Her case will be heard in a non-jury trial without witnesses in New Jersey Superior Court on Tuesday in Woodbury. Baus also filed a complaint in federal court in Camden, which is pending.

Baus’ effort to start a business has devolved into a struggle with Swedesboro officials, replete with charges of racism, nepotism, corruption, and ineptitude, underscored by a multigenerational family feud stoking resentments.

“I’ve been shocked and crying,” Baus said in an interview. “It’s been awful.”

Swedesboro swims against the tide regarding weed. Just around 37% of New Jersey’s 564 municipalities have opted to allow cannabis businesses, said Todd Johnson, executive director of the New Jersey Cannabis Trade Association.

Currently, there are 215 cannabis dispensaries statewide, most of them recreational, according to the New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission. Only five of them are purely medical marijuana distributors, said Ken Wolski, executive director of the Coalition for Medical Marijuana New Jersey.

The majority of towns balk at weed sales for various reasons: Officials don’t yet know how to control the business; they fear crime; they’re uneasy about communities becoming gathering spots for weed smokers.

Why accept recreational cannabis dispensaries? That’s easy, Johnson said. The state’s cannabis business is worth a billion dollars.

Swedesboro officials decided against weed in 2021 when New Jersey legalized recreational cannabis. But in 2023, Baus suggested a dispensary, an idea the borough’s leaders were receptive to — until they weren’t.

“As a Black woman, I was sabotaged,” said Baus, 44, a finance manager at Spirit Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram, a Swedesboro auto dealership owned by her in-laws, where her husband, Michael, is the general manager. Baus also owns the Hip Hop Shop, a local dance studio.

In court filings, attorney David Avedissian of Haddonfield, who represents Jersey Joint Dispensary Swedesboro (JJDS) — the Las Vegas-based company that was ultimately awarded a cannabis sales license in town — said Baus was alleging racism “with no supporting facts,” adding that she “blames anyone and everyone for … [her] own shortcomings.”

Neither Avedissian nor Baus’ attorney Micci Weiss from Holmdel nor Westmont attorney Michael Miles, who represents the borough, would discuss the case. Similarly, JJDS executives and individual Swedesboro officials didn’t respond to requests from The Inquirer for comment.

For Baus, operating a dispensary was a dream.

“I’ve worked in the car business all my life,” Baus said. “This dispensary was going to be something that I built, my own baby.”

The place she planned was projected to take in $4 million to $6 million a year. Towns like Swedesboro would be eligible for as much as 2% of that in taxes, according to calculations by Alloy Silverstein, a Cherry Hill accounting firm.

Unfamiliar with the cannabis business, Baus asked her friend Kris Wilson for help. Wilson owns Woolwich Wellness Company, a seed-to-sale cannabis operation.

“I had no money in Jenn’s business,” Wilson said in an interview. “I’m a friend who loves the family. Spirit Dodge is a community cornerstone, sponsoring Little League, providing cars for parades.”

In October 2023, Wilson reached out to the township to discuss licensing a dispensary called Greenhouse.

In court papers supporting Baus, Weisswrote that Wilson is white, and that Swedesboro officials didn’t know that a Black woman — with whom they would ultimately engage in “discriminatory conduct” — was Greenhouse’s founder.

Wilson interacted with town officials in person and via email over a five-month period. When Swedesboro Mayor Thomas Fromm learned Baus was involved, he “made a face” and said, ‘Oh, the Bauses,’” Wilson said in an interview.

“Aside from my being Black, there’s bad blood between the mayor and my husband’s family,” Baus said. “Petty, small-town stuff.” MichaelBaus said that around 15 years ago, his father, a Republican, ran against Fromm, a Democrat who’s been mayor for 22 years. The elder Baus lost by 17 votes “and the election sticks in Fromm’s craw,” Michael said.

Nevertheless, Swedesboro seemed open to her idea to fortify its tax base, Jennifer Baus said.

On May 21 of last year, court records show, Wilson emailed Jena Dolbow, the borough clerk/registrar, asking, “How quickly could we submit our application for a cannabis retailer and get in front of the planning board/township committee? Is there an application…we need to complete?”

Dolbow referred Wilson to planning board secretary Heather Samples, writing, “She will explain to you everything that is needed.”

Samples sent Wilson a form. “Is this everything we need to submit a cannabis retail application?” Wilson asked her.

“Yes, everything is outlined in the application,” Samples responded.

