Kent City Council committee passes recreational marijuana business ban

A Kent City Council committee agreed with the city’s Land Use and Planning Board to ban recreational marijuana businesses.

The council’s Economic and Community Development Committee voted 2-1 on Monday to agree with the land use board’s recommendation in June to not allow marijuana retail, production or processing facilities in Kent.

Council members Jim Berrios and Bill Boyce voted in favor of the ban. Dennis Higgins opposed it. The full, seven-member council is expected to consider the ban on Oct. 7 when it could pass an ordinance against recreational marijuana businesses operating in the city. Kent currently has a moratorium against the businesses that expires in November.

“I do need to respectfully disagree with the outcome of their process,” Higgins said about the land use board’s recommendation. “Kent is the sixth largest city in Washington and 56 percent of the people in Kent voted in favor of Initiative 502. I think the 120,000 people of Kent shouldn’t have to go to Tukwila (or other cities). Most of the cities around us have not banned it.”

Higgins continues to be the only council member to support recreational marijuana businesses being allowed to open in the city. Voters statewide passed I-502 in 2012 to allow such businesses to open. State Attorney General Bob Ferguson issued an opinion that local jurisdictions have the right to ban the businesses.

“I think the policies of the prohibition of marijuana have pretty clearly failed across the United States and that’s what we are looking to change here,” Higgins said. “I say that as someone who doesn’t like marijuana personally, but I can’t ignore the evidence that what we’ve been doing just isn’t working. When we say we’re not going to allow it seems like more head in the sand type of behavior.”

Berrios said because neighboring cities (Renton, Covington, Des Moines) allow the businesses it makes it easier for Kent to ban them.

“The impact on our citizens is minimized because we have cities that have jumped forward and said, ‘we’re going to do it,’ that are surrounding us,” Berrios said. “I’m not comfortable with those unanswered questions being out there and not having a better understanding of what the potential impacts are.”

Berrios wants the council to wait a year or two before jumping on the marijuana business bandwagon.

“As we’ve gone through this process – and it’s been a long process – there’s a lot to consider,” Berrios said. “The will of the people in terms of the vote, I don’t know how many Kent people voted for it. But when we look at all of this, there is still a lot of unanswered questions. There is the issues of consideration of potential impacts – the odor, safety, crime and impacts of surrounding land use issues. As this body looks at what we are up against, if it chooses to disallow it, we could come back later and allow.”

City staff recommended to the land use board and council that it could allow the marijuana businesses in certain parts of Kent through zoning. The first retail stores in the state opened in July.

Boyce agreed with Berrios that it’s best for Kent to keep waiting before allowing marijuana stores and facilities.

“We have debated this thing for a few years,” Boyce said. “There is a lot of unknowns in the state with the production and the smell and what goes on in retail and what might be generated with crime. That is the unknown and we probably won’t know that until one or two years down the road when we have some data.”

Kent is the largest city in the state to ban recreational marijuana businesses. The state’s largest cities of Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, Vancouver and Bellevue allow such businesses through zoning regulations.