MIDDLETOWN, Ohio — Middletown City Council abruptly reversed course and rejected an emergency extension of their moratorium on recreational marijuana businesses in town limits Tuesday in a 3-2 vote clearing the path for the industry to make inroads.
The state will begin accepting applications for recreational marijuana business licenses Friday.
An Ohio State University study found 56 municipalities across the state have issued some form of ban or moratorium on recreational marijuana as of May 31.
Middletown councilman Steve West said as long as he's on council Middletown would not be one of them.
"I'm at a point right now where I'm not going to support a moratorium for anything when it comes to marijuana. Period," West said.
According to David Waxman, an attorney with the McGlinchey Stafford law group, the first round of business applications accepted by Ohio's Department of Cannabis Control would only be available to already existing medical dispensaries.
"The reason they're doing this is, number one, it gets things out faster," he said.
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The first phase's approval of existing businesses puts places like Middletown behind others. The city already made medical marijuana dispensaries illegal in city limits.
"Middletown has not done anything to even sort of prepare us for medicinal," West said. "We can wait all we want, knock it all out in one fell swoop, but good god look at all the tax money we've missed out on."
Waxman said placing a temporary moratorium in a city, as Middletown did in December, makes sense. He said many towns put the breaks on allowing the businesses to take root to ensure they've got proper zoning laws, rules and regulations in place as recreational marijuana is new to Ohio code.
Middletown council argued ahead of the vote that it would be wise to correct the town's code to ensure they can control where the businesses can establish before lifting a moratorium.
"It's a legitimate concern," Waxman said.
On the other hand, Waxman said leaving a moratorium in place too long could hurt applicants when the general public gets a shot to apply.
He said there are only going to be 50 dispensary licenses split between districts laid out by the DCC. Applications, Waxman said, would be highly competitive.
"If they want to get a license they may have to go elsewhere, which is going to make things difficult," he said.
Middletown's existing moratorium will expire on June 16, and multiple council members, including Mayor Elizabeth Slamka, indicated they would consider repealing the ban on medical dispensaries at a meeting in the near future.
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