Mt. Pleasant city commissioners Monday made some final changes to the proposed ordinance to allow medical marijuana facilities in the city.
A 1,000-foot buffer zone for K-12 schools is back in the ordinance with no exemption for downtown and there will be more 500-plant grow operations allowed than originally planned.
At a nearly three-hour work session, commissioners discussed the buffer zones, limits on the number of businesses, the application deadline and other topics.
The decisions they reached will be added to the proposed ordinances.
They are:
Provisioning centers will be allowed in industrial areas, but only if they are part of a co-location for other types of the businesses, such as a grow operation or a processing center.
No limits on the number of processing centers, secure transporters or safety testing businesses. There will be a limit of three for provisioning centers.
They changed the limits for grow operations. The ordinance will now allow up to five of Class A (500 plant) facilities, and a total of three for Class B (1,000 plants) and Class C (1,500 plants). They will allow stacking of up to three operations for a Class C operation, meaning someone could have up to 4,500 plants at one site.
For buffer zones, they stayed with a 500-foot buffer zone for the main campus of Central Michigan University, with areas east of Mission Street being exempted.
They favored a 1,000-foot buffer zone for K-12 schools. They did not follow a recommendation from the Planning Commission, which would have exempted the north side of Broadway Street.
Commissioners also discussed the dates for when the city will begin accepting applications. Applications would be accepted starting Oct. 1.
At the City Commission meeting in September, the board will discuss a resolution for setting an end date for accepting applications. That date will depend on how much progress the state is making in approving applicants.
Commissioners also kept with the plan to use a lottery drawing for provisioning centers and grow operations if the number of applicants exceeds the number of businesses allowed.
Commissioners also want the commission to review the ordinance a year after it takes effect to consider it overall and to consider adding more businesses if the process is going well.
Buffer zones took up a large part of the discussion, as commissioners continued to struggle to find a consensus on the issue, before finally getting majority support for a 1,000-foot buffer for K-12 schools.
Commissioner Will Joseph, a former planning commissioner who also served on the city’s ad hoc committee last year, noted that there isn’t much difference between a 500-foot buffer for schools and a 1,000-foot buffer, in terms of how much property would be available.
Provisioning centers are the only type of business that will be allowed in commercial areas, such as part of the downtown, Mission Street and Pickard.
Commissioner Kathy Ling was concerned with treating a private school, Sacred Heart Academy, differently than the public schools. The north-of-Broadway exemption for the buffer zone would have amounted to basically a 360-foot buffer zone for Sacred Heart.
Both Mt. Pleasant Public Schools and Sacred Heart requested 1,000-foot buffer zones.
“For medical marijuana and alcohol, it’s hard for me to treat them differently. They both have potential problems if they get into the hands of people who are not allowed to have them,” Ling said.
“The problem that I have with the exception that was made (for the areas north of Broadway) – at the time, I understood what was being said and I thought it was an attempt to come up with a compromise. But on the other hand, it really puts it very close to Sacred Heart and I have a hard time saying ‘OK, in this one situation, we are only going to have about 300 feet, but for all the other schools, we need to have 1,000 feet. It just doesn’t feel consistent to me,” she said.
All of the commissioners except Gillis were in favor of a lottery system if needed.
“I would like some things that would help us decide the best qualified candidate that would fit into our city,” she said. “Other cities have written those into their ordinances and we do local preference when we do bids for sidewalks and other things that we bid out.”
“Frankly, I don’t care what any attorneys in the audience have to tell us,” Commissioner Tony Kulick said, referring to those representing potential business owners who advocated against a lottery system. “We’re paying Nick (Curcio) and his firm a lot of money to provide us an opinion. That opinion is we should go with a lottery. I’m a lottery person, pure and simple.”
“I think it’s very necessary that we treat these businesses without any preferential treatment,” Vice Mayor Nicholas Madaj said.
For the grow operations, Kulick was willing to compromise and support the idea of allowing five 500- plant grow operations. In turn, Ling was willing to compromise and support the stacking of licenses for the larger Class C operations.
Ling said she thought allowing only three grow operations overall would end up with large operations and not smaller ones.
The rational for allowing the 500-plant grow operations is that they would, in theory, allow current medical marijuana caregivers to transition into being small-business operators.
“I think the idea behind Class A is that it allows someone who is a caregiver to maybe make that step to being a small-business owner,” Joseph said. “If you are currently a caregiver, you’re supplying your medicine to a limited amount of people and probably not making very much money. But if you can gather some assets and become a Class A grower, you’re now a small-business owner in this town, and I think there’s a real value to that.”
Will and Commissioner Kristin Lalonde would have supported allowing even more than five.
Lalonde noted that if a large Class C operation went out of business, it would probably be a large building and would be hard to deal with. A smaller Class A operation site could more easily be converted to other uses.
Ultimately, commissioners went with a limit of five for the Class A grow operations.
The next step is for the city attorney and city staff to make the changes for the proposed ordinance.
They indicated they would try to have it done this week to be on the agenda for the Monday, June 11, City Commission meeting, but that is not 100 percent certain.
Commissioners indicated they do not want it added at the last minute, which means the ordinance needs to be ready in time to be included in the meeting information packet that is released online on the Friday before a meeting.