CASHMERE — For a city that doesn’t allow state-sanctioned marijuana businesses, Cashmere can’t seem to catch a break.
The Happy Crop Shoppe, the Wenatchee Valley’s first retail marijuana store, recently opened a second location there. It’s along Highway 2/97, just outside Cashmere city limits.
And now, a Wenatchee-area retail marijuana store, Green Life Cannabis, is promoting itself and its location on a longtime area billboard that’s also just outside Cashmere city limits.
“You can barely see it, but it’s there,” Mark Botello, Cashmere’s director of planning and building, said Thursday. “It’s clearly in violation of Cashmere municipal code.”
Botello has received several complaints from city residents about the billboard, which is outside the city but inside the city’s urban growth area.
Botello said the city’s code prevents off-site advertising of any business either within the city or its urban growth area, but the billboard structure dates to 1998, before the city created its advertising rule, so it can stay.
That’s a fact, said David Grimes, the county’s interim community development director, who’s responsible for enforcing land use rules outside city limits.
The state’s Growth Management Act obliges counties to adopt the same codes for urban growth areas as those adopted by their corresponding cities.
“It is what it is,” Botello said of the law, “so I guess we just have to go with it.”
The sign is large and visible to eastbound motorists, but it’s south of both the highway and the Wenatchee River.
Most of the message, including the business logo and address, isn’t really visible from that distance, especially when traveling at 60 mph.
The sign meets state requirements for legal advertising of a recreational marijuana business sanctioned under voter-approved Initiative 502, but it still subject to city and county code requirements, said Mikhail Carpenter, spokesman for the state Liquor Control Board.
Green Life spokesman Casey Davison said they’ve been assured by the Liquor Control Board that the sign doesn’t violate state rules.
“We haven’t been contacted by the city of Cashmere, and, as far as I know, the company that owns the sign hasn’t been contacted either,” Davison said.
