authorized dispensaries, 23 were open as of Aug. 25. A 24th, Blue Sage in Lebanon, was scheduled to open at noon Friday.

One piece of the picture did change this spring. On April 28, 2026, the Justice Department published a final rule, 91 FR 22714, moving state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. The rule states that state licensees "will no longer be subject to the deduction disallowance imposed by Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code." Section 280E barred cannabis businesses from deducting ordinary expenses and was for years the heaviest drag on their finances. The rule adds a caution: "Nothing in this rule constitutes a determination regarding federal tax liability," and tells licensees to consult tax counsel. The tax agencies then spoke for themselves. Five days before the rule took effect, Treasury and the IRS announced they planned to issue guidance, said "rescheduling generally removes section 280E as a bar to claiming deductions and credits," and signaled a transition rule under which relief would reach a business's full taxable year — meaning all of 2026. That guidance has not yet issued.

Roberts, asked whether the April rule had been accounted for, said the remarks about financing described the industry generally rather than this licensee, and pushed back on the premise: "Section 280E concerns taxation, not lending or banking broadly. Perhaps the most impactful part of rescheduling is that it will lead to further study of medicinal benefits for patients."

That distinction is a fair one. Section 280E governs what a cannabis business may deduct at tax time; it does not require a bank to lend or a landlord to sign. Relief from it improves a company's after-tax cash, which is not the same as opening a credit line. The constraints Roberts named first — the leasing statute, the SBA bar, the absence of a banking law — are untouched by the April rule.

There is a reading of the timeline that favors the company, and it deserves stating. The zoning compliance permit for the Tiverton Way site is dated April 21. The Justice Department rule took effect April 28. The Lexington build got underway the same week the tax treatment changed — which is what one would expect if financing had in fact been the binding constraint until then. Since the state approved the site on May 6, C3 has moved faster on paper than in either of its completed Kentucky builds. What the inspection record shows is a project that reached framing in mid-August with five or six weeks left on the trade association's timeline.

The unresolved question is whether the same April rule also loosened the other federal constraints. The Small Business Administration bar turns on activity "illegal under Federal, State, or local law," and the leasing statute on distributing a controlled substance. Whether either now reads differently for a state-licensed medical dispensary is not settled, and no agency has said.

No hearing, no notice

Neighbors were not asked, and under Lexington's rules they did not have to be. The city's 2024 medicinal cannabis ordinance made dispensaries a principal permitted use in the business zones where they are allowed, rather than a conditional use. City records place the Tiverton Way site in B-3, a corridor business zone. A dispensary opening in an existing business zone needs no rezoning and no conditional use permit — so no Board of Adjustment case, no public hearing, no mailed notice to surrounding owners. The first public trace is a permit filing.

That is also why the store is absent from the city's own meeting record. A search of Lexington's public meeting archive found 14 references to dispensaries across all bodies and all years: the 2024 ordinance debate, a 2023 hemp shop, and a handful of passing mentions. The search turned up no discussion, by any council committee, planning body or board, of a dispensary at a specific Fayette County address other than the Hamburg store already open.

The one time a Lexington official mentioned the count out loud came at a Planning Commission subcommittee meeting on March 5, 2026. Asked whether dispensaries were a normal use in a business zone, Jeremy Young of the city's Division of Planning told commissioners that Fayette County is permitted two dispensaries at the moment, based on the state office, and that one is in operation. Then he named it: “the former Frisch’s next to Meijer in Hamburg.” A commissioner answered, “Interesting. Thank you very much.” No one asked about the second.

For patients without a car, the new store looks the easier of the two to reach. Lextran's stop nearest the Tiverton Way site, about 200 feet away, is served by two routes, Tates Creek Road and Nicholasville Road. The stop nearest the dispensary already open in Hamburg, about 400 feet away, is served by one, Hamburg Pavilion. Neither measure speaks to sidewalks, curb ramps or crossings, which is the part of accessibility a transit map cannot answer.

Kentucky bars dispensaries within 1,000 feet of a school or daycare. Two agencies have already signed off on this site: Lexington completed the zoning compliance permit, and the change-of-location request the state approved May 6 must contain that confirmation under its own regulation. The nearest public school, Southern Elementary, is about four-fifths of a mile away.

One step is left on the local side. A second ordinance council passed the same night in 2024 requires any medicinal cannabis business to hold a special fees license from Lexington's Division of Revenue, which the division may deny or revoke. Whether High Profile has applied for one is not published.

The Lexington Times has asked the Office of Medical Cannabis, under the Kentucky Open Records Act, for the change-of-location filing approved May 6 and for any notice DHK filed about missing its own projected timeline. The office's general counsel, Georgiana Ledford, acknowledged the request Aug. 27 and said the office would answer on or before Thursday, Sept. 3.

Separately, the state has not answered a set of questions sent Aug. 26 about the license itself — its status, whether the licensee ever filed the notice state regulation requires when it misses its own projected timeline, and whether the office has reviewed the common ownership of three Kentucky licensees that share an Ann Arbor address. Beth Fisher, deputy executive director of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services' Office of Public Affairs, asked Thursday for the publication deadline and said Friday that the office was "still working on this response" and would not have information that day. This story will be updated when the state answers.

Kentucky wrote an exception into its own rules so Lexington could have two dispensaries. Twenty months on it has one.

The second is a permitted, inspected, half-built store on Tiverton Way with a sign approved and nothing scheduled. Before it can sell anything to a patient, an inspector has to walk through it and pass it. Nobody has asked one to come.