POT-ZONE PLAN HITS ROADBLOCK
Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to shrink the downtown “exclusion zone” to a sliver and relax zoning requirements for cannabis businesses all over Chicago hit a roadblock Tuesday, stalling efforts to help minorities who have been shut out of the so-called “green rush.”
The City Council had been poised to streamline the zoning process to attract an avalanche of “social equity” applicants — a designation created by the state to try to diversify the lily-white weed industry.
But Aldermen Anthony Beale (9th) and Ray Lopez (15th), Lightfoot’s two most outspoken Council critics, used a parliamentary maneuver to postpone the vote until the next City Council meeting.
Lightfoot promptly declared she would call for that vote at Monday’s Council meeting, when she plans to present her 2022 budget and deliver her annual budget address.
Lightfoot introduced the sweeping zoning changes in July, only to make changes to appease aldermen determined to give minorities a piece of the lucrative pie.
The changes were not enough to satisfy Beale.
Arguing that “over 40%” of social equity applicants are “fronts” and actually white-owned, Beale urged his colleagues to keep Chicago’s onerous zoning restrictions in place until the statecreated designation truly benefits Blacks and Hispanics.
“We should opt out until they fix this. You have social equity people that are selling their licenses. They’re fronts. Until that process is vetted, we’re still going down the wrong path when we’re trying to obtain the goal of having people of color be part of the cannabis industry,” Beale told the SunTimes before the meeting.
“Why should we continue to give people that are not of color cannabis licenses while we’re trying to fix the process?”
In addition to opening up far more properties for cannabis operators to call home, the mayor’s plan would eliminate the city’s seven cannabis zones and their underlying license caps and do away with a related zoning lottery.
It would most notably open up a large portion of the downtown area to weed sales, hacking away at an “exclusion zone” Lightfoot previously fought for and defended.
“We’re not turning Michigan Avenue into pot paradise,” Lightfoot declared in January on the day Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) introduced an ordinance that would have nixed the zone altogether.
The downtown exclusion zone currently stretches from Division Street to the north, Van Buren to the south and Lake Michigan to the east. The western boundary is State Street in River North and south branch of the river in the Loop.
The new proposal would cut off sales from Division to Van Buren between State and Michigan, with the no-pot zone extending to 16th Street on Michigan. Sales would also be prohibited from Ohio to Illinois streets between Michigan and Navy Pier.
Reilly said his “preference” would have been to “eliminate the exclusion zone altogether.” But he called the new, narrower exclusion zone a “fair compromise,” noting Lightfoot “may have preferred to expand it.”
“The city grossly discounted the revenue upside from local cannabis taxes when we first had this debate. Now that we’ve seen the potential, it’s time to embrace this industry and ensure taxpayers reap the benefits,” Reilly wrote in an email to the Sun-Times.