Plan To Permit Possible Pot Shop In Edens Plaza Gets Green Light

WILMETTE, IL — The village board took another step toward ending its moratorium on retail cannabis sales last week, directing staff to draw up an ordinance establishing a process for pot shops to seek special use permits to operate at Edens Plaza.

Village trustees voted 5-2 to move forward with the plan, which is expected to return to the board for preliminary approval by the end of next month.

Trustees Peter Barrow, Kathy Dodd, Gina Kennedy, Kate Gjaja and Justin Sheperd voted in favor of the motion. Village President Senta Plunkett and Trustee Dan Sullivan voted against it.

After the possession and retail sale of recreational marijuana was legalized in Illinois at the start last year, the village board put a non-binding referendum question on the ballot during last year's presidential election asking if dispensaries should be permitted in town.

Residents voted 56-44 in favor of permitting the "retail sale of adult use cannabis" on the Nov. 3, 2020, ballot. In February, trustees referred the issue to the village's Land Use Committee, and at a June meting, the three-member committee unanimously recommended that Edens Plaza was the most suitable location to allow a dispensary.

"I've never been a big fan of this, and I have to say I'm not thrilled with the idea of having recreational cannabis in Wilmette," Plunkett said. "But I do feel somewhat allayed by the security [requirements] and listening to [Wilmette Police] Chief [Patrick] Murphy and having many talks with Chief Murphy about this, and just the experience of other businesses and other towns."

The anchor space at the shopping center is a 161,000-square-foot former Carson's, the original developer of the mall, that has been vacant since 2018. Chicago-based Newport Capital Partners bought the property in a pair of 2019 transactions for a combined $86 million.

Village Manager Mike Braiman said Newport was open to leasing a smaller space at the mall to a cannabis dispensary, but it was not a driver for the developer's strategy and would probably require a subdivision since its regular lender does not finance cannabis enterprises. The village manager said figuring out a plan for the vacant former department store was the top priority for the Edens Plaza's owners.

"We want to know from [Newport] what's happening at the Carson's box. What are they going to do with that? Are they demolishing it? And if they are, what are they building and what are they putting in? Because that's really the big driver to that center," Braiman said.

"They've always said, from the very beginning, they're not going to let other components of the center dictate what happens at the Carson's box," he said. "That's where they're going to make their money and their return on their investment is figuring that out."

The village's retail cannabis sales moratorium is currently set to expire at the end of the year.

Two days after the village board's July 27 meeting, state regulators held the first of three planned lotteries to award 185 new dispensary licenses last week, the first fresh licenses since prior to cannabis legalization. Barring a judge's order, those new license-holders could begin securing locations for operations within months.

Kennedy said there was no good reason to forbid cannabis when the village — a formerly "dry" community — sells alcohol to a degree she considers excessive.

"I'm not crazy about selling cannabis, but I'm not crazy about selling alcohol at the level we do to be honest in the village. Every single storefront has alcohol these days, including pharmacies, where supposedly they're interested in people's health — and we're selling it at the beach. So given that fact, it's pretty hard to understand anything other than a kind of emotional objection to cannabis," Kennedy said.

"I also feel pretty strongly that if you ask the village for their opinion on something, which you don't have to do, and they give it to you, it's pretty hard to ignore it," she added. "So I think that we've kind of set ourselves up here for defeat and disappointment if we now say, 'Oh sure, thanks for telling us, but we're not interested.'"

Sullivan said having an emotional objection to allowing a dispensary in the village was not necessarily a bad thing.

"A lot of people I talk to, they just don't want to live in a community that sells it, because of the unknown," Sullivan said. "And I hear that, and it's emotional because it's still very new."

Kennedy said that although a few residents strongly object to cannabis sales in the village and in the state at large, most people did not feel strongly about the issue.

"Maybe that's not the best basis for making public policy, to cater to the emotional response of a small group," Kennedy said.

"That was 44 percent of the village. That's not a small group," Plunkett said. "Almost 44 percent, which is not a small number, voted 'no.' I don't want to characterize that necessarily as a small group. How much did they care? We haven't, obviously, interviewed them all."

The village president said she had expected the discussion to be more charged, noting that there had not been the same level of public concern as with other issues.

"I do think that we need to listen to all our residents, and we need to show we've gone through this process, we have listened as much as we could, I think," Plunkett said.

"But that's precisely what we've done," Barrow said. "With multiple discussions, multiple hearings, a referendum, this discussion tonight. I think the absence of engagement, frankly, as our fellow trustees have said, [shows] this simply isn't an issue that animates people. And maybe it's the result of real-world experience — having a large dispensary in walking distance to village limits, and people appreciating that it just isn't a large concern."

Barrow was referencing the recreational marijuana dispensary that opened in September 2020 across the street from the Old Orchard Mall in Skokie. Now branded as Curaleaf Skokie, the 15,000-square-foot former bank is located about a block outside of Wilmette village limits and 1.2 miles from Edens Plaza.

Keeping the village's share of its residents' property tax bill from rising, on the other hand, is an issue that animates residents, Gjaja said.

"And one of the ways we do that is by keeping sales tax revenues up. I think another way to think about this is: We are providing a tool to our shopping center developer to, hopefully, revitalize our biggest sales tax base in our community," Gjaja said. "We don't know if, in fact, they will end up bringing us a cannabis dispensary to consider or not. But it provides another tool in their toolbox of trying to figure out how they bring this shopping center together, and that is something our residents really do care about — our businesses, our sales tax base and how we keep taxes on our residents as low as possible."