PONTIAC, MI -- Within two hours on a day following record snowfall in Michigan, a career fair seeking up to 100 employees for a proposed marijuana grow facility in Pontiac ran out of its 300 applications.

A waiting list was created for the jobs that pay between $15 and $18 per hour with benefits kicking in after a 60-day probationary period.

As Michigan’s projected $1 billion-plus-per-year recreational marijuana industry closes in quickly on reality, businesses, investors and future employees are making their moves. The state Marijuana Regulatory Agency began accepting recreational marijuana business applications on Nov. 1. The first licenses are expected to be issued within weeks and recreational marijuana could commence by March or April of next year.

Scenes like these, a barrage of job seekers descending on career fairs with aspirations of breaking into the legal marijuana industry, are becoming routine.

Lansing-area’s Green Peak Innovations, a major player in Michigan’s medical marijuana industry that is licensed to grow 18,000 plants and operate five dispensaries, as well as a processing facility, held a career fair of its own in the Lansing Hyatt Place hotel on Nov. 7.

In eight hours, the company interviewed 338 prospective employees for 50 production and growing position openings, said Green Peak spokeswoman Colleen Robar. The company, which is celebrating the opening of its newest dispensary in Ann Arbor Friday, drew nearly 500 applicants to its 2018 job fair.

“The industry is booming and is going to be one of the state’s biggest industries, no doubt,” Robar said. “Our career fair was very successful.”

Michigan budget planners are projecting $1.48 billion in statewide marijuana business revenues once the industry takes hold by late 2020, said Jim Stansell, a senior economist with the state House Fiscal Agency. That equates to nearly $230 million new tax dollars to the state generated by a 10% excise tax and 6% sales tax.

In hats and winter coats, some with purple Mohawks, dreadlocks, tattered jeans or dress slacks, a menagerie of job seekers on Tuesday waited in the dilapidated, linoleum-floored room of a shuttered Pontiac strip mall that once housed the second-ever Kmart department store. “Yang’s Oriental Food Store,” read the left-behind sign of a former business that hung above the entrance to the job fair in what was formerly known as Glenwood Plaza.

Rubicon Capital, A Detroit-area development company, wants to purchase and transform the abandoned commercial relic into a $45 million “cannabis park."

“The whole idea for the plaza is everything in the back would be cultivation and processing and that will anchor,” said Rubicon Capital co-owner Manni Ferraiuolo. "With that we can bring in a grocery store, shopping plaza, everything else up that is needed in the community.

“Today, Pharmaco is that anchor tenant for that cannabis section.”

In total, planners estimate the redevelopment could create up to 400 new jobs.

Pharmaco currently operates eight licensed medical marijuana dispensaries in Michigan, including locations in Bay City, Morenci, Vassar, Detroit and Battle Creek, according to the state Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs website.

Pharmaco Human Resources Manager Katrina Cotton smiled and briefly interviewed one applicant after another from behind a folding table armed with an application-stuffed manila folder.

“Today has been so, so busy,” she said. “There’s always a new movement coming and I think this is the next movement. And to be on the ground floor of what’s about to happen in this industry is so exciting."

Among the applicants in the standing-room-only waiting area surrounded by artist renderings of what the vacant strip mall is envisioned to become were a construction worker, homemaker, medical device technician, cook and a pair of brothers who recently began legally growing their own marijuana plants and want to do it professionally.

“It’s newer and I guess it’s something that you can get your foot in the door and there’s an opportunity to grow,” said 25-year-old Justin Willard, who came to the job fair from Allen Park. “That’s probably the same with other industries but as this one is exploding and taking off, you have a lot of opportunities to go places inside of it.”

Recent high school graduate Jyrese Williams, an 18-year-old Pontiac resident, said he’s looking for a job that he can be passionate about.

“I like weed,” he said, “and I want to help do it the right way.”

Williams purchased an instructional book from a marijuana supply store and began teaching himself how to grow marijuana when voters legalized possession in November 2018.

He proudly shows off cell-phone pictures of his second at-home attempt at growing marijuana.

“They’re three inches tall,” he says.

Editor’s note: Michigan law requires anyone who possesses, grows or transports marijuana or marijuana plants to be 21. Williams said he was assisting his brother, who is over 21 and also at the job fair, with the grow.

Pharmaco encouraged anyone with cannabis-related convictions, felonies or misdemeanors, to attend the job fair.

The effort is in line with the state’s social equity program, aimed at encouraging "participation in the marijuana industry by people from communities that have been disproportionately impacted by marijuana prohibition and enforcement and to positively impact those communities.”

Ferraiuolo said the goal is for Pharmaco to open a temporary grow operation in one of the property’s buildings by Jan. 1. However, that seems unlikely. The Pontiac City Council placed a hold on issuing any medical marijuana licenses until Jan. 6 at the earliest, Mayor Deirdre Waterman said.

Pontiac opted not to allow recreational marijuana business in the city, but the mayor said that could change, especially if elected officials begin to see the potential economic benefits to the community from the presence of developers like Rubicon and companies like Pharmaco.

“I won’t be the arbiter of the future ... but I’m here to fulfill the will of the people,” Mayor Waterman said. " ... I kind of equate it to the end of Prohibition. I notice that among younger people, cannabis is more their commodity than a bottle of bourbon is for the older age.

“So it’s just and era that looks like its time has come.”

-- Gus Burns is the marijuana beat reporter for MLive. Contact him with questions, tips or comments at fburns@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter, @GusBurns. Read more from MLive about medical and recreational marijuana.

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