After a tempestuous two-hour hearing in June, the Fresno City Council narrowly voted to take the first step to ban recreational marijuana businesses in the city. More fireworks could be in store Thursday morning, when the city’s planning department presents its draft of the proposed law to the council.
While marijuana remains illegal under federal law, California voters in November approved Proposition 64, legalizing the use of marijuana for recreational purposes and the licensed sale of marijuana starting on Jan. 1, 2018. But the law also gave local cities and counties the authority to regulate – or even ban – the establishment of marijuana businesses.
The changes backed by Councilman Garry Bredefeld and Mayor Lee Brand would prohibit nearly all commercial operations related to recreational pot – most notably retail dispensaries or shops where marijuana could be sold. The ban would apply to “any cultivation, manufacture, processing, storing, laboratory testing, labeling, transportation, distribution, delivery or sale of marijuana” for recreational use.
“These dispensaries are generally prime targets for robberies because they are all-cash businesses, and that increased criminal behavior places more demand on law enforcement and makes neighborhoods where they exist unsafe,” Bredefeld said this week. “We don’t want them in our neighborhoods.”
“Proposition 64 sent a terrible message to our young people that lighting up, getting loaded and smoking pot is a fine thing,” Bredefeld said. “But as a council, we have to recognize that it passed and it’s the law.”
Proposition 64 establishes one ounce of marijuana, or 8 grams of cannabis concentrates, as the legal limit for recreational pot possession for adults over the age of 21.
But “it also gave municipalities the right to regulate or ban these dispensaries, and this city and others in this area have taken the position that we don’t want these in the community,” he added. “People can grow up to six plants – it’s legal to do that – and they can go to other communities where they can buy it legally.”
Marijuana delivery services are already banned under the city’s current laws, but more than 40 reportedly operate in defiance of the law in Fresno, providing medical cannabis to patients who have a doctor’s recommendation under Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act approved by California voters in 1996.
The changes would also reinforce Proposition 64’s ban on the use or consumption of marijuana in public.
Different approach
The Bredefeld/Brand pot-shop ban isn’t the only marijuana issue to be discussed Thursday. Council President Clint Olivier, who in June tried a parliamentary maneuver in an unsuccessful effort to allow – rather than ban – dispensaries, has his own competing proposal on the agenda. Olivier will ask the council to allocate up to $100,000 to seek and hire a consultant to provide expert advice on state marijuana laws, other cities’ best practices on pot regulation as well as the potential for revenue from the taxation of marijuana.
Olivier has been an outspoken critic of an outright ban on dispensaries. “I think the debate we’ve had has been inadequate in terms of coming up with a creative public policy that could benefit not just this organization but neighborhoods in Fresno as well,” Olivier said last week as the City Council postponed a vote on imposing a six-plant limit on cultivation as well as other restrictions on where and how marijuana can be grown. “It may come forward during the months to come that it’s a public benefit for (the city) to regulate the cultivation, the transport and the sale” of marijuana.
Unlike the raucous City Council meeting on June 22, an Aug. 2 public hearing before the Fresno Planning Commission produced only three speakers who spoke against the ban. Commissioners voted 4-1, with one member abstaining, to recommend that the City Council approve the changes
The ban proposed by Bredefeld is separate from Fresno’s existing laws concerning medical marijuana dispensaries, which are prohibited. But passionate testimony from at the council’s June hearing by medical marijuana patients may have softened leaders’ attitudes toward the drug’s medicinal uses. Bredefeld said some council members and the mayor are taking a look at easing the ban on medical dispensaries.
“There are a lot of questions about the medicinal part; there are a lot of anecdotal reports that it helps a lot of people,” Bredefeld said. “We’ll take a look at it; I think the council is going to take it up before the end of the year.”
credit:fresnobee.com
