05/17/2022
The following was presented in-person to City Council at the May 16th meeting by one of the local residents.
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At the outset, I would like to acknowledge that I do not believe that everything I am going to say applies equally to each member. However, since each of you have a responsibility to our community and to hold each other accountable, I will be addressing Council as a whole.
I would like to begin by emphasizing just how shameful and unethical it was to give the residents of our community less than twenty-four hours notice before you held your Special Meeting on Thursday, May 5th. You didn't publicly post the notice in City Hall until fifteen minutes before closing time and you didn't have it posted to your Facebook or web page until almost 10:00pm that night. Most of us didn't know about it until we woke up the next morning, which only gave us a couple hours to try and rearrange our entire day to attend a meeting that was scheduled for 11:00am when most people are working. Personally, I had to push back a birthday lunch with one of my children and a 20th wedding anniversary trip my wife and I had planned. Not only did you fail to respect your residents by giving them reasonable notice and holding the meeting at a reasonable time, but on your posted agenda you failed to include any time for public comment, which led some people to believe there wouldn't be any. And then, for the few who were able to attend, you decreased our comment time by forty percent from the normal five minutes to an insulting three minutes.
There is not a single person on this Council who should not be embarrassed and ashamed at what took place there and there is no compelling justification for why that meeting couldn't have been held later that evening or the following day.
And as of earlier today, neither the original agenda for that meeting, nor the video of that meeting were listed in the main Agenda, Minutes, and Video section of the City Council website, or on the City's YouTube page, even though it only took a couple of days to upload the video from the May 2nd meeting.
Why is this? How can you look us in the eye with a straight face and try to tell us that you really value our feedback and you're making every reasonable effort in order to obtain it? I'm sorry, but your actions speak much louder than your words.
And your actions reveal that you have a major problem when it comes to transparency and truly informing and prioritizing the residents who live in this community.
And this leads me to my next point. Over the last several weeks and at the last meeting, I heard people imply that this situation could have been avoided if the residents had only given more feedback during the original development of the ordinance.
Let's think about that for a minute. Why is it that on an issue of such importance and with such strong opinions, there was an unusually low amount of residential participation? And how is it that this could go on for months, when in less than two weeks after a rehearing letter was sent out, we had fifty-five personal signatures from ninety-five percent of every person available within the immediate neighborhood of one proposed location, one-hundred and fifty-five electronic signatures from people with an Alpena address, fifty-two more from people in surrounding areas, one-hundred and twenty-four from concerned friends and family who live outside the area, and a Planning Commission meeting was filled with so many people they had to watch the meeting on their phones in the hallway?
How is that possible? How could you get so little input over months and yet get that much input in less than two weeks? Anyone who would either explicitly or implicitly blame the residents is either not thinking very clearly or they have ulterior motives for saying that.
Do you think it could have anything to do with the same kind of problems that surrounded the Special Meeting on May 5th? I know you made efforts to publicize those initial meetings when the ordinance was being developed, but you obviously failed to do it in a manner which actually reached the people who would be most affected by it and which clearly communicated what was at stake.
Many of those meetings took place in the middle of a pandemic when people were home bound, sick, fearful of dying, infecting others, grieving the loss of loved ones, or busy trying to feed their families. And when your meetings went virtual-only, most high-risk and elderly people in our community were stuck at home with less access to information, without computers, and without the experience needed to use them to participate in such meetings.
Was it any surprise you had lower than expected input? But instead of recognizing those limitations, and that your attempts to overcome them were not working, you just kept going and kept doing the same things with the same results. And now some of you want to blame the consequences of those poor results on the residents? Such a response is both insulting and borderline abusive.
Why didn't anyone send a courtesy letter to the residents of every home that was within three-hundred feet of a location that was being proposed as an acceptable spot for a ma*****na establishment? You knew that letter would have to be sent out before a Special Use Permit could be approved anyway. So why not spend the few bucks it would cost in postage and paper to communicate directly with those who would be most impacted by the placements that were being considered during the creation of the ordinance itself?
Was it just another one of a long list of oversights or was there more to it than that?
Over the last few months I've heard various public servants say, “We never even thought about residential areas,” when the ordinance was being created and buffer zones were being considered.
