EDITOR’S NOTE — KING-TV (channel 5) in Seattle came to Port Angeles last week and did a video report on the fight over using the old Fairview School as a marijuana growing and processing plant. Watch it at the end of this story.
PORT ANGELES –– Neighbors of the mothballed Fairview School are asking the Port Angeles School District to cancel its sale agreement with a Sequim man who wants to use it to grow marijuana.
“We don’t want it in our neighborhood,” Pastor Glenn Douglas of The Crossing Church told the School Board at its Thursday night meeting.
“Though it may be legal what you’re doing, it is very unethical and it’s questionable behavior.”
Kurt Jafay of Sequim applied Aug. 4 under the school district’s name for a permit from Clallam County to use the 9.48-acre site at 166 Lake Farm Road east of Port Angeles to grow and process recreational marijuana.
Jafay also wants to build 12 greenhouses to grow marijuana on the school’s former playfields.
In May, the school district agreed to sell the school property for $814,000.
The elementary school was closed in 2007 because of declining enrollment districtwide.
School Board members did not response to the suggestion that they drop the sale.
Drug-free policy
Brad Schaefer asked how the sale, and the potential pot grow, matches with school district policy that says it is committed to maintaining a “drug-free school, community and workplace.”
He also noted the school is across the street from the Fairview Grange Hall, where buses stop every day to pick up schoolchildren.
“My child cannot play in her own yard at home without being within 1,000 feet from the Fairview School, much less walk home from the bus stop under the student code of conduct,” said Schaefer, whose wife, Sara, is an employee of the Peninsula Daily News.
School officials told the neighbors Jafay did not tell them why he wanted to buy the school, nor did they ask.
In a response letter to Tom Arnold, one of the Fairview neighbors, Superintendent Marc Jackson said: “Mr. Jafay was not required to reveal his intentions nor was the school district able to ask of his intentions.”
Director Patti Happe said at Thursday night’s meeting that state laws prevent school districts from asking what potential buyers plan to do with public property.
“There is a lack of information involved in the law on what school districts can and cannot do when they sell a property and how we can and cannot operate,” Happe said at Thursday’s meeting.
Directors, in a special meeting all day Friday, did not return calls about what those laws are.
Douglas questioned that assertion.
“We don’t understand why you wouldn’t have investigated, why you wouldn’t have checked it out,” he said.
“We don’t know that, but it doesn’t ring true; it doesn’t square, so to speak with the reality of the situation.”
He said he recently sold property and investigated his buyer thoroughly before finalizing the deal.
“Before we even entered into escrow, I knew their middle names, the intended use, the buyer, how they were going to do it, what they were going to do with it — I knew their mommy and their daddy before I would even enter into escrow,” he said.
Fairview school was built in 1973.
Since deciding to sell the school, the district fielded offers from at least two private schools: Five Acre School, located northwest of Sequim, and Olympic Christian School in Port Angeles.
The Fairview property was appraised in 2010 for $1,055,000 and for $904,000 in February 2013.
Neighborhood zoning
The neighborhood is zoned neighborhood conservation, which is intended to keep rural neighborhoods rural.
Jafay has applied for a license from the state Liquor Control Board but has not been approved for one.
A hearing on the permit is slated for Oct. 8, but the county has not begun processing the permit request.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Joe Smillie can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or at jsmillie@peninsuladailynews.com.
EDITOR’S NOTE — KING-TV (channel 5) in Seattle came to Port Angeles last week and did a video report on the fight over using the old Fairview School as a marijuana growing and processing plant.
WATCH IT HERE, or go to video at http://bcove.me/c4wij2vo
