Cannabis shops may be free to open next to each other in Lake Country
Council mulls abandoning proposed minimum separation
Future pot shops could be located side by side if Lake Country abandons a proposed one-kilometre minimum separation.
Council members this week signalled their intent to drop the restriction, allowing pot shops in much of the Main Street commercial district, as well as the Turtle Bay Crossing strip mall.
Having several pot shops in a relatively compact area, Mayor James Baker suggests, might make the neighbourhood into a bit of a destination, much as groupings of wineries do on the Naramata Bench or along Boucherie Road in West Kelowna.
“We do want to see the marijuana dispensaries in commercial areas rather than taking up agricultural land,” Baker said Wednesday.
The C-1 Town Centre commercial zone stretches just over one kilometre along Main Street in Winfield. Much of it is currently vacant, although the road was opened in the fall of 2008 as an alternative shopping and business alternative to the Highway 97 corridor.
If council had stuck with the onekilometre separation idea proposed by town staff, the practical result would have been a limit of one or two pot shops in the Main Street area.
However, with the removal of the one-kilometre buffer, pot shops could open “beside each other” in the Main Street corridor, so long as they were at least 400 metres from daycares and schools, Jamie McEwan, Lake Country’s community development manager, wrote in an email.
A public hearing on Lake Country’s proposed pot shop rules will be held July 17.
With marijuana to become legal this October, municipalities are busy crafting rules on where pot shops will be allowed to open.
The City of Kelowna currently has under consideration a staff proposal to explicitly prevent pot shops from opening anywhere on Bernard Avenue, the downtown’s main commercial street.
It would be a mistake to allow many pot shops along streets like Bernard with high pedestrian traffic, Coun. Luke Stack said earlier this year.
“I think having six cannabis locations on Bernard would change the character of the street,” he said at the April 9 council meeting.
However, at the same meeting, Stack said he would be open to allowing several pot shops in close proximity elsewhere.
“You could go to the toking district,” Stack said, adding with a laugh that he wasn’t sure how up-todate his term was for smoking pot.
The idea of specific pot-shop exclusion zones was sent out for discussion by groups such as the Kelowna Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown Kelowna Association. The issue has not returned to council since April.