OAKDALE RULES OUT MEDICAL MARIJUANA DISPENSARIES

OAKDALE -- Fearing the city could become a magnet for medical
marijuana dispensaries, and the criminal element the police chief
says comes with them, the City Council has voted 4-0 to ban the businesses.

Police Chief Marty West said Oakdale joins Modesto, Riverbank, Ceres
and Turlock in banning dispensaries.

The city hasn't received a request to open a dispensary, West noted.
It would only be a matter of time before a request arrived, he said,
because of the bans in neighboring cities.

West said dispensaries would damage Oakdale's quality of life by
inviting criminals, vagrants and other bad elements into the city in
hopes of selling, buying or in some other way getting a piece of the
marijuana business.

He cited reams of reports from law enforcement across the state
detailing assaults, robberies and home invasions, all of which he
attributed to the presence of medical marijuana dispensaries.

Assaults and robberies also occur near bars and liquor stores, but
West added that dispensing marijuana violates federal law. State law
allows residents with medical marijuana cards to buy and consume it,
but West said federal law trumps state law.

While a hot topic in some cities, the issue virtually went without
notice in Oakdale. No one spoke for or against the proposal during
Monday's public hearing.

The council also agreed to pay $20,364 to McPhee Masonry of Oakdale
to fix a retaining wall on a closed stretch of J Street. McPhee built
the wall during the J Street extension and the city accepted it in
2006, but now it's tilting and could topple.

A lack of attentiveness is being blamed for the extent of the damage.
Because the extension never has opened, the city said, there was no
daily observation of the wall, hence no one to notice the lean.

The extension, behind Oak Valley Hospital, was finished in October
2006. Oak Valley asked that the road stay closed so it could use the
area to store construction material, City Manager Steve Hallam said,
and has returned every six months to ask the council to keep it
closed. The council has OK'd each request.

If open, the J Street extension would provide a shorter route to the
hospital, high school and downtown businesses for residents in the
Bridle Ridge subdivision, among other benefits.

There is no record of the city inspecting it from October 2006 to
November 2007 -- McPhee's one-year warranty lapsed in October 2007 --
when a contractor working for the hospital told the city that the
wall was leaning.

The city never measured the wall's original height and lean, so it
didn't know if the lean was missed in the original inspection or if
this was a new problem.

Poor drainage is a possible culprit. As water collected behind the
wall, instead of being carried away in a ditch, the soil swelled.
That could have caused the wall to lean, the city theorized.