After residents on Park Ridge’s south side complained that the city approved locating two cannabis dispensaries in their area but none elsewhere, officials are now considering whether to authorize a dispensary location in the city’s Uptown business district.
Only one dispensary has opened in the city.
When the Park Ridge City Council approved cannabis dispensaries in the city in 2021, it did so under a couple of stipulations, including prohibiting those stores from being located in Uptown. As the city council debates where dispensaries could locate, as well as possibly extending buffer distances between dispensaries longer than those mandated by the state, several City Council members expressed that there might be interest in reversing that ban, and delegated the topic to the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission. The commission voted unanimously to approve the reversal recently.
The Planning and Zoning Commission, made up of nine volunteer residents appointed by the council to give advice on zoning recommendations, had previously approved cannabis dispensaries to operate anywhere in the city, Commissioner James Hanlon said. “Now the City Council is putting it back in our laps to say… ‘What do you feel about that now?’” he said.
Hanlon said the City Council received feedback from residents who felt the city was “ganging up on the South Side” by allowing two cannabis dispensaries to locate within close proximity to each other, both on Higgins Road. The city eventually revoked the license of one of the dispensaries to operate in their proposed location.
“There were many steps and measures taken and things discussed to separate (dispensaries) by a certain distance… (City Council) kicked around different ideas,” Commissioner James Hanlon said, in reference to the City Council preliminarily approving five cannabis dispensary districts, while only allowing two cannabis dispensaries to operate in Park Ridge. “It got so confusing we needed a formula from MIT to figure out what we were trying to achieve,” he said in jest.
“I look at the Uptown (business district) different than I look at the whole city… it has different things, and different protections, and different facades and different goals maybe than other parts of the city. I can understand why at one time the City Council chose to go a different route and say, ‘hey, maybe this isn’t the spot.’ There seems to be a stigma,” Hanlon said.
Hanlon said the city will continue to administer its dispensary licenses through special use permits, which makes dispensary operators intending to locate in Park Ridge go through both the Planning and Zoning Commission and the City Council, creating a discourse between the operator and the city and giving residents a chance to voice their feedback on proposed dispensary sites.
“So if a (dispensary operator) said, ‘We’re going to take over the Pickwick Theatre, making it the biggest dispensary in Chicago,’ I think that there would probably be some negative feedback to that by many residents, and maybe that would stop that,” Hanlon said.
“I was fine with it then, and I’m fine with it now,” said Commissioner Clayton Hutchinson. “We’re here because of a political horse trade. That’s it. It wasn’t based on anything related to facts. There was no evidence. It was a straight up political horse trade and that’s what we’re left with here.”
“A lot of nods, a lot of nods,” commented Hanlon, looking at commissioners who agreed with Hutchinson.
Frequent public commenter and resident Missy Langan said the city’s inquiry was not initiated by residents, “but there were a great many residents who were down in the 6th and 7th wards who did feel like (the city’s attitude) was to throw (dispensaries) down there… When the provision for excluding Uptown was put in, there were a lot of hurt feelings.”
“When I heard (the City Council was interested in dispensaries in Uptown), I thought that is a beautiful way to ease all residents‘ sore feelings, perhaps,” she said.
“We are where we are with cannabis. I think everybody kind of accepts that, stigma or not,” Langan said. “It’s where we’re at. So open it up, open it up everywhere.”
The commission also voted 6-3 to allow Sociale, Park Ridge’s only dispensary, to expand its store hours from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. The store is currently open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. The City Council will need to make the final decision on Sociale’s proposed hours. Drew Awsumb, the city’s director of community preservation and development, said both items will likely be on the agenda for the Aug. 5 city council meeting.
