MAYORS TALK POT POTENTIAL
Municipalities see new opportunities in cannabis
If Health Canada approves the licences, Kingsville will likely be the home of 12 new large commercial cannabis growing operations in the near future.
Mayor Nelson Santos said Friday that council has already approved zoning applications for nine sites to grow medical cannabis, with three more in the queue. Those 12 sites could mean even more than a dozen greenhouses, depending on the acreage of each one, he said. “It’s a new industry for us and we’re trying to identify the concerns that are coming from our community, but also recognizing that is part of the future of our economic development,” said Santos. He made the comments Friday at Breakfast with the Mayors 2019, hosted by the Leamington District Chamber of Commerce. Santos and Leamington’s new mayor, Hilda MacDonald, gave speeches at the gathering. Both were peppered with questions from reporters about cannabis following their speeches.
“I truly believe we’re on the cusp of a great opportunity,” said MacDonald, whose town was the first in Essex County to opt in for having private cannabis retail stores. Despite that, she said marijuana will still be secondary to the other food-focused greenhouse operations.
“I imagine it’s going to be huge,” said MacDonald, who told the crowd her top priority is a new sewer line to service greenhouse and industrial sectors north of town.
“We always eat, though. So produce, vegetables — 100 per cent of the people eat 100 per cent of the time. One hundred per cent of the people will not use cannabis.” In Kingsville, said Santos, a site plan has already been approved at Mucci Farms for one of the 12 operations. He said the next step is Health Canada approval. “We’ll see up to 20 acres potentially built in the next year, year and a half depending on their approvals,” said Santos.
The 12 applications would account for at least 100 acres, he said. “After those 12 are dealt with, we’re putting a freeze on any future development so that we can actually see this evolve,” said Santos. “We can see what other challenges may happen.”
Both mayors said dealing with the smell and lighting from cannabis greenhouses are among the challenges.
“We’ve incorporated that into our bylaws and incorporated into site plans,” said Santos.
“The greenhouse growers know they need to control the smell on site and they need to keep the light, maintaining our night skies so we’re not invading the night skies.” There haven’t been a lot of Leamington residents concerned about the light and smell issue, said MacDonald, but enough that it must be dealt with.
“It may be a matter of turning the lights on not when people are trying to fall asleep,” she said. “It might be turning them on at two in the morning. All of those things, we can solve them with conversation. We may have to put some rules and regulations into place but it is not prohibitive.
“We can work on that.”