At its special November town meeting, Brewster opened the door for retail marijuana operations.
Brewster town meeting voters rejected an article for a moratorium on recreational marijuana
facilities and then also turned down an article that would have banned recreation marijuana
facilities in town.
Article 10, a complete ban similar to the one that Falmouth voted for and article 11,
a moratorium similar to the one East Ham Orleans and Nantucket voters supported.
All those opposed to the motion to ban marijuana establishments, please raise your Brewster
voter card.
Both failed to garner the needed two-thirds majority, leaving the town of Brewster with
the state's default licensing process and timeline, one which could begin as early as
next spring.
What that does is now basically put the town in a position of having to come up with zoning
regulations to handle or allow recreational marijuana facilities, meaning a retail outlet,
testing lab, also cultivation, any of the uses that were defined by the state statute.
Local recreational marijuana in Massachusetts is a fact.
Voters statewide approved a referendum question in November 2016 and in July 2017, Governor
Charlie Baker signed the bill into law.
Votes like the one in Brewster and in other towns across the Commonwealth provide municipalities
the option to block these types of businesses altogether or to buy additional planning time
through a moratorium.
This process is supposed to start sometime in the beginning of April, so there's a real
time crunch for at least getting the first notice of the proposed regulations out to
the public to review, so there are some real close time issues here.
The lottery system by which articles are debated at town meeting in Brewster may have impacted
the debate, but the outcome was still clear.
Because of the lottery system, the moratorium came up prior to the article for a ban.
Because of the town bylaw, we could not put those two together as companion articles,
so it made some of the discussion a little bit disjointed, but the two-thirds majority
for both of those articles failed.
Even without the moratorium, it does not mean that marijuana businesses will start popping
up like so many weeds tomorrow all across Brewster.
The town still develops and will apply zoning and planning systems just on a somewhat faster
timetable.
We would have these regulations prepared to go to town meeting in May at our annual.
They do require a public hearing in front of the planning board prior to that, and there
is a schedule that has to be laid out, so over the course, probably in a couple of weeks,
the building official, the town planner, and I will be sitting down going through the major
questions and what are the issues that need to be addressed and lay out a plan of action.
