forgive my ignorance, but where exactly do you find permissions for this?

the permission is found inside compoststacks, compoststacks.use. thank you for reminding me to add to the description.

i used that because it seemed common sense; it doesn't appear to be working though. i'll look into it some more. 

That is a known issue, if the plugin reloads it works just as you would expect, as long as it is granted.

I was hoping to avoid reloading the plugin to solve it, but it seems like it might be the only way without force reloading it once permission is given.

i squirreled...sorry. it worked fine after server restarted and i completely forgot about it. :)

its cool, i get the same issue when it is a freshly granted permission