After a four-hour meeting as dramatic as it was long, Juneau\u2019s Planning Commission decided Tuesday night to forward an ordinance establishing regulations for marijuana businesses to the full Assembly for consideration.<\/p>\n
Minutes, if not seconds, after commission chair Nicole Grewe called the meeting to order, commissioner Bill Peters moved to suspend the rules in order to \u201caddress her role as chair of the planning commission.\u201d The conversation Peters wanted to have stemmed from the Feb. 9 commission meeting, at which he accused Grewe of allowing off-topic public comment and failing to disclose a potential conflict of interest.<\/p>\n
Peters\u2019 motion failed with a 5\u20134 vote, one vote shy of the required two-thirds vote. Though the commission didn\u2019t get to discuss Grewe\u2019s position as chair as Peters might have hoped, the matter didn\u2019t die with his motion.<\/p>\n
Juneau resident Dixie Hood revived the matter immediately after Grewe opened the public comment period for non-agenda items.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s totally inappropriate and unethical for her to continue to chair the Planning Commission and even to be a member of the Planning Commission,\u201d Hood said of Grewe. She called for both the Assembly and Community Development Director Rob Steedle to consider ousting Grewe from her position after she allowed her husband to testify at the commission\u2019s last meeting.<\/p>\n
Later in the meeting, before the commission started discussing the marijuana ordinance, Grewe addressed the conflict accusations leveled against her. She asked her husband, Todd Boris, to stand up and she introduced him to everybody in the Assembly chambers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI should\u2019ve mentioned that at the time, and I didn\u2019t,\u201d she said explaining how she should handled his Feb. 9 public testimony, which lasted about 25 minutes.<\/p>\n
She also explained that she \u201chad no intention in participating\u201d in the hearing of a conditional use permit for the Fireweed Factory, a proposed marijuana cultivation facility less than 500 feet from Grewe\u2019s home.<\/p>\n
She did, however, say that she felt able to participate in the discussion regarding the ordinance before the commission \u201cin a fair and balanced manner.\u201d In accordance with rules of order, it fell to commission vice chair Ben Haight to decide whether Grewe could participate in discussion regarding the ordinance.<\/p>\n
Haight, who took over briefly as commission chair to oversee the ordinance discussion, allowed Grewe to participate, but not before asking his peers for their input.<\/p>\n
\u201cTransparency, I think, is really the key word that we want to speak to in this situation,\u201d Peters said before expressing his discontent with Grewe\u2019s handling of public comment for the second time in two meetings. He said that the three-minute limit Grewe imposed on members of the public at Tuesday\u2019s meeting was \u201cin grave conflict to the way she handled the last meeting\u201d at which commenters were not limited.<\/p>\n
Time limits or not, the public testimony during Tuesday\u2019s meeting made the hour-and-a-half public participation period of the Feb. 9 meeting look tame.<\/p>\n
The North Douglas neighborhood crew of about six people, all of whom oppose any commercial marijuana cultivation in residential zones, showed up and had bolstered its numbers. Tuesday was the fourth public meeting in a row \u2014 two Assembly meetings and two Planning Commission meetings \u2014 at which the group has testified. And now the group\u2019s members have a petition of about 80 signatures backing them, each member told the commission.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that we can all agree that neighborhoods and industry are not compatible,\u201d North Douglas resident Fred Hiltner said.<\/p>\n
Merry Ellefson, another North Douglas resident, called for a moratorium on conditional use permits in all residential areas until the city creates a comprehensive neighborhood plan for North Douglas. She was not alone in this request. Toward the end of the meeting Grewe, too, asked whether the commission should impose such a moratorium. Her question went unanswered, though.<\/p>\n
Hiltner et al. weren\u2019t the only interested group to testify. Members of Juneau\u2019s commercial cannabis community spoke during the public participation portion of the meeting. One commenter used more than words to make a point.<\/p>\n
In order to dispel the \u201cfear-based message\u201d of the commenters in Hiltner\u2019s camp, Ben Wilcox, a prospective marijuana business owner, drank the fertilizer he hopes to use growing his plants.<\/p>\n
\u201cUgh, that tastes like crap,\u201d Wilcox said, grimacing after taking a swig from the fertilizer bottle as members of the public laughed. \u201cThat does taste bad.\u201d<\/p>\n
But as bad as the fertilizer might have been, the bad taste in Wilcox\u2019 mouth came from the \u201clast-minute\u201d commenters who are now looking to change the zoning rules for marijuana businesses, which the Assembly set in November.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been to dozens of these meetings,\u201d Wilcox said, acknowledging that other members of the cannabis community have as well. \u201cWe have been upfront, open and honest about our intentions since the beginning unlike our opposition. Why weren\u2019t they here working with us?\u201d<\/p>\n
The full Assembly will now discuss and eventually pass some version of the ordinance that moved out of the Planning Commission Tuesday. It has not been scheduled for public hearing at this point, but it is unlikely the ordinance will make it out of the Assembly before April due to procedural order.<\/p>\n
After a four-hour meeting as dramatic as it was long, Juneau\u2019s Planning Commission decided Tuesday night to forward an ordinance establishing regulations for marijuana businesses to the full Assembly for consideration. Minutes, if not seconds, after commission chair Nicole Grewe called the meeting to order, commissioner Bill Peters moved to suspend the rules in order […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-33502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33502"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=33502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}