The City is preparing its rules and regulations for the upcoming legalization of marijuana.
The planning and development department of Lloydminster has laid out its plans on regulating and restricting access to pot when it comes to land use. City Councillor Michael Diachuk says that the presentation touched on a lot of areas the City needs to be paying attention to.
“We talked about land use, restrictions, basically the safety and security of the City and the people within the context that were responsible for looking forward to.”
Being in a Border City, there are two legislation’s that have to be looked at before the City can roll out their guidelines, for example under the Alberta framework, cannabis retailers have to be at least 100 meters away from any parks and schools, whereas Saskatchewan is still determining that distance.
Mayor Gerald Aalbers says that they try to apply all their bylaws across the City no matter the provincial boundaries.
“We went with a 100 meters as an example of distance from schools, health care facilities and things like that for cannabis stores and the associated businesses. I think that’s what we’ve deemed as to be a reasonable distance.”
The plans include possible locations for retail stores including, 52 street as a light industrial zone and 56 street as a medium industrial zone. Commercial areas were also proposed such as 50 street downtown. Aalbers says that they don’t want to completely restrict the locations of marijuana shops into one area of the City.
“One of the challenges you have is how far do you send it because if we send it so far we’ll be limited to locations of maybe three or four blocks total of the entire City, that would be over 200 meters or 300 meters whatever that designation would be.”
The City will continue to watch for new regulations set by both provincial governments.