HADLEY — A new zoning bylaw to regulate adult-use marijuana retailers and cannabis cultivation adopted by annual Town Meeting earlier this month will not be subject to additional hearings by the town’s Planning Board.
Even though a legal advertisement printed in Friday’s Daily Hampshire Gazette calls for a June 18 hearing on the contents of the bylaw, town officials have learned that this hearing, and a second vote on the matter at a special Town Meeting in October, will not be needed.
While the bylaw is being reviewed by the attorney general for conformity with state law, Town Clerk Jessica Spanknebel said Monday that she was notified verbally by a representative of the attorney general’s office that the Planning Board will not have to hold another hearing on the marijuana bylaw.
The concern came up when one of two legal advertisements in advance of the April Planning Board hearing on the bylaw was not printed by the Gazette on the date it was supposed to appear.
Planning Board Chairman James Maksimoski explained at the board’s May 7 meeting that he follows a process for submitting information about bylaws to the attorney general’s office. That process includes providing notifications made to people by mail, demonstrating that public hearings are posted at Town Hall and presenting proof that notices of the hearings have been published in the local newspaper for two successive weeks prior to the hearings. For the marijuana bylaw, those ads were supposed to be printed Feb. 20 and Feb. 27.
Maksimoski said he did not know until after the May 2 Town Meeting that the Feb. 20 ad did not run when it was supposed to.
Seeing this, and realizing that the town’s moratorium on adult-use marijuana ends June 1, he scheduled the June 18 hearing and arranged for two new legal ads in the Gazette.
“Do it the right way,” Maksimoski said to his colleagues. “It wasn’t posted. It wasn’t our fault.”
A new hearing would have locked in existing zoning for six months and ensured the town wouldn’t face a free-for-all situation once the moratorium ended.
Maksimoski said Monday that even with the mistake of the legal ad not being printed, the notice was so far in advance that there was sufficient time for the public to be informed about the hearing and the contents of the bylaw.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
