'STUCK IN LEGALISM'

To watch the City Council thrash and gnash over medical marijuana
cultivation in the downtown area last week was more than a little bit
harrowing, as it flirted with making the same mistake
well-intentioned but wayward leaders do when things don't go
according to plan -- they throw out the plan.

It's perfectly understandable that the council and many citizens
would want to maintain the status quo, with two, going on three,
industrial-scale grows providing medicine and tax revenue from
otherwise-unused facilities. Especially since these businesses went
ahead with large-scale installations in good faith and with no
indication that they were running afoul of City regs.

The finger-pointing over that can get underway once all the appeals
are exhausted. For now, though, one lesson to be learned is that in a
world of difficult choices, the council was right to respect the
painstaking work of its citizens, staff and Planning Commission in
creating the General Plan 2020 and in defining it when push comes to
shove, as occurred when the Planco ruled that agriculture, be it
flower bulbs or marijuana buds, is not what was intended.

Some of the dispensary advocates presented a false choice: turn the
downtown into an industrial marijuana factory or support grow houses
that wreck neighborhoods and make contaminated pot. Patients would be
poisoned with this impure substance, and it would be the City's fault.

The grow houses will grow and sell regardless of the dispensaries.
And the dispensaries still can grow in industrial or agricultural
zones, as the Planning Commission and Community Development
department made plain.

In the 1970s, the City Council helped put Arcata on a sustainable
financial footing with establishment of Aldergrove Industrial Park.
This has enabled Arcata to weather financial storms and economic
fluctuations, for example in the timber and fishing industries, while
other communities are hit hard by the changing winds.

Now, the 2008 City Council came close to cementing Arcata's
dependence on a highly volatile, quasi-legal tax resource -- Big
Marijuana. This phenomenon is in a transitory phase -- it's all based
on a cockamamie patchwork of federal and state laws and gray legal
areas, and the DEA could close it all down at any moment. This is
what we should base Arcata's tax revenue stream on?

Without some sort of ceiling on this phenomenon, and given the hugely
lucrative nature of the industry, more downtown economic
infrastructure could be consumed by this temporary cash cow monolith.
When it goes away, then what?

It was expediency -- the desire to end-run troublesome but carefully
developed laws -- that compelled the Bush Administration to simply
nullify carefully-wrought Roadless Area Rules in our national
forests. Thankfully, the courts shot that down. And then there's the
administration's infamous Torture Memo, which not only justified
heinous, non-productive acts but set our country back in ways we are
just beginning to realize. All from trying to short-circuit the law
of the land.

When a councilmember lamented that Arcata might be "stuck in
legalism," it offered a heart-stopping resonance with Bush's uglier,
process-be-damned urges. Obviously, the scale of these offenses is
vastly different, but the same impulse plays out in ways as trivial
but troubling as blowing stop signs, parking in spaces reserved for
the handicapped and letting your dog take a dump on the Plaza.

And the point is the same: either make rules you're serious about
with the kinds of open public processes that brought about the
General Plan, or change the law to reflect reality. But don't just
throw the backbone of our social contract aside willy-nilly whenever
expediency calls.