The Riverhead Town Board will hold a public hearing Sept. 16 on whether to impose a one-year moratorium on the siting of a medical marijuana dispensary in the Town of Riverhead.
The board today agreed to schedule the meeting, which will be held at 7:15 p.m. on Sept. 16.
“We need to be clear, we’re not looking to block medical marijuana. We want medical marijuana,” Councilman John Dunleavy said. “We just want to make sure it’s in the right place.”
Board members are concerned that the Route 58 site selected by Columbia Care, one of five companies selected by the state health department to manufacture medical marijuana in New York, is too close to Riverhead High School. The site, the longtime former home of Blockbuster Video, is 589 feet from the boundary line of Riverhead Central School District property, board members said.
The one-year moratorium is aimed at giving town planning department officials time to determine where such a dispensary should properly be sited in the town and whether the town’s comprehensive plan and zoning code must be modified and to make such modifications as may be necessary.
The Route 58 dispensary is the only one currently slated for Suffolk County and one of only two on Long Island.
Traffic impacts are also a concern, board members said.
Columbia Care will grow the plants and manufacture the forms of the drug approved for medicinal sale at 204,000-square-foot agricultural facility in Rochester, at the Eastman Business Park in Rochester, in a building where Eastman Kodak once manufactured photographic film. The Kodak factory was shut down several years ago.
If the moratorium is adopted following the public hearing, no site plan or building permit application can be processed by the town for the duration of the moratorium.
The board was initially going to adopt a six-month moratorium, but decided at the meeting to make it one year.
Councilwoman Jodi Giglio expressed concern that the town might not be able to adopt the moratorium or any local law restricting medical marijuana dispensaries in Riverhead, because the state’s law and regulations might pre-empt action by the town.
Town attorney Robert Kozakiewicz said the state law does not contain any pre-emptive language, so the town would not be blocked by the state from regulating where such a facility can be sited.
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