PORT ANGELES –– Clallam County Hearings Examiner Mark Nichols ordered planners to perform an environmental review of a recreational marijuana growing facility in the Dungeness Valley — a review he said should have been done in the first place.
“I’d like to get this done correctly,” Nichols said Wednesday.
He was presiding over a conditional-use permit hearing for Grover Grady’s application to set up a 30,400-square-foot facility to grow and process marijuana at 3931 Old Olympic Highway.
Saying he couldn’t make a decision on the project without a review under the State Environmental Policy Act, or SEPA, Nichols stayed Grady’s hearing 30 days and ordered the county to fill out the environmental impact checklist.
Grady applied to use seven greenhouses, used by a commercial nursery for at least the past decade, to grow marijuana made legal by the November 2012 passage of Initiative 502.
Because the property, currently owned by Wayne Mustitch, is zoned low-density rural residential, Grady needs a conditional-use permit.
County Planning Director Steve Gray told Nichols on Wednesday that planners initially thought Grady’s project would not need a SEPA review because it was being set up in existing buildings they assumed already had been through an environmental review.
“The proposal is entirely within existing structures and therefore exempt from SEPA,” senior planner Donella Clark wrote in an Aug. 4 memo about the project.
Planners later learned the greenhouses had never been reviewed or permitted, Gray said.
“We assumed incorrectly, in retrospect,” he said Wednesday.
Grady’s attorney, Donna Knifsend of Port Angeles, agreed to the SEPA review but said the applicant doesn’t feel it is necessary because the marijuana facility would not change the property.
“There’s no new construction that’s going to go on,” Knifsend said. “It’s going to be identical; in fact, we’re going to be reducing the environmental impacts.
“There is nothing that’s going be done in a permanent nature within those greenhouses that has not already been done.”
Knifsend pointed to Victor’s Lavender Farm, which is near Mustitch’s property, saying that facility has more greenhouses per square feet than Grady has proposed.
“They’ve never been permitted. They’ve never had a SEPA done,” she said.
“What’s before me is this parcel, is this property,” Nichols said.
“I don’t see anything or hear anything compelling that says this property should be exempted from the SEPA.”
Grady will now fill out a SEPA checklist, and the county will put that out for public comment.
A new hearing on the conditional-use permit will be scheduled after that, Nichols said.
Under the trade name Way Kool Productions, Grady has applied for a license to grow marijuana from the Washington State Liquor Control Board but has not received one yet.
The hearing was packed with neighboring residents who did not want the facility set up in the neighborhood, as well as residents of other neighborhoods where pot facilities have been proposed.
County planners had recommended Nichols deny Grady’s permit, saying it did not conform to the aesthetics and characteristics of the existing neighborhood.
County commissioners are considering a new slate of regulations on where marijuana can be sited in unincorporated areas of Clallam County.
The proposed interim rules more clearly delineate where different levels of marijuana production and processing can be sited.
The new rules would not apply to existing applications like Grady’s, Community Development Director Sheila Roark Miller said at Wednesday’s hearing.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Joe Smillie can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or at jsmillie@peninsuladailynews.com.
