The City of Airdrie has passed their Cannabis Use Bylaw at Tuesday's (September 4th) city council meeting.  

Since February the city took multiple routes to get the public feedback on where they would like to see cannabis stores. This included a public survey and focus groups. 

The overall consensus from the public is that they did not want cannabis stores near places where children congregate. 

William Czaban with the City says the city had worked closely with staff and the public to start the long process of putting together the suitable land use bylaw draft.

"We hit the ground running in February and we presented to council in mid-March where we basically gave an overview of everything that was set in stone and a shopping list of everything the city could control."

The next meeting with City council took place in June when city staff presented the results of the public consultations and opinions in hopes that city council would give the blessing to move forward with drafts of the bylaw. 

"Council accepted the results as information and gave us the blessing as information to create the draft, from where we needed to turn around our draft regulations rather quickly."

The staffs first presentation was on July 23rd when they brought the draft land use bylaw update as well as an update to the smoking bylaw. 

"From there it was a lot of discussions and some checking in on the public hearing and providing some more direction as we really focused on the different iterations on the districting that was going to be involved. A lot of the nuts and bolts of the bylaw remained as they were from the July draft but it was really fine-tuning the location of where those stores could go."

At the council meeting of September 4th Council decided they would allow potential cannabis stores to be in the same zones that liquor stores were designated. The zones were split into three areas of permitable, non-permitable and discretionary.  

During the three meetings with the council, city staff was asked to compare their potential locations with that of liquor stores and to include the provincial setback requirements.

After heavy deliberation, the land use bylaw was given three readings and approved by the council. 

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