Retail weed stores can go anywhere in Westport?
Yes, that’s right, marijuana businesses can go anywhere there is a business district.
Why? Because we are operating under a zoning bylaw that pot promoters and store owners snuck onto the backside of a special Town Meeting held in February 2020.
Please consider helping put an end to this usurpation of voter discretion by attending our annual Town Meeting at 9 a.m. on Saturday, June 5, at the high school, where several important questions related to recreational marijuana stores will be decided.
What will be different about this vote, and will we continue to be tortured by moneyed special interests tenaciously pursuing their objectives at subsequent Town Meetings? Hopefully not, as the zoning bylaws being considered will require a two-thirds majority to pass. This makes it harder to pass but harder to overturn. This is why your vote, or at the very least one vote from your household, is needed on Saturday.
WESTPORT The state Attorney General has rejected two bylaw amendments approved in October that prohibited the legal sale of non-medical marijuana within town borders.
The ruling, according to Planning Board Chairman James Whitin, was expected. He mentioned that it would not alter articles that will appear at the annual Town Meeting later in the year that will seek to prohibit the sale of non-medical marijuana. Those articles, unlike the ones rejected by the Attorney General Maura Healey, represent zoning changes.
The Oct. 3 special Town Meeting votes on two articles sought to initiate a ban, after voters at a February Town Meeting voted to lift a previous ban on the sale of non-medical marijuana. The February votes allowed approved medical marijuana establishments to branch out and sell non-medical products. Right now, there is only one approved facility Coastal Healing on State Road. That facility’s applicant initiated the February petition article vote and has express
Credit Travis Ragsdale
A member of the Kentucky Attorney General’s search warrant task force was sanctioned this year for publicly defending the search warrant process and the judge who approved the warrant for Breonna Taylor’s home.
Jefferson Circuit Court Judge Charles Cunningham received a private reprimand from the Judicial Conduct Commission in January for comments he made in an op-ed published in The Courier Journal. The reprimand doesn’t name Cunningham, but he confirmed to KyCIR that he is the subject of the disciplinary action.
Cunningham was publicly named last week as a member of the task force the attorney general will charge with scrutinizing and suggesting possible reforms for how search warrants are obtained and executed in Kentucky.
Opinion: Brewer, Boxler deserve Westport s support
R. Michael Sullivan
R. Michael Sullivan lives in Westport and is a former Westport Select Board member and chairman.
I hope you will join me in supporting our two incumbent Select Board members at the April 13 Town Election.
Dick Brewer and Ann Boxler have well represented Westporters over the past three years but deserve particular praise for guiding the town through this last year made very difficult by the pandemic. They and the rest of the current board have had to make tough choices to accommodate restrictions and budgetary issues brought on by COVID-19, a job I do not envy.