The Mitchell City Council last night tabled variance requests from three medical cannabis dispensaries so the city zoning ordinance could be revisited and likely altered. City Attorney Justin Johnson says the ordinance has created some unintended results.
“The language in the ordinance that we have discussing these buffer zones says that you calculate the distance for those from property line to property line, and you exclude the right-of-way,” said Johnson. “The strict interpretation of that language can lead to some absurd and kind of unintended results.” He added that as they started running into more of those results, “we started thinking about how can we come up with a way to interpret this that is still going to make sense and preserve the original intent when the ordinance was originally adopted?”
He says they weighed different alternatives, with tabling the variances and rewriting the ordinance being the fairest. He says the right-of-way language may be removed, and the strict distances would be used.
The three medical cannabis dispensaries requesting variances were FSST Pharms, DLC LLC, and Genesis Farms LLC.