Alaska News

Unalaska activists launch petition to overturn commercial pot ban

Commercial marijuana advocates have started collecting signatures to put a referendum overturning the Unalaska City Council's ban on pot businesses on the ballot in the Oct. 4 city election.

The petition seeks to repeal the anti-commercial pot ordinance narrowly approved by the City Council by a 4-3 vote earlier in the year.

"Shall the City of Unalaska repeal Ordinance No. 2016-03, which prohibits all types of state-licensed marijuana businesses (cultivation, manufacturing, testing, and retail sale) in Unalaska?" is the proposed ballot language.

According to Unalaska City Clerk Cat Hazen, petitioners need to collect 77 signatures, an amount equal to 25 percent of the 306 votes cast in the last regular election.

Petition organizer Jerry Swihart said more than 77 signatures have already been collected, though they had not yet been turned in to the city clerk's office on Tuesday. Hazen said petitioners have until July 5 to turn in the signatures.

Swihart said the City Council ignored the wishes of local voters expressed in the 2014 state election legalizing recreational marijuana, when they heavily supported Proposition 2 by a vote of 369 to 271.

"Opt-out is a cop-out on the voters," said city worker Swihart, noting that local residents voted heavily in favor of legalization in 2014.

ADVERTISEMENT

But the mayor said the statewide ballot question, while legalizing personal possession, gave decision-making power on commercialization to the City Council.

"Members of the public do not have that responsibility," Mayor Shirley Marquardt said.

Council members Frank Kelty, Roger Rowland, Zoya Johnson and Marquardt voted to ban commercialization, while David Gregory, Yudelka Leclere and Alejandro "Bong" Tungul supported locally regulated pot sales when the issue was on the agenda in January and February.

Gregory said that the City Council will lose the ability to regulate marijuana businesses if the council's ban is later overturned by voters.

"I want to be involved in regulating marijuana," he said. Presently, marijuana is sold illegally, without quality control measures, and "you don't know what you're going to get if you go to the black market."

Unalaska City School Superintendent John Conwell opposed commercialization, saying it threatens the town's stature as an "idyllic," or a picturesque and pleasant, community. School Business Manager Holly Holman said it could make the town a less desirable place to raise children.

And a School Board member who also sits on the City Council, Frank Kelty, voted for the ban, though he said he agonized over the decision and sometimes thought pot sales should be allowed locally.

"I really struggled with this," said Kelty, a former fish plant manager, who worried about the effects of a marijuana store a short distance from a fish processing plant that drug-tests employees.

Council member Bong Tungul reacted angrily to the vote against locally regulated sales, saying that "it doesn't make any sense." The black market, he said, exposes youths to far more dangerous drugs.

In other decisions in the Oct. 4 election, the mayor's and three City Council seats will appear on the ballot. The council seats are held by Rowland, Gregory and Waldron — who was appointed to fill the unexpired term of Johnson, who resigned. The incumbent mayor is Marquardt.

This story first appeared in The Bristol Bay Times/Dutch Harbor Fisherman and is republished here with permission.

ADVERTISEMENT