The council voted 4-3 in June 2012 to ban medical marijuana collective gardens<\/a>. Thomas, Boyce, Ralph and Deborah Ranniger approved the ban. Dennis Higgins, Elizabeth Albertson and Jamie Perry were against it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\nMasse, the attorney for Kealy, told the committee that a marijuana production plant would be a good fit with all of the other Kent warehouses in the valley. She said the plant would benefit the city.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“Chris and his team are prepared to invest $20 million in that kind of business here and to offer potentially dozens, and if extremely successful, maybe over 100 jobs,” Masse said. “It would contribute to your B&O (business and occupation) tax and contribute to your property tax base with the value of the improvement. We ask that you consider it the way you consider other manufacturing.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Thomas, who earlier in the meeting bought up the idea of a permanent ban rather than just six months, responded to Masse’s comments about comparing marijuana production to other products made in Kent.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“The other manufacturing processing plants there is one major difference, those are all legal,” Thomas said. “Right now federally it (marijuana) is still against the law. We have a problem. This council is split but this council probably will move for a total ban if possible and the next council an even stronger ban.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“This is not a friendly place to locate this business. I’m sorry to tell you this.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Kealy and Masse plan to return Tuesday night to City Hall to address the full council with the hope they can persuade at least four members to hold off on the six-month moratorium.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chris Kealy wants to give the Kent City Council another option as it prepares to adopt a six-month moratorium against recreational marijuana businesses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-15616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15616"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15616"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=15616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}