Park Avenue Cannabis store proposal gains momentum from city's referral process

Monday night Council reviewed correspondences from the public
related to the application for a retail cannabis location at Five Corners

City Council members have moved a proposal for a retail cannabis location on Park Avenue a little further down the Provincial government's assembly line, with Council members reviewing their call for comments related to the High Culture application for a retail outlet on Five Corners in the old Sears building.

At Monday's Council session, members heard a report from Hans Seidemann who provided a short overview of the process in place by the province when it comes to the licensing of cannabis retail locations and what role in the process that municipal governments provides for.

The Old Sears location at Five Corners
is one step closer to becoming one of
the first retail cannabis options
for the community

From that he outlined the response to the City's call for comments related to the proposed High Culture Shop retail store for Park Avenue, noting that twelve correspondences had been received with ten in favour of the location, two opposed.

You can review both Mr. Seidemann's report and the correspondences to Council from the City Council Agenda Package of Monday evening starting on page 23

The role of council for Monday was to determine whether they wished to make a recommendation to the Provincial licensing branch.

From the review of the public feedback, Mayor Brain observed how he was very happy to see a lot of support for the proposal from those living in the area as well as other tenants in the building and hailed the due diligence of the community engagement process.

To balance some of the discussion on the topic, Councillor Adey took note of some of the concerns from those who opposed the proposed development and suggested that they do raise concerns for council to consider.

"I would like to say that when I read and listen to the people that have objected to this, one of the things they have said quite often is that there is quite a lot of litter and say social problems in that neighbourhood and the concern is that this would increase them. I don't know whether it would or not, I don't have a crystal ball, but I think maybe it would be worthwhile examining those problems as separate issues and see if there's ways around some of those problems, because they exist and people are concerned about them. So here we are, maybe that's something we should be taking a look at."-- Councillor Nick Adey on the public response to a proposed cannabis retail operation for Park Avenue

The City Councillor further observed however that he didn't believe that we could blame problems that exist now, on a store that hasn't come into existence yet.

Adding that perhaps some of the issues raised in the community engagement is a separate issue that council needs to talk about.

Councillor Nick Adey to time on Monday evening to make note of some
of the concerns about the Park Avenue area of the city that were raised
as part of the city's call for comments related to a proposed retail cannabis application

Councillor Blair Mirau asked for some clarification on the process from this point, in response Mr. Seidemann outlined how the provincial process of review does not move forward until the local government provides for its recommendation.

In a follow up question, Mr. Mirau inquired as to what the timeline for approval or rejection may be, he was advised that he did not know how long it would take.

Mayor Brain added that there was still a part of the process for the province to act on, and how he didn't believe the province could offer up a timeline either as they were still trying to figure things out as well.

Council wrapped up their review of the report by moving the process towards final consideration of the response to the referral.

You can review the Council discussion and vote to move the High Culture application forward from the City's Video Archive starting at the nine minute mark.





A look at some of the past notes related to the Park Avenue proposal can be found here.

For more items of note from Monday's City Council session see our Council Timeline here.

A wider overview of City Council Discussion themes can be explored here.

Cross posted from the North Coast Review