But then at the Special Meeting on May 5th when Councilwoman Walchak asked if there was ever any question or discussion about how far it could be from residences during the formation of the original Ordinance, the Mayor responded by saying that, “We had a lot of internal discussion … and when it came down to residential neighborhoods, the discussion became … if we buffer a residential house, how big is that buffer going to be, and when we started putting circles on, it started to basically eliminate the opportunity for businesses to open, so we took those off.”
So there we have it. Residential buffers were considered because everyone understood that this particular business which stores, sells, promotes, and transports a schedule 1 controlled substance poses unique risks and dangers that are not equivalent to anything else that might go in that retail space. And these dangers are especially significant for younger populations and the families that might raise them. That's why it's not allowed within two-hundred and fifty feet of a park with playground equipment that might be empty most of the time, but somehow it's okay to allow it about one-hundred feet from the swimming pool and play set of a home with young children who live there every minute of every day? And it can't even be within two-hundred and fifty feet of a child care center that may only watch one kid for part of the day, and that's even located in a commercial area, but it can be within two-hundred and fifty feet of multiple homes with multiple children that are in a residential area and who have owned those homes for ten, twenty, or thirty years, and may own them for another thirty years?
It would be one thing to buy your home there after Meds Cafe had been approved, or even after the City had made it legal to sell Ma*****na in those retail spaces, but it's completely different when the vast majority of these people bought their homes long before anyone thought legalizing ma*****na was even a possibility, or that our public servants would allow it to be sold at a location that was directly adjacent to four residential properties.
None of us ever thought our representatives would allow something like that to happen. And that's probably another reason why you didn't get more feedback from residents: we trusted you to be consistent and to use common sense. The same common sense that would tell you that the same people which argued that this should not be in our community at all most certainly wouldn't think it was appropriate to place it right next to multiple residential properties and nearby family homes with children. The lesser is obviously assumed in the greater and you shouldn't need forty-seven separate residents to all show up to a meeting to ask for a ten-point-seven foot buffer between a ma*****na shop and a person's backyard. That's not the real reason more restrictions for residential areas were excluded and it's extremely irresponsible to ignore the fact that you should have known better based on the general feedback you did receive.
The real reason explicit residential limitations were excluded was because the ones you considered basically eliminated the opportunity for businesses to open. In other words, the desire to allow as many ma*****na businesses to operate as possible took precedence over protecting the people you serve.
And it's not like limitations would have necessarily eliminated every possibility for them to operate in the city. For instance, you could have restricted these properties from being directly adjacent to any privately owned residential property. Even under those circumstances there still would have been multiple possible spots, including the Neighborhood Provisions location which is not directly adjacent to any residential properties and even has a railroad track as a buffer. So to imply that limitations were unworkable, or to claim that it was unfair to approve the Neighborhood Provisions Special Use Permit and to deny the one for Meds Cafe, is to make an utterly false equivalency between the proximity of those two locations to residential properties and the number of properties they would immediately impact. The only disadvantage Meds Cafe ever experienced was the result of choosing one of, if not the most inappropriate building in the entire state of Michigan.
And then you gave it your explicit approval when you determined that you knew better than the 55 immediate residents who told you this would have a substantial negative impact on the character of our neighborhood and you knew better than the Planning Commission who agreed with them and had the courage to do what was both legal and right on two separate occasions. Then you dishonored our democratic process by the way you called the May 5th Special Meeting and, once there, you disrespected your constituents by refusing to afford us the dignity of being able to speak to you face-to-face for a full five minutes.
Instead of using some of the tax money that's been collected from my neighbors over the last 30 years to even attempt to defend the decision of the Planning Commission in court, you completely betrayed us and those interests of ours which your ordinance explicitly states are to take priority over the interests of the ma*****na businesses.
My fellow citizens and I would like to see this relationship repaired and we would like to see this trust restored. And it is to that end that we request that you act as soon as possible to suspend the acceptance or approval of any more applications or permits related to ma*****na establishments in the City of Alpena so that the Ordinance can be reopened for discussion and modifications can be made which would place explicit limitations around residential properties and family homes with children, as well as explicitly limit the number of shops that can exist in a given area. There is no reason the families of any other neighborhood should have to suffer like mine will. If you do this, I can assure you that you'll get a lot more feedback this time around. And if you don't, I can assure you that you'll get that feedback at the polls instead.
