Ephrata extends marijuana garden moratorium

EPHRATA - Ephrata decided to delay creating any codes for community medical marijuana gardens for six more months.

The council recently approved its third six-month moratorium concerning the state law passed in 2011.

The law, passed in 2011, allows up to 10 qualifying patients to grow as many as 45 marijuana plants in a shared garden. Each patient is allowed to grow as many as 15 plants each.

City Administrator Wes Crago explained the law places city officials between the state and federal laws.

"The federal government says, 'Marijuana is a schedule one drug and illegal,'" he said. "The State of Washington said, 'Yeah. Kind of. It's still kind of illegal, but if you have a card you can grow it. If you're part of a collective garden then this many people, this many plants,' and yet it doesn't provide any protections for essentially city officials violating federal law."

The law doesn't protect people engaging in a legal state business to be protected from federal prosecution. Crago said the conflict isn't good for governments.

"Governments should be consistent from top to bottom. That puts you in the position of one of (four) options," he said.

Councilmembers could choose to ban community marijuana gardens, create zoning codes for the gardens or continue to not do anything until the conflict between state and federal law is resolved, Crago said.

"(Another) option is you don't take a stand on cannabis. You merely insert into all of your zoning ordinances and business licenses that the business and the use of that property must comply with all state and federal law," he said. "We already do that for business licenses, but we don't yet do that for zoning."

If the councilmembers chose to ban the gardens, they risk being sued by people wanting to grow marijuana, he said. If they chose to create zoning codes, it's possible the federal government could prosecute city officials.

"The fourth option is the option that staff is recommending tonight is to punt. Take the option of delaying and wait for the state and federal government to reconcile their differences," Crago said. "I believe we're going to need to do that this time. We may need to do it one more time before that is going to be done. The Legislature is not in session and we don't know anything about what they intend to do."