Pasco council takes back its vote on retail cannabis stores. Here’s why
The Pasco City Council is going back to the drawing board on how to lift its citywide ban on retail marijuana stores.
In a 4-2 vote this week, the council walked back a plan for an ordinance that would have allowed pot shops in industrial zones with special use permits.
Councilmen Pete Serrano and David Milne voted against rescinding the plan.
Other council members said they need more time to better study the options on the table and for more research on the potential impacts on nearby neighborhoods.
Serrano again suggested putting the issue to residents by way of a special election.
More discussion is planned for the March 6 council meeting.
In recent months, hundreds of residents and business owners have chimed in on the topic. Opinions have run the gamut, with many for and against.
“The further this goes on, the more clear it is that people are just not willing to stand by us when we make a decision. They’re not allowing us to make that decision,” Councilman Joseph Campos told the city council before Tuesday’s vote. “I’ve heard both sides – I’m focused on are you for it or are you against it. And there’s only one way to figure this out.”
The proposal to allow retail cannabis in industrial zones was also scrutinized by longtime Pasco resident Dallas Barnes, who called the choice “blatantly discriminatory” in a Tri-City Herald letter to the editor.
Mayor Pro-Tem Craig Maloney read aloud parts of Barnes’ letter, saying that it hit him “very deeply.”
Nearly all 8,100 acres of the city’s industrial zoning lies in east Pasco, a historically Black section of town that had previously seen a generation of segregation and “civic contempt,” Barnes wrote.
“As such, their majority vote continues to stigmatize east Pasco in its historical ‘Apartheid-like’ manner,” he wrote.
“At a recent Pasco city meeting, one official characterized east Pasco as accommodating for cannabis sales because of its, ‘industrial zoning, loud noises, junkyards, truck traffic and bad odors….’ Not mentioned were the foundational causes and lingering consequences of governmental decisions that included the segregation of blacks, industrial waste dumping, World War II prisoners and tolerance of vice activities due to civic contempt,” he continued.
After reading the letter, Maloney said, “If you take a map of our industrial zones and commercial zones that we were considering, and you overlay a map of our most impoverished citizens and residents, you’ll note that they’re virtually the same.”
He said they need better understand of what the implications would be for east Pasco.
Debate over lifting Pasco’s ban on retail cannabis has been ongoing for years, though this most recent discussion has been going on for nearly seven months.
It was sparked by a proposal from David Morgan, a Spokane business owner, who wants to open a store in downtown Pasco.
Still, it appears likely that Pasco will be the first city government in the Tri-Cities to lift its ban on retail cannabis — the question is where.
