Pubdate: Thu, 30 Aug 2012
Source: Chico News & Review, The (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Chico Community Publishing, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.newsreview.com/chico/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/559

SUPERVISORS SEE THE LIGHT

After Two Failures They're Letting Citizens Draft a Medi-Pot Ordinance

It took a long time-more than a year-but the Butte County Board of 
Supervisors finally has seen the light. After passing a 
medical-marijuana ordinance that voters soundly rejected in June, and 
then coming up with an even worse proposal that ran into a firestorm 
of criticism during a public hearing Tuesday (Aug. 28), the 
supervisors finally got the message.

Heretofore they'd tried to regulate medical-marijuana cultivation 
according to their own lights, which shone only dimly on the notion 
of pot cultivation. Their first ordinance was overly bureaucratic and 
had the fundamental flaw of forbidding anyone from growing plants on 
a parcel smaller than a half-acre. Their second ordinance, modeled on 
one in Kings County, went to the other side, allowing cultivation on 
any size parcel, but requiring that it be done inside a secure, 
ventilated, county-approved structure.

As speakers told the supervisors in no uncertain terms Tuesday (see 
our report on page 9), this was prohibitively expensive for both 
grower and county. The county would have had to beef up its code 
enforcement at a cost of about $1 million a year.

The ordinance was also, as District Attorney Mike Ramsey told the 
board, unconstitutional because it criminalized medi-pot cultivation, 
which is allowed under Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996.

Faced with the reality that both of the ordinances they'd generated 
were duds, the supervisors finally did what numerous people had been 
urging them to do for a long time: They decided to set up an ad-hoc 
committee of representative citizens and county officials to work 
together and come up with an ordinance that met, as much as possible, 
the needs of everyone.

Better late than never. Still, had the board taken this tack from the 
beginning, it could have saved the $50,000 in taxpayers' money it 
cost to put the referendum on the June ballot.

Regardless of how you feel about medical marijuana, you have to 
acknowledge that it's always good when citizens challenge their 
government to do better. That's what happened here, and it was indeed good.
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