WESTBROOK – City Council enacts six-month moratorium on marijuana dispensaries.
Westbrook won’t see its first medical marijuana dispensary until August at the earliest. The City Council Monday enacted a six-month moratorium on the dispensaries, retroactive to Feb. 1.
The council approved the moratorium unanimously, without any discussion by officials or any comments from the public.
According to City Administrator Jerre Bryant, the purpose of the moratorium is to allow the city time to develop regulations regarding where the dispensaries could be located in Westbrook.
Earlier this month, the council voted to direct the city’s Planning Board and Public Safety Committee to develop those regulations, which ultimately will have to be approved by the council.
Voters in a state referendum in November overwhelmingly approved the licensing of nonprofit medical marijuana dispensaries. During December and January, a 14-member task force, appointed by Gov. John Baldacci, developed recommendations on the implementation of the new state law.
According to Sen. Joseph Brannigan, a member of the task force who represents Portland and part of Westbrook, the governor is currently putting together a legislative bill, which will be handed to the Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee.
Brannigan said he expects the committee, which he chairs, to hold a hearing on the bill by the beginning of March and then make a recommendation to the House and Senate. The Legislative session is slated to end by mid-April, and Brannigan said there should be a law in place by then.
According to Brannigan, the task force’s recommendations were not to limit the number of dispensaries in the state and also left wide open the ability of individual communities to form local zoning regulations. However, he said, those stipulations could be made before the law is enacted.
“It’s in process,” he said. “That could be added.”
City Councilor Dotty Aube said she’d like to see the state law prohibit dispensaries from being located near places children congregate, like day cares.
“I hope whatever they come up with is stringent enough so we don’t have to worry about where they should or shouldn’t be,” she said.
But the fact that the law may not make those restrictions is why the moratorium is important to local officials, like Aube and City Councilor Mike Foley. He said he thinks they shouldn’t be near schools or residences, but instead in commercial or industrial areas.
“I think we need to properly zone it,” Foley said.
The moratorium is meant to give the city time to decide how dispensaries would be regulated, so that if the state law passed first, no one could apply to have a dispensary in Westbrook before local officials enacted their regulations. Other Maine towns and cities, including South Portland, Ellsworth and Brewer, have recently enacted moratoriums on dispensaries, as well.
City Councilor Paul Emery said he doesn’t think dispensaries should be zoned any more restrictively than doctors’ offices.
“If it’s for medical purposes,” he said, “why do you have to come up with two sets of rules?”
Westbrook resident Charlie Wynott, who is in the planning process for opening a dispensary in Westbrook, agrees.
“I hate any limitations whatsoever,” he said.
Wynott has been operating the Maine Medical Marijuana Resource Center for the past two years, currently out of his Cumberland Street home, distributing marijuana to people from all over the state who suffer from AIDS, multiple sclerosis, glaucoma and other debilitating diseases.
Wynott is legally operating as a nonprofit caregiver organization and will be able to continue that operation regardless of the stipulations in the new law.
He said his plans for opening another dispensary in town, in a central location on a bus line, probably won’t be in place until after the moratorium has ended. However, Wynott hopes that his plans aren’t hindered by the local or state regulations.
“It’s all about patient access,” he said. “If they’re going to put it on some back road somewhere it’s not going to work.”
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