Lake County Board Reconsiders Regulating Recreational Marijuana

WAUKEGAN, IL — Just over a year after the legalization of recreational marijuana in Illinois, the Lake County Board directed its staff to begin a public hearing process that could allow adult-use cannabis businesses to open up shop in unincorporated parts of the county.

In late 2019, after extensive debate, board members agreed to a one-year moratorium on recreational cannabis. That moratorium is due to expire Feb. 10.

Ahead of its expiration, Lake County board members met last week in a remote committee meeting to discuss whether to extend the ban on potential cannabis dispensary, cultivator, processor or distributor business — or whether to explore zoning regulations.

Eric Waggoner, director of planning, building and development for the county, said the one-year marijuana moratorium had been intended to give county staff time to do research into the impact of cannabis legalization in the area and gather public input.

"It was an ambitious plan and one that we anticipated would yield an enormous amount of data to sift through — I'll call it a great plan and a great strategy — and then COVID hit, and COVID persisted and COVID remained throughout the year, and we're now still in the pandemic and it's going strong," Waggoner told board members. "So, needless to say 2020 was anything but a normal year within which to attempt to collect and synthesize the kind of information we were looking for."

Krista Braun, the county's planning and zoning manager, said it was difficult to say how much the pandemic affected pot purchases until the state has at least a year of post-pandemic data. But based on sales trends in other states, she said the revenue from dispensaries could be significant.

"We predict that the tax revenue collected from dispensaries will be far greater than what the county gets from video gaming, and depending upon the number of dispensaries that may eventually be in operation in just a few short years, could hit $3 million per year," Braun said

Dispensaries were considered essential businesses in Illinois during the governor's coronavirus-related stay-at-home orders. During 2020, medical and recreational sales combined for more than $1 billion.

As of January 2021, there is only one recreational cannabis dispensary in Lake County, Rise Mundelein at 1325 Armour Blvd. It is owned by by Chicago-based Green Thumb Industries, which has licenses for 96 retail locations and 13 manufacturing facilities across 12 states. There are also operational medical dispensaries in Deerfield and Highland Park.

Mundelein Police Chief John Monahan said the most significant issue with the facility has been parking. He said the village board made some adjustments to parking regulation to help resolve the matter.

"As it stands now they do get quite a bit of traffic down there, however, it's been monitored very well," Monahan said. "We're lucky to have a facility that works very well with us. They're very good at communicating their concerns with us and listening to our feedback and making those adjustments on some of the ideas we have for them."

Lea Bacci, program coordinator for the health department's drug prevention programs, said only half of high schoolers took the youth drug use survey due to COVID-19 cutting the school year short, making it difficult to compare data.

"Overall, given the numbers who took it, marijuana use remained consistent from 2018," Bacci said. "So we did not see any prominent or significant differences in youth use of marijuana."

Bacci said cannabis was consistently looked at more favorably than alcohol in national polling of youth in questions of perceived parental disapproval, personal perceptions of harms and perceived "coolness."

Sgt. Keith Kaiser of the Lake County Sheriff's Office said cannabis arrests had been trending downward in recent years, falling from 98 in 2018 to just 16 last year. But no totals were available of the number of drivers under the influence of cannabis who had been arrested from one year to another, he said.

"Getting DUI statistics is a little difficult with the systems that we have in place, but anecdotally, talking to some of the deputies on the street, they see that DUI arrests involving cannabis intoxication have gone up since the recreational cannabis has been legalized," Kaiser told the board.

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Even though Mundelein is the only recreational dispensary in the county, At least of 23 Lake County municipalities allow for potential adult-use cannabis businesses. The status of Old Mill Creek and Indian Creek are unknown, according to a map prepared by county staff.

The issuing of new cannabis businesses licenses has been delayed indefinitely. A legislative effort to rework a social equity applicant scoring system that triggered lawsuits and concerns about its process failed to pass on the final day of this week's lame duck legislative session in Springfield. But even if new licenses were available, it is not clear a cannabis businesses would wish to open in the unincorporated areas where the 21-member county board serves as the municipal authority, according to county staff.

"Cannabis retailers are going to locate where they're going to locate based on only two considerations: number one, where they're allowed to locate, and two, perhaps more importantly, where the market dictates they should locate," Waggoner told board members during a nearly three-hour Jan. 8 committee of the whole meeting.

"So to the extent that cannabis retailers are looking for places where there's high traffic, high foot traffic, high visibility, they are going to try to locate in areas that fit those characteristics in order to capture as much market share as possible," the planning director explained. "Given that fact, it may be that, despite the potential availability of a lot of different sites in the unincorporated area for retail business, if we were to allow cannabis business in the unincorporated area we may not be able to compete effectively with municipalities that have more of those, I'll call them, 'traditional shopping districts.'"

Citing the view of a majority of board members that emerged during the meeting, Waggoner said a resolution to direct the Zoning Board of Appeals to begin a public hearing process will be prepared on the agenda at the board's Public Works, Planning and Transportation Committee meeting on Jan. 27. Recommendations from the public hearing process could return to the full board sometime in the middle of the spring, he said.

EARLIER: Lake County Imposes 1-Year Moratorium On Recreational Weed Firms