POT CO-OP MORATORIUM APPROVED BY COUNCIL

A moratorium on medical marijuana cooperative gardens and
dispensaries was approved on a split vote Tuesday night by the
Paradise Town Council.

Next month the council will host a public hearing on the matter
before it can consider extending the moratorium past 45 days to 10
and a half months. The ban can't last more than two years.

Mayor Alan white was the lone vote against the measure, saying the
moratorium would slow the regulation process too much. One man
supporting marijuana rights Tuesday was Jon Remalia, who came with
his lawyer, Eric Berg, who challenged the town's legal right to
restrict medical marijuana to patients and its right to restrict property use.

Berg said Remalia invested $50,000 into a project to sublet a
basement to marijuana growers and had done all the legal business
moves, but banning such legitimate efforts only penalized law-abiding
citizens, not those that abuse the drug. Remalia's plan is to build
16, 6- by 6-foot cubicles in the basement of the Chin Dynasty
building on Skyway at Wagstaff Road which he is buying and is now in escrow.

He argued that his operation would be safer than the way marijuana is
now grown, with hundreds of collective grow sites in town that
attract negative attention. The underground operation would be built
to code and be extremely secure, he said.

Some of the council said it liked Remalia's idea as a concept,
especially filtering the odorous air out of the grow area, including
White who only wanted to speed up the approval process.

Nearly the whole council said they had fielded complaints about
marijuana odor in the fall as crops ripen. Though a medical marijuana
user, Remalia agreed that the plant smells like a skunk. However,
Remalia said the drug offered relief from seven other prescriptions
he was taking for lung problems.

While there was some talk about the merit of medical marijuana, the
issue wasn't as much about pot as it was about land use, the council
and Town Hall staff said. Development Services Director Craig Baker
said the Town Hall needed more time to study the legal landscape
before regulating dispensaries and co-ops.

The most important consideration was where and how to allow such
operations, not if, he said. White disagreed that the town needed to
study the legal climate of the issue, saying Town Hall has every
legal right to determine where it would allow cooperative grow sites
and non-profit pot shops. He said after the meeting that he preferred
to make sound judgment aside from what others do.

The issue was urgent for the town's consideration as other
neighboring jurisdictions also consider the issue fronting local
governments, Baker said. Town Attorney Dwight Moore said the council
had the legal backing for its decision Tuesday which was to prohibit
"medical marijuana distribution facilities" and "marijuana collectives."

Moore defined a distribution facility as one serving two or more
people that don't live together at the facility. A collective was
defined as a group collectively growing pot together indoors or
outside. Moore said the City of Chico and the county were
entertaining ordinances to restrict the drug. Councilman Tim Titus
said he understood and appreciated medical patients' needs, but said
the decision was a clear message that the town wanted to do things right.

As a former Paradise Unified School District board trustee, he sat in
on many expulsion hearings regarding pot and said it is being abused
in town. He said waiting to make an educated decision was the right
call to protect individual rights. Councilman Joe DiDuca said he
didn't care what people did if it didn't affect their neighbors, but
outdoor grows did generate odor complaints.

"I don't care if you smoke couch stuffing," he said. "But don't let
it affect (others.)"

Vice Mayor Scott Lotter said marijuana dispensaries can negatively
affect neighboring businesses, which the council also has the
responsibility to protect. Town Manager Chuck Rough said medical
marijuana has been legal for 15 years, but has only recently become
the big business that cities are now dealing with. While selling pot
for profit is still illegal, the non-profit status of some places was
questionable, councilman Steve "Woody" Culleton said.