The form would take Baus four months to complete. It required her to consult experts like engineers and architects, she said, costing her$50,000 to hire them.

She and Wilson thought it all seemed excessive. Baus shared their misgivings with a Swedesboro council member, who told Baus to “keep going and that she would get through it,” court records show.

Then, everything fell apart.

On Aug. 19, Swedesboro issued a resolution supporting JJDS for a dispensary, records show. Baus said she was shocked, wondering how out-of-towners could fill out the form so quickly and leapfrog over her.

“Turns out,” Wilson said, “we were given the wrong form — the complicated site plan form, not the cannabis retail form I asked for, which took 48 hours to complete and cost $10,000 to be processed, not $50,000.”

Weiss asserted in court filings that “this was a calculated concealment, not an oversight or a mistake.”

Wilson said, “I one hundred percent believe they purposely gave us the wrong application. I’m so hurt for Jenn and can’t do anything but sit back and watch.”

Avedissian tells a different tale in his court filings.

Baus’ “story that…[she] was misled by the borough is a pretext to try to cover for … [her] own error,” he wrote.

He hammered Baus and Wilson for relying “blindly on the borough clerk’s advice to contact… [Samples] for cannabis application information.” The argument that Baus’ “failure to apply for a license is the clerk’s fault is either untruthful, incompetent, or both.”

Writing in a court file for Swedesboro officials, Miles said thatwhen Dolbow had read Wilson’s email asking about two facets of applying for a dispensary — how to get a “cannabis retailer form,” and how to go before the planning board — “Dolbow had only noticed his reference to the planning board.” That’s why she told Wilson to consult Samples.

“And that’s a big mistake,” Baus said. “Their job is to give us the right application.”

Avedissian also said that JJDS, led by Dustin Alvino, a Las Vegas commercial real estate broker and entrepreneur, represented a “more robust” financial position than Baus’, and had experience running dispensaries. Borough officials also awarded JJDS higher scores in a vetting process, which Baus dismissed as biased.

Avedissian concluded that Baus had “ample opportunity” during the process to submit a complete dispensary application but failed to do so.

Baus said that she’s tried contacting Fromm about the flawed process, but that he’s unresponsive. “I begged him to help me,” she said. “Why didn’t someone ask me why my application was taking so long? Why did JJDS get the right application, and I didn’t?” Fromm didn’t respond to interview requests.

Baus claims she got her answer in what she said was another “bombshell”:

Delaware resident Tracy Valichka, described in court papers as a co-owner of JJDS, is the sister-in-law of the borough’s zoning officer Jennifer Valichka, according to plaintiff filings.

“It was never disclosed to plaintiffs” until much later in the process, after Swedesboro had already decided that JJDS would get the dispensary license, Weisswrote.

“The borough’s blatant favoritism, procedural misconduct, and undisclosed conflicts of interest…tainted the licensing process,” he charged. Jennifer Valichka didn’t respond to a request for comment. Valichka never voted on any dispensary application, records show.

Baus said she’d long wondered how a Nevada company got wind of a Swedesboro dispensary when so few people knew it was being contemplated. “Maybe someone on the inside told them,” she said. “It feels like they never wanted a Black woman to run such a high-profile business.”

As recompense, Weiss requests that the judge in the case intervene to “invalidate the Borough’s improper actions,” and direct Swedesboro to support Greenhouse for a dispensary. Baus is also asking to be reimbursed for application and attorney’s fees amounting to more than $100,000.

Avedissian said those demands are “draconian and unsupported by any legal authority.” He added that Baus never proved that she suffered racial discrimination, and that an “innocent party” (JJDS) shouldn’t be punished for following rules Greenhouse didn’t.

Since Baus erected her signs last month, people in town who’d been unaware of the dispensary controversy have been buzzing.

Some accused Baus of “race-baiting” to make her points. Others said they’d prefer a local resident like Baus to run a dispensary. Many said they don’t want Swedesboro in the weed business at all.

“I went to a lot of borough meetings about the dispensary,” said Wende Campanile, 58, who has owned two fitness businesses in town.

“People are quite upset about how this went down. Swedesboro did some manipulative, backdoor stuff.

“In the end, it looks like they went with nepotism, and with believing they’d make more money with a big corporation running things.”

What happens next is up to a judge, Baus said.

“It’s trial on Zoom,” she said. “I don’t think I could watch. I’m so scared.”