The Town of Pilot Mountain Board of Commissioners on Monday approved a set of rules for new tobacco/hemp/vape stores and pain management clinics that seek to set up shop in the town.
“The purpose of these zoning amendments is to provide guidelines for the establishment and operation of new tobacco/vape/hemp stores and pain management clinics. The proposed amendments aim to safeguard the health, safety, and welfare of residents and ensure the orderly development of the Town,” the proposal stated.
The board members said they, “believe it would be in the best interests of the citizens of Pilot Mountain to place restrictions on the location and number of pain management clinics and tobacco/vape/hemp stores (tobacco stores).”
Andy Goodall joined the Town Pilot Mountain staff earlier this summer after having worked for the City of Mount Airy as Planning Director. He said in that role he was part of the planning for Mount Airy’s policy regarding tobacco, vape, and hemp stores as well as pain management clinics that started nearly from the ground up.
He explained to the Pilot Mountain commissioners, “Late last year, early this year, we started getting a lot of phone calls from out of state pain management companies that were looking for locations in both communities to put, it’s called a pill mill. I’m sure everybody has heard that term before.”
“Suboxone clinics, methadone clinics, basically just come in and get your fix and leave kind of locations and they were pretty serious about a couple locations here and we were a little worried about that happening in both communities,” Goodall said.
He added that since Mount Airy had passed new rules on these businesses, “We really want to get it here.” The logic behind that move he said was if a pain management clinic could not find a suitable location in Mount Airy, they might come bounding down U.S. 52 looking for the next best location.
“We didn’t have anything in the ordinances that addressed a lot of that stuff in this proposal. We had some information about tobacco stores before, but if you’re not been in one lately they really aren’t tobacco stores anymore,” he said.
A store once selling cigars or bulk tobacco for personal use may now be more of an “alternative shop” as Goodall phrased it, one that may be selling more marijuana paraphernalia and vapes than traditional tobacco products.
The ordinance the commissioners approved Monday dictates that no new tobacco stores be located with 500 feet of a church, school, library, childcare center, public park, residential zoning, or an existing business of the same type. These rules will not apply to existing stores unless they close for a period of 180 days or more, at which time they would lose grandfathered status.
Furthermore, the ordinance stipulates that these shops may not derive more than 40% of their total sales from marijuana, or marijuana adjacent products. These include but are not limited to different types of products that are kissing cousins of, but not exactly, marijuana such as Delta-8, Kratom, and Cannabidiol (CBD) products.
“North Carolina doesn’t have these defined in statutes yet but some of our neighboring states do,” Goodall explained. Tennessee and Kentucky have defined rules that he was able to base the new ordinance off of. In fact, he said there is a “belt” of states from the Gulf Coast up to the Great Lakes that have established rules. “They have addressed this, so it must be a real hot issue in those areas.”
The ordinance defines pain management clinics as a facility where “any licensed health care provider provides chronic, nonmalignant pain treatment to a majority of its patients.”
He said the best procedural way to control them is to set a “well defined area, and limit where they can be.” The same 500 foot buffer from schools, day care, churches, and residential properties applies to these businesses as will to the tobacco stores.
These rules are a bit stiffer than those approved in April by Mount Airy officials who set some of their distances at 1,000 feet.
Some wanted to know if even more could be done. Commissioner Dwight Atkins asked if the town could simply exclude these types of businesses.
“We cannot exclude them,” Goodall said, “but you can make it so that if you want to open one, you have to be very serious about it. In order to locate here you can’t just come into my office with a permit application, it needs to go to the Board of Adjustment to make sure they meet all these different standards.”
“This ordinance will at least provide standards that we just don’t have and will keep these from just popping up everywhere.”
Most Popular
Comments / 0