“What happened here is that we decided, after the passage of the law and once we started implementation efforts, that the big-picture oversight of the cannabis work required someone inside the governor’s office to help coordinate and prioritize all of the various agency-level work and to handle the high-profile outreach that will be necessary as we work to ensure the success of the equity provisions in the law,” the governor’s office said in a statement issued Nov. 21. “The governor felt that Ms. Hutchinson was the most qualified person to do that job.”