Sebastopol wants to regulate the way medical marijuana patients grow their own, requiring modestly-sized pot gardens within secure buildings or outside with high walls and locked gates.
"If we didn't do any of this, we run the risk of excessive cultivation that could be done, and maybe has been done, in a way that threatens the public safety," said Vice Mayor Guy Wilson. "It takes place anyway. ... We are responding to that reality and not pretending it is not there."
Sebastopol would be the first Sonoma County city with a cultivation ordinance, which the City Council will consider Tuesday night.
"The reason it is happening in Sebastopol is there are a lot of medical marijuana advocates," said Wilson, a member of the council committee that drew up the ordinance. "This is a fairly progressive community."
When voters approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, it set up very general provisions under which medicinal marijuana may be cultivated, prescribed, dispensed and used.
"There are no clear standards on how much and under which conditions," said Kenyon Webster, Sebastopol planning director. "The city is concerned about community safety and having appropriate limits on what is reasonable on the patient's side, but without creating a major concern in terms of public safety."
Under the proposed Sebastopol ordinance, medical marijuana patients and care-givers are allowed to grow marijuana on a 100-square-foot plot, either inside a hothouse, in a home or in an outside area with a six-foot high solid fence with locked gates.
It also allows dispensaries and medical marijuana patients to set up cooperative gardens of up to 750 square feet for non-retail purposes.
The proposed ordinance is being praised by medical marijuana advocates.
"The city is being pro-active," said Robert Jacob, executive director of Peace in Medicine Healing Center, a Sebastopol medical marijuana dispensary. "It creates a process to tell their citizens to do this well, instead of not telling them anything and then treating them like criminals."
Peace in Medicine is Sebastopol's only dispensary and has a permit to open a second.
Wilson said Sebastopol police would react to neighbor complaints, but would not be out looking over fences for violators.
Police Chief Jeff Weaver said there have been three burglaries, but no robberies or serious problems related to marijuana. Even so, he remains concerned about public safety.
"Any time you have something of value, which marijuana is, the more there is of it, the more likely someone will try to take it," Weaver said. "Any increase in cultivation is a concern to me."
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