Heather Wright/The Independent

Plympton-Wyoming councillors are not keen on the idea of cannabis farmers setting up shop in town.

That’s despite the fact the municipality now has rules in place to govern where the operations can be. 

Maria Cossa-Rossi, Lambton County Senior Planner, told council Monday an interim control bylaw which stopped companies from building greenhouses for the now legal product is about to expire. 

In 2020, the town passed a bylaw effectively stopping cannabis operations from setting up in town with an interim control bylaw. It renewed it in 2021 and then there is a three-year ‘cooling off’ period, which the province allows which allows municipalities to stop unwelcome development.

But under the rules of Interim Control Bylaws, the town had to move forward with a plan, not just stop development. 

So, in September of 2021, adopted new polices which banned outdoor cultivation, limited it to agricultural land, mixed commercial industrial land and the Reece’s Corners’ planning area.

Any operation would also have to follow the province’s rules for livestock barns, called Minimum Distance Separation or MDS.

“It’ll still have to conform with,  the province’s sensitive land use guidelines, noise, odour, wind, photometric analysis, servicing, including storm water management, security plans, waste management plans, mitigation plans,” she told council adding it was all part of the process the town adopted when it passed its official plan in 2021.

Chief Administrative Officer, Adam Sobanski, says by the end of 2025, cannabis growers could begin approaching the town with projects.

“If you get a plant that comes in and applies and goes through the planning processes, and they meet the OPA (official planning act) requirements,  we’ve seen with other applications that meet our OPA generally, they go through and if they don’t, they go to OLT (Ontario Land Tribunal) and we’re behind the eight ball.”

That didn’t sit too well with some councillors.

“Just looking down the road where Enniskillen and Petrolia – the hassles they’ve had with theirs… light pollution, that kind of thing. We’re getting screamed at because we want to put a street light in, and yet we’re going to allow how many watts” asked Councillor Mike Vasey.

Sobanski says there are options. “If this council as a whole feels that they are not a willing host for cannabis growth and production facilities, then you would pass the Interim Control Bylaw and direct staff to commission a study to determine why we can’t support it,” he said. That study would look for reasons to ban the facilities outright. 

Councillors were interested, however they did not formally instruct staff to bring an bylaw to council, yet.