The Medical Lake Planning Commission ended its talks about marijuana at its Oct. 30 meeting. The commission voted 4-1, to forward an ordinance to City Council that prohibits the production, process and sale of marijuana within the city limits. Commissioner Wayne Ueda was the dissenting vote.
City Administrator Doug Ross presented two ordinances to the commission at the meeting: the one Planning Commission recommended, and another that allowed recreational marijuana facilities in the light industrial area on South Graham Road where the old Nike Missile site was located.
Ross said Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson issued an opinion, which states that Initiative 502 does not prevent local governments from banning recreational marijuana businesses. He also brought up the city of Wenatchee, which banned marijuana from city limits in October 2013.
According to the Yakima Herald Republic, the Wenatchee City Council recently voted not to make an exemption to city law. Under the current law, all businesses have to comply with local, state and federal laws in order to obtain a business license to operate in Wenatchee.
Ross added that there are pending lawsuits against Wenatchee. One of the cases, SMP Retail, LLC v. City of Wenatchee, wrapped up after Chelan County Superior Court Judge T.W. Small agreed with the Attorney General’s opinion that governments can ban I-502 businesses.
Ross said he cannot guarantee that the city won’t get sued.
“The worst case scenario is that the judge would make the city allow marijuana,” Ross said. “If marijuana does become legal (under federal law), we can sit down and revisit the issue.”
Ross said that banning marijuana and revisiting it later was easier than allowing a business to set up shop and trying to ban it later.
“You could stop future businesses, but you couldn’t make existing businesses go away,” Ross said.
Commissioner Mark Hudson was concerned with some of the recent statistics that have come out of Colorado since the state legalized marijuana for recreational purposes for anyone age 21 and over.
According to a report from the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, marijuana-related hospitalizations emergency room visits increased by 57 percent from 2011-13. Most of these are related to marijuana edibles.
In 2012, 10.47 percent of Colorado youths, ages 12-17, were considered marijuana users compared to 7.55 percent nationally.
Hudson asked if the ordinance “can be worded similar to Wenatchee’s ordinance.”
Ross said the final decision is up to the City Council, though it is unlikely they will not go with the Planning Commission’s recommendation.
Al Stover can be reached at [email protected].
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