In the words of Chadds Ford Township Planning Commission Chairman Craig Huffman, a medical marijuana ordinance is “close” to becoming a reality in Chadds Ford.
“Basically, it sounds like we’re very close. We just need to figure out the distance from residential property,” Huffman said after an hour-long conversation on the ordinance during the March 24 commission meeting. “We might be ready to recommend passage of this in a couple of weeks at our next meeting.”
That meeting is scheduled for April 14.
In Pennsylvania, municipalities must accommodate all legal business activities in their zoning codes. With medical marijuana legal in Pennsylvania, Concord and many other municipalities in the area have already amended their codes for that purpose.
Huffman and his commission members have been working on an ordinance for the past several months, and it’s being written in a manner that could include recreational use should the state legislature pass a law legalizing recreational adult use.
“We need to be forward-looking on what might be coming next,” Huffman said in January, referring to possible full legalization.
As has been explained previously, without an ordinance controlling where legal cannabis may be sold — for either medical or recreational use — a municipality would have little control over where such a business could be located.
The draft of the Chadds Ford ordinance under discussion calls for dispensaries being located in the B-1 Business District. There are only a couple of areas zoned that way, and they are along the Route 202 corridor, north of Route 1. One is north of State Farm drive and the other is north of Oakland Road.
Chadds Ford already allows for medical marijuana dispensaries in the B-Business Zoning District as a pharmaceutical use.
But much of the discussion focused on how close some of those districts are to residential districts and how far away dispensaries should be from homes. That is yet to be resolved.
“We’re handicapped by having a thin business district,” said commission member Timotha Trigg.
However, the ordinance does specify that a dispensary may not be closer than 1,000 feet from a school, daycare center, place of worship, playground, public park or any business whose primary clientele are minors.
There was also discussion regarding perimeter fencing between dispensaries and residential districts, whether those fences should be six or eight feet high, and whether they should be chain link fences or privacy fences.
Other areas of the discussion centered on setting a limit on how large, in terms of how many square feet, a dispensary may be. Under consideration were sizes ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 square feet, the size of some banks.
Supervisors’ Vice-Chairman Samantha Reiner, who was sitting in on the meeting conducted via Zoom, said 5,000 feet isn’t a bad number to plug into the draft, then we could get an actual measurement later. Reiner said she and others sat in on a call with West Goshen Township where a dispensary went into a former bank location.
“We don’t want to make this too small,” she said. “You don’t have to spend too much time on this [the size] because between now and the time it goes to the board and then comes back to you to approve the final form, we’ll be able to plug the real number in.”
The commission will later begin a discussion on an ordinance regarding growing marijuana for the legal dispensaries.
Other business
Lou Colagreco, the attorney representing Mercedes-Benz of West Chester told commission members that his client is not yet ready to ask for final land development approval. The dealership wants to open up on the property between Route 202 and Oakland Road. Supervisors already gave their conditional use approval for the project, but the dealership still needs approval for the engineered plan.
Colagreco said there are still a few items that need work, but that his client will be ready to ask for the recommendation at the April 14 meeting.
About Rich Schwartzman
Rich Schwartzman has been reporting on events in the greater Chadds Ford area since September 2001 when he became the founding editor of The Chadds Ford Post. In April 2009 he became managing editor of ChaddsFordLive. He is also an award-winning photographer.
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