Council OKs plans for Elgin’s 1st pot dispensary
High Haven Cannabis won Elgin City Council approval this week to be the city’s first recreational use marijuana dispensary despite concerns about insufficient parking and increased traffic from other tenants of their Randall Road strip mall.
The council voted 4-2 to approve the dispensary’s conditional use permit request, with Mayor David Kaptain and Councilman Toby Shaw voting against it and Councilman Steve Thoren abstaining. Councilman John Steffen wasn’t present.
A final vote will be taken at the next council meeting.
“It is an honor to be the first dispensary petition in Elgin,” High Haven CEO Mahja Sulemanjee-Bortocek said.
The company met every qualification for a conditional use permit for the store it wants to open at 353-355 S. Randall Road, Sulemanjee-Bortocek said, and did multiple counts to ensure there was enough parking.
In “every situation we found there is plenty of parking for us as a business. It would be detrimental for us if there wasn’t,” she said.
High Haven is a social equity applicant for a state cannabis license. The woman-led, minority-owned cannabis company sued the state over its social equity application process and ultimately received five licenses last fall.
Elgin will be its first dispensary in the state.
The company plans to spend $700,000 remodeling the interior of the store so the 3,200-square-foot space meets state’s standards for an adult-use cannabis business.
Its hours will be 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, with two security guards on-site while it’s open, said Marc Mylott, Elgin’s director of community development. There will be no more than three sales associates working at any one time and, according to High Haven estimates, most customers will spend 10 to 20 minutes at the store.
Per city codes, the shopping center is required to have 100 parking spaces on the property, but the location only has 54. High Haven asked for a variance, something other tenants opposed and was cited by the council members who voted against it.
“I want to stick to the facts,” said Chris Keller, who owns Top Shelf Cards in the same strip mall. “This is not a referendum on marijuana. This is not whether a dispensary is good or bad for a city. It’s not about people that (go to) these (dispensaries). This is about common sense.”
It made sense to give the nearby Dunkin’ a parking variance because most of its business is via its drive-thru lane, Keller said, but “how do you make sense of giving an exclusion to a dispensary, which is known to bring more traffic?”
Additionally, city ordinances say that when considering an exception to parking regulations, the business should be suitable, be a good fit for the area and have a customer base that won’t exceed existing park spaces, he said. He disputed High Haven’s traffic count and asked the city to require a professional study be done by a third party.