By Terry Witt – Spotlight Senior Reporter

An ordinance was approved by the Levy County Commission on March 20 legalizing the growing and processing of medical marijuana in Levy County and outlawing medical pot dispensing facilities, but questions were raised about why it includes language governing concentrated commercial farming, chickens and exotic animals.

State law says the county can’t prohibit the growing or processing of medical marijuana, but there is a catch. Local farmers could grow medical pot in agricultural zones (A/RR and F/RR) and could process the pot in an industrial zone, but they would need a state license for a dispensary to do either one.

There are 16 licenses in Florida.

The net effect of the new ordinance is to prohibit medical marijuana from being grown in the unincorporated areas of the county unless someone has a state license for a retail dispensing facility. The ordinance was written by the Development Department and County Attorney Anne Bast Brown. The county commission approved it. There was virtually no input from the public.

Hearings were advertised, but few people attended and almost no one commented on the ordinance.

The county commission was criticized at the March 20 public hearing for including language in the medical marijuana law that didn’t appear to be directly related to the purpose of the ordinance – prohibiting medical pot dispensing facilities from operating in the unincorporated areas of the county. Critics said the title of the ordinance should have warned the public that issues other than medical marijuana were addressed by the ordinance.

Brown said the ordinance clarified definitions and cleaned up redundant (repetitive) language in the Levy County Commission’s code of land use ordinances related to farming and forestry, and she felt the title of the ordinance was adequate to alert members of the public that they would find more than just medical marijuana regulations in the law.
Every ordinance adopted by the county commission has what is known as a title. The title can be as large as a couple hundred words describing the contents of the ordinance. The title for ordinance 2018-004 said the new law would prohibit medical marijuana dispensaries, but the public’s only clue that there might be other issues regulated by the ordinance were the words “and to update other code provisions necessitated thereby.”

Brown was asked by Spotlight why concentrated commercial farming was mentioned in a medical pot ordinance. Concentrated commercial farming deals with issues such as large dairy farms and cattle and pig feedlots. The county’s land development code for big commercial farms regulates concentrated animal feeding operations that could generate odors, flies and groundwater contamination. So why did Ordinance 2018-004 mention concentrated commercial farming, which has nothing to do with the cultivation, processing or dispensing of medical marijuana? Brown provided a long answer.

“That was included because the definition of general farming and forestry had to be amended and the concentrated farming and the keeping of exotic animals had been included and referenced in that earlier definition and it needed to be separated out with its own definition,” Brown said. “It is included in the title in the reference to the updated other code provisions necessitated by the changes to Chapter 50. We had to change the definitions. We had to clear it all up. Otherwise with the way general farming and forestry was, actually you couldn’t even grow crops (inaudible) the way it was worded.”

Spotlight Founder Linda Cooper said the ordinance was misleading to the public. She said if members of the public looked at the medical marijuana ordinance they would have thought medical marijuana was the only issue mentioned. They wouldn’t have been alerted to the other issues regulated by the law.

“I think it’s misleading to the public for this to be touted only as marijuana when you are changing other things, redundant or otherwise,” she said.

Commission Chairman John Meeks defended the wording of the ordinance.

“The only changes I saw were clarifications of definitions that actually made it easier to understand and that I can now have 20 chickens per acre instead of 10,” Meeks said.

Development Department Director Bill Hammond said his office worked jointly with Brown’s office to develop the medical marijuana ordinance.

Brown rejected Cooper’s assertion that there hadn’t been proper public notice because the newspaper advertisement written by the county didn’t accurately portray the contents of the ordinance. Brown responded that there had been countless public hearings for the moratorium on medical marijuana and later on for the ordinance itself.

But Cooper said Brown was missing the point.
“We thought it was about inserting medical marijuana nothing else, but other things were changed,” she said.

Meeks asked Brown what else had been added to the ordinance other than the number of chickens allowed per acre.

“The other change was to add a qualifier to the definition for the exotic animals to put in the code how it had been enforced; the term is keeping of exotic animals, zoos, reptiles, farms and existing animals and we added the word dangerous to qualify exotic; that’s the way it’s been enforced for years – we wanted to bring the code into how it was enforced. We were required to fix that definition, while we were again doing the general farming and forestry definition. That was included in there as well,” Brown said.

Brown added that the definition of concentrated farming was changed, but the regulation of concentrated farming will remain the same.

“We just cleaned up the language,” she said.

The county attorney added that concentrated farming, general farming and forestry, all of which are discussed in the ordinance, were “adequately referenced in the title or Ordinance 2018-004 by the words …“and to update other code provisions necessitated thereby.”

Cooper disagreed. “It was a missed opportunity for the public to have input and that’s what I find offensive,” Cooper said.

Levy County Board of County Commission Regular Meeting March 20, 2018
Posted March 24, 2018