The City of Penticton’s open house on Aug. 28 was a bit of an experiment, and judging from the turnout, a successful one.
The evening was billed as four “juicy” topics, bringing together unrelated issues the city is working on: a framework for cannabis regulation, the ongoing parking study, a proposed new building code and options for wastewater solids handling.
“The goal behind having the four topics in one event was to make it convenient for residents so that if they were interested in more than one topic, they did not have to give up more than one evening,” said JoAnne Kleb, the city’s engagement strategist. It also brought together topics like cannabis and parking that were sure to generate more interest than less discussed issues.
“I came for them all. I think it is so important to see so many people interested in a lot of topics. There are very controversial issues, like always parking and cannabis,” said Peter Haubrich, one of the attendees. “I see more people looking there (cannabis framework), but I think it is good there is so much interest.
“Democracy works with community engagement, engagement of people and being able to express your opinion.”
Blake Laven, the city’s planning manager, was manning the cannabis framework section.
“We had a lot of people come through with a lot of different viewpoints,” said Laven. Most of the comments, he continued, tended to the positive.
“There are people on both sides of the fence, people that wanted us to take a really prohibitive stance,” he said, adding that was more about cannabis consumption in public. “People feel really strongly that you shouldn’t be allowed to smoke it or inconvenience other people.”
Laven said he also spoke to a number of people interested in opening cannabis sales locations, “prospective retailers just trying to understand what the rules are.”
“We heard pretty strongly that the community wants us to allow retails sales in Penticton, so we have tried to set up a system that will do that in a more conservative way. We’ve tried to put buffering around schools so that retail sales aren’t going to be located close to schools and also we’ve tried to spread the stores out,” said Laven.
Steve Kidd
Senior reporter, Penticton Western News
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