City Council forbids commercial marijuana

Come Jan. 1, all marijuana businesses within Chico will not be operating in accordance to city law.

In a 4-3 vote on Oct. 17, the City Council forbade commercial marijuana licenses from being issued in Chico. This was part of an ordinance which forbids outdoor cultivation of marijuana but allowed for indoor growing with a permit.

The ordinance, which was drafted in March, is intended to combine all medical and recreational zoning laws into one. The city already had zoning laws for medical marijuana cultivation. But Proposition 64 introduced laws for recreational use, so the city had to update current marijuana ordinances.

Proposition 64 is a detailed 62-page initiative which writes hundreds of marijuana related provisions into state law, but in summary it is intended to do four main things:

64 also puts into place marijuana business licenses, those licenses will be issued starting Jan. 1.

But the law also allows local municipalities to block access to licenses in their jurisdiction. This is what the Council has done.

Proponents

At the Oct. 17 meeting city officials and a few residents spoke in favor of restricting outdoor growing and commercial marijuana businesses. One city resident said she’s against outdoor growing due to the smell.

“I live next to people who grow marijuana and it smells like I live next to a skunk farm all the time, there’s not even like a fermenting period or something,” said Chico resident, Polly Bisaga. “it’s just constant and it’s just really really miserable and it would solve sort of all of my complaints if you made people grow it inside.”

Mayor Sean Morgan brought up statistics from Colorado around the black market in the Oct. 17 meeting.

"So I have two points of clarification. One is to the comment that marijuana has never killed anybody,” said Mayor Morgan. “I’ve got a nifty executive summary here, thank you Chief O’Brien, about the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and the impact and marijuana related traffic deaths increasing 66 percent since the time Colorado legalized it, so I just thought it was important to point out."

Law enforcement testified that outside grows attract a lot of attention and crime.

“Anytime you have something that is highly sought after commodity it’s going to draw attention. It smells like skunk." said Chico Police Commander Billy Aldridge, "Crimes of violence is typically what we see whenever there’s drugs related to crime, in the scenario of an outdoor grow you’re going to have people that want to defend their property and people that are gonna try to get it. That usually leads to someone getting injured in one fashion or another.”

"One of the things they have seen in other states where marijuana has been legalized and made commercially available, is that the black market still remains," said Chico Police Chief Mike O'Brien.

He added that the Trump administration may decide to enforce federal law which conflicts with 64.

Opponents

Legalization advocates have another view.

Mark Stemen, a professor at Chico State, cited a report released by Dr. Evan Mills, energy research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore lab titled Carbon footprint of indoor cannabis production.

In it, Mills writes that it takes 13,000 kilowatt per growing cycle to power a plot, four feet by four feet by eight feet (around the same size of the legal limit an individual can grow.) Stemen said growing indoors would eliminate the energy savings that Chico Sustainability worked hard to achieve during its Million Watt Challenge. The Million Watt Challenge is a community effort to save power with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“If they were to grow 50 square feet, which is the legal limit in Butte County, and 125 people did that, that would be 975,000 watts, almost a million watts, so in other words, by them passing this ordinance, 125 people grow, all our energy savings just go up in smoke,” said Stemen.

At the Oct. 17 council meeting Councilmember Randall Stone explained why he wouldn’t be supporting the ordinance, explaining that the high power use might become a fire safety hazard.

“The places where we’re gonna have a lot of marijuana grows where we already have a lot of marijuana grows are in our older neighborhoods those are hundred year old homes, stick built, do not have modern fire suppression systems. . .” said Councilmember Stone. “. . . Now we’re gonna add systems that produce 13,000 kilowatts per quarter roughly, for these indoor grows in exactly the fire sensitive sections of our community.”

Others say that limiting access to indoor grows only is a disservice to citizens of Chico.

“Grow your own is not patient access or citizen access, you have to know how to grow, you have to know what you’re gonna grow,” said Jessica MacKenzie, executive director of Island Cannabis Farmers Association. “and more perhaps relevant is that, if I decide that I want to cook spaghetti tomorrow night I want to be able to go to the store and buy spaghetti sauce. I don’t want to have to go plant a tomato plant. There is a sense of immediacy.”

MacKenzie explained that less than 50 percent of dispensary products are flowered. The rest, she said, are a variety of other products like ointments, balms, oils, and tinctures.

“Me growing in my, even if I’m growing in a greenhouse inside, that doesn’t necessarily give me that, the only thing that I can do with that that I know how to do is smoke it, what if I don’t want to smoke it, what if I don’t want to smoke anything, what if I want to ingest it in some other form?” said MacKenzie. “Do you want me having a lab in my kitchen? Do you want me doing extracts in my kitchen? You do not.”

Because it is a product, she said, you want professionals growing, processing, and manufacturing it.

Others say restricting commercial use is pointless because people will always find a way around it.

“While they ban dispensaries and delivery services, people will still be delivering to the city of Chico, because they don’t actually have the authority to ban deliveries to the city of chico because the public roads aren’t under their purview,” said Evin Sanders, “so as soon as I walk outside the city limits and open a new dispensary, I’m back to being legal.”

Here all the public comments at the Oct. 17 Council Meeting: