More than a week after Newton voters voted against a ballot question that would have banned recreational marijuana shops from opening here — as well as a second ballot quesiton that would have capped the number of stores to between 2 to 4 — some ban advocates have been writing letters to elected leaders, The TAB and Patch, blaming Mayor Fuller and challenging what the numbers really mean.
Here’s what Jennifer Adams wrote on Patch.
Let’s look at the numbers — on Election Day last week, 39,967 votes were cast and 18,203 of those voted for the ban and 18,167 voted for the “2-4 store limit.” This left a remainder of 3597 who voted “no” on both in order to have 8+ stores. Of course, the actual number of people who voted “no” on both ballot questions was higher than 3597 because an unknown portion of the “yes” vote for the “2-4 limit” was cast by supporters of the ban who voted for the “2-4 limit” as a backup. It is not known precisely how many of the votes were overlapping because the City of Newton did not count the votes that way. Even if Newton city officials never manage to provide the exact breakdown of the votes, it is safe to assume that “ban” supporters would have overwhelmingly preferred the “2-4 store limit” over “8+” stores. Combining those votes with “2-4” supporters, it is very clear that the vast majority of voters do not prefer “8+” stores. Yet that is the result from this flawed ballot structure. The marijuana companies who advertised heavily for this option will be happy, even if the voters are not.
Maybe it’s just me but I’ve read this paragraph several times and I can’t figure out how Adams’ reached her conclusion. (The same is true for a letter in this week’s TAB, which does not seem to be online.)
Rather then blaming the mayor, I believe the Adams should fault Opt Out’s campaign strategy which adamantly opposed 2-4, blasting it as “sham,” when really 2-4 was a compromise.
Yes it was a compromise they didn’t like. It was also a compromise many ban opponents didn’t like. But politics and elections are almost always about compromises. You have to play the cards you are dealt, not the cards you wish you were given. Once both 2-4 and the ban were on the ballot, supporters and opponents had to decide where to place their chips.
Opt-Out made a strategic decision to oppose 2-4 full throttle (even calling it a “sham” on their lawn signs). They placed all their bets on the hope that a ban would prevail.
It was a gamble Opt-Out lost. As result, recreational marijuana opponents lost out on a compromise that would have allowed for fewer stores in Newton. Instead we can have up to eight.
But how is Opt-Out’s campaign strategy anyone’s responsibility but their own?
If OON wants to continue this conversation, they are certainly free to do so. However, the rest of the community has moved on.
The ballot did not have a “structure” – the two ballot questions were separate and distinct, and the results of each were counted in the same way that the three state ballot questions were counted – as separate and distinct. How votes were counted is not math; it’s not even simple arithmetic. You count the yes votes and no votes for each question, and the one with the higher number wins. Then you move on to the next controversy in the city 🙂 .
The one option that was not on the ballot this month–keeping the 2016 law–is the option that actually won. The 2016 law has now won THREE times at the ballot box. Respect the freaking vote and implement the law to “regulate marijuana like alcohol.” Does democracy mean nothing in Newton?
The two ballot questions were independent, except to the extent that the results could not be simultaneously implemented. As it happened, the results of both questions can indeed be implemented.
There is no legal or statistical means to use the results on one question to modify the results on the other–and it seems that is precisely what some disappointed activists want to do. If those activists believed the questions were inherently uninterpretable–and therefore illegal–they should have sued to keep them off the ballot.
It would be deeply undemocratic for the City Council to contemplate any meta-analysis on the ballot results. As I have stated in the past, I do not have strong feelings about these ballot questions, but I firmly believe that City Council must respect the plain will of the People to whom it posted each of these questions.
The issue could have been avoided if 2-4 had been made conditional on opt-out. It was totally in the council’s control to write it that way.
The outcome of the vote was entirely clear after the 1st precinct reported. OON, lacking the polling, made the strategic mistake of assuming that more than 1 in 10 of 2016 yes voters would flip nimby, and worried that an opt-out win would be canceled out by 2-4 getting a bigger majority, Someone out there had the polling results to know that was not going to be the case (Not RSFN to be clear) and must have laughed as OON did the work to defeat 2-4 for them.
I do think some in close proximity to the 1st two dispensaries might have been in favor of Opting out or 8+ over 2-4 to spread the wealth. I wonder if the city council should dictate that all tax revenue be directed to capital improvements in the precincts housing the dispensaries.
Jennifer wrote:
“it is safe to assume that ‘ban’ supporters would have overwhelmingly preferred the ‘2-4 store limit’ over ‘8+’ stores.”
But even Opt Out Newton disagrees with this:
http://optoutnewton.org/index.php/faq/
Under “SHOULD I VOTE FOR THE 2-4 LIMIT QUESTION AS A BACKUP IN CASE OPT OUT FAILS?”:
“Additionally, the so-called 2-4 ‘limit’ is not a firm limit and can be increased by the City Council at a later date at their discretion, so it is really not much different than the currently proposed limit of 8 stores. All of the negatives we have listed on this website are likely to occur whether there are 2, 4 or 8 stores. If the number of stores are reduced, most of these problems will just be concentrated in a few unlucky neighborhoods.Then it will spread to the rest of Newton if the so-called ‘limit’ is increased in the future.”
Amidst all this imaginative theorizing about how the vote results are not what they appear to be, one very important detail is being lost.
The results for the 2018 ban referendum were almost exactly the same numbers as the Newton vote on the 2016 state referendum to legalize marijuana. This seems to indicate that the voters knew exactly what they were doing. They effectively voted twice on the same question.
That shouldn’t be a surprise since so much of the Opt-Out campaign was about the dangers of marijuana in general rather about the much narrower question of stores in Newton.
This analysis – if indeed it can be called one – is a ridiculous mishmash of numbers meaning nothing. It would take some kind of futuristic AI to know why and how each voter divided their vote between the two separate questions. Which obviously doesn’t matter anyway.
OON no longer exists – the ballot questions have been decided. The end of that decision.
Last night the Programs and Services Committee, including Lisle Baker, passed the Planning Department’s Draft zoning ordinance for marijuana establishments forward to the full council. Thanks.
As others have said, this is purely an academic exercise. If forced to guess the voters’ intentions, I would say this was essentially a referendum on the ban, and Newton is clearly against a ban. 2-4 stores or 8 stores are really the same for most people, and many of the “yes” votes on 2-4 (including mine) were merely a strategic vote against the ban. I believe the result would have been exactly the same had the ban question been alone on the ballot.
What Jerry & Mike Striar said.
This election was virtually identical to the 2016 election. The voters have spoken, more than once. Lets implement and move on.
Oh, come on!
You know that the objective Albright and Krintzman had all along was to get pot shops into Newton no matter what and that they pulled out all the parliamentary maneuvering stops to accomplish their goal.
Albright even outted herself during the Council meeing in July when she said it would be “too dangerous” (direct quote) to let the voters have a clean ballot in whether they wanted to ban pot shops. So she and her clique persisted in stacking the ballot.
Voter supression take many forms. This is the Newton version.
Readers may have an easier time understanding the argument if they read the whole piece.
It’s clear that neither question had much of a chance of getting over 50% since it was essentially a three-way race between the two ballot questions and voting NO on both to get 8+ stores, which is the option the marijuana store owners spent heavily to promote. The default option didn’t need to get 50% — it just had to be a spoiler for the other two. It won even though it likely got the lowest support.
https://patch.com/massachusetts/newton/newton-marijuana-election-option-least-votes-won
And yes I do fault the mayor for this mess. The City Councilors knew that having multiple questions would make it impossible for either question to win and a majority were leaning towards having one clean question, or at least having a nested question — do you want a ban? If not,how many stores, 2-4 or 8?
Then at the last possible moment, the mayor announced she wouldn’t sign anything that didn’t have multiple questions, creating this ridiculous, confusing mess.
The ban may have failed anyway in that scenario but at least it would have led to an unambiguous result.
Abe Zoe – Please tell me in which meeting I said it would be “too dangerous” . I’d like to listen to the tape of that meeting.
I do not have a strong opinion about marijuana, but I do believe that the ballot yielded an uninterpretable result and upheld the 8+ status quo, which looks to be the least popular option of all (Why looks? Because who knows with the bad data we got). I think this result was predictable and may not reflect the majority opinion. There was nothing preventing the City Council from simply running a 1- queston ballot — as the other towns did. Except, I believe, it would be entirely possible that the ban would have passed with a slim majority. Why? Because it did in other MA towns which initially voted to legalize in 2016. So logically, I would assume the ballot was like this by design (of some Council members), not through lack of forethought. I would never suspect our city government of the latter.
There were more no votes than voters. Go tell your kids how proud you are that you made that happen. The council members who put two questions on the ballot knew this was likely and did it anyway because they were one step ahead of the ‘activists’ who wanted a ban. What the heck is OON? Newton didn’t want recreational marijuana stores, no vote has actually even asked us that question. Yet zoning is moving ahead? Good job.
“Alternative Math.”
No the arguments made about the effect of two questions on the ballot do not add up. The result is what it is. Perhaps Ralph Nader’s presence on the ballot kept Al Gore out of the White House and perhaps Gary Johnson and Jill Stein kept Hillary Clinton out. But those are far more consequential elections than Newton’s ballot measures and we didn’t get a “do-over” on those either.
Maybe someone can write the Newton version of this piece of satire: Trump Warns Recount Could Set Dangerous Precedent of Person With Most Votes Winning
@Newton North, you are spot on that a small majority of councilors, led by Albright and Krintzman, knew they were stacking the deck with this ballot structure, and did it anyway. There will be no do-over, but those councilors and the Mayor should be held accountable for creating this ridiculous ballot, and ensuring the undemocratic result where the least popular option won.
You are also right that not one other town in Massachusetts, out of over 100 that voted, had multiple questions at once. Are we just more clever than all the other towns?
Actually I was responding to Eugenia.
@Bruce you make a good argument, but in your examples we would have had President Nader in 1992 and President Stein in 2016 if the Newton voting rules had been followed.
“…it was essentially a three-way race…”
You keep saying that, but that doesn’t make it true. 8+ stores is what the current MA regulations required -it was the status quo. There were two *independent* questions, asking the voters if they wanted to change the status quo, either by allowing 0 stores or 2-4 stores. On each question, a significant majority of voters said No. There is nothing ambiguous about the result.
It’s funny that the prohibitionists think the mayor and city council actually wanted cannabis shops in Newton, when most local office holders did everything they could to ban them. Fuller never revealed her intention to “vote on retail marijuana” until after she was elected. She lied about the issue to The TAB as a candidate. The City Council passed a moratorium on “recreational” marijuana without a single dissenting vote. Most of them had previously voted for the ban on MEDICAL marijuana. Regrettably, most of Newton’s elected “leaders” have been woefully out of touch with the electorate on cannabis issues.
The only true way for these questions to have been independent from one another would have been to actually tie them together. For instance – question 1: do you want a ban on retail recreational marijuana? Yes or No. Question 2: If there is no ban on retail recreational marijuana in Newton, do you want to limit the number of stores to at least 2 but no more than 4? Yes or No. That is the only true way that people would have been able to vote on these two proposals independently and not having to factor in game theory to get their preference to win. Instead, the city council, led by Albright and Krintzman polluted the process by ensuring these questions would not be tied together in this way and by ensuring that the instructions would be confusing such that whichever gets more votes would be the proposal that governs. This makes absolutely no sense. If more than 50% of the voters voted for a ban, then that should be the end of the story.
I also find it curious given how much time had passed since the 2016 election that Krintzman didn’t propose any type of limitation until after the council received the 50 person petition to raise the issue of the ban (as rightly permitted by the 2016 ballot question).
I wish the city council would have respected the 2016 vote and allowed a clean opt out question on this year’s municipal ballot. It will be interesting to see how this affects the next election for city councilors.
Hopefully zoning can consider that there were certain precincts that clearly voted to ban recreational pot shops in their neighborhoods:
3-2, 5-2, 5-3, 6-1, 7-1, 7-4, 8-1, 8-2, 8-3, and 8-4
We should do what we can to respect their wishes!
Some on this blog think that Opt Out was ill-informed and could have prevented this outcome if they had not campaigned against the 2-4 option. That is not accurate, in my opinion. We did do an online survey early on (not the infamous $10k phone poll), re-weighted the results to account for the over-abundance of responses from those who voted for question 4, and discovered the following;
1. In a 2-way race solely against either the 2-4 option or against 8+ stores, the ban would narrowly win against either option. The margin of victory for the ban in this scenario came from people who voted for Question 4 in 2016 for social justice reasons but didn’t want commercialization.
2. In a 3-way race, the ban would still have the most support of the three, but none of the options would reach a majority. A sufficient number of pro-cannabis voters would vote NO on both questions to prevent the other two questions from getting over 50%.
3. A significant number of ban voters planned to vote for the 2-4 store limit as a backup in case the ban failed, but not enough to give the 2-4 question a majority.
Once the City Council voted to place two questions on the ballot, effectively making it a three-way race, we knew that the deck was stacked against either question winning. At that point, we seriously thought about throwing in the towel and accepting likely defeat, which would have saved all of us a lot of time, money and personal attacks. Instead, we decided to campaign our hardest to win despite the odds.
The only path to victory (however small), was to convince voters on the merits of the ban AND keep our voters from also voting YES on both questions. Otherwise, all our efforts to sway voters would have just led to a victory for the 2-4 limit, which is a reasonable option, but not something we wanted to spend our time on.
The narrow majority of City Councilors who voted for this flawed ballot structure, and the Mayor who urged it, either knew or should have known that it would likely lead to the undemocratic result of the least popular option winning.
So it seems Opt Out made a rookie mistake believing its own online poll which was circulated through its own supporters. Laurie, you shouldn’t believe these kinds of self distributed polls any more than you should believe that the comments on Village 14 represent any kind of consensus.
But Opt-Out made a much bigger mistake when it deliberately and repeatedly told supporters that 2-4 was a “sham.” Clearly a lot of core supporters listened and a compromise that should have passed didn’t.
You can’t blame that on Krintzman, Albright, Fuller or anyone else. It was Opt-Out’s decision. Opt-Out alone owns that.
@David–allowing each ward and precinct to determine how it will be governed may sound nice to you today, but wait until your ward needs a budget override, for example, to build a new elementary school. Not long ago voters approved a budget override for new elementary schools. My family will never benefit directly from those schools, but I supported the override because I understood that there some decisions we must make as a unified city.
@Greg, it looks like the initial poll results that OON describes were quite accurate and pretty well track the results in the election. They may indeed have been rookies, but the analysis looks pretty sound.
OK, Sarah. I’ll play along. So why did 2-4 fail?
I do not think that forcing both “ban” and “2-4” groups into an impossible “compromise”, mutually cancelling their votes, and blaming it on them after the predictably-biased and ill-counted outcome is the way any elections/voting should be run.
Woah. I recognize that there’s a new trend in American politics to claim election fraud or other misdeeds when the results don’t break the way you want. But unless you have proof Oleg, please don’t drag Newton down that road.
Clearly OON believed, and still believes, that this was a three way race when in reality the two ballot questions were independent of one another. This error may have influenced their campaign strategy to prioritize an attack on the 2 to 4 question rather than focusing on the Question to Ban ballot question. The truth of the matter is that there was an up or down question on the ban. It read as follows:
“Shall the City of Newton adopt the following general
ordinance?
All recreational marijuana retail establishments shall
be prohibited from operating in the City of Newton.”
Simply and clearly stated, and it lost.
If I may interject another thought about why the ban (and limits) lost: in general bans on legal behavior are controversial and often unpopular. If you tell me we should ban an item that’s going to sit on the ocean floor for 10,000 years, I’m with you because that’s an environmentally wise decision. But bans on ordinary legal behavior inevitably become controversial and are often rejected, either by a lack of compliance or in this case, by a vote.
Oleg – Nicely said. EXACTLY right!
Tired of being called a “prohibitionist” by determined “potheads” when all that was desired was a FAIR ballot so that there could be a free exercise of that Local Control that was guaranteed by the terms of Q4 in 2016 (which was drafted by the pot industry).
But the propot faction of the City Council was too scared and determined to allow that.
@Greg, in my estimation, the reasons why 2-4 failed are three-fold:
1. The ballot was structured so that a relatively small group voting no to both made it difficult for either question to prevail. How many elections have you seen where the top vote getter gets above 50% if there are 3 options? Elizabeth Warren is a recent example that did, but that is rare.
2. The 2-4 limit did not have Elizabeth Warren-level support (> 60%) required to overcome the flawed ballot structure. Neither did the ban.
3. Many ban voters did vote for 2-4 as a backup but not in sufficient numbers to overcome 1 and 2.
@Sarah: That’s hogwash. These were two different ballot questions. Any other interpretation is fake news.
Perhaps “many ban voters did vote for 2-4 as a backup.” Perhaps not. Unless you did exit polling, that’s impossible to prove. But I think it’s fair to assume that many more ban voters would have also voted for 2-4 if Opt-Out wasn’t so busy blasting that as a “sham.”
as for this….
Because RSFN stopped the ban, which was its number one objective.
RFSN won. Opt-Out lost. End of story.
@Greg why are you not blaming RSFN for urging their voters to vote against the Prohibitionist ban? If they didn’t want the 8+ stores, shouldn’t they have urged their voters to vote for the ban as a backup in case the 2-4 store limit failed?
Right again, Sarah!
What is clear from this discussion is that the option of 8+ stores had the least support and yet still won. Let’s get specific on the City Councilors who brought us the flawed ballot structure that pre-ordained this undemocratic result. The following City Councilors, at the urging of the Mayor who threatened to veto a one-question ballot, voted to keep two competing questions on the ballot:
Susan Albright
Barbara Brousal-Glaser
Deb Crossley
Vicki Danberg
Andrae Downs
Maria Greenberg
Rebecca Grossman
Josh Krintzman
Alison Leary
Christopher Markiewicz
Brenda Noel
They had a chance to rectify this when Greg Schwartz offered an amendment to impose an if/then structure which would have allowed voters to decide if they wanted a ban, and if not then do they want 2-4 or 8 stores. All of the above councilors except Markiewicz voted down that more rational structure, and Lenny Gentile voted it down as well. (Lenny Gentile may have been tired/confused when he cast that vote. He has told his constituents that he has been consistently against having pot shops. Unfortunately, not on that critical vote.)
Regardless of the result you preferred, all voters should be appalled at a situation where the ballot was essentially rigged in favor of one outcome in the name of “voter choice.”
Perhaps this post should be better placed on the “And Now to the Next Election” thread since voters should take the above into account when they vote for all city councilors in 2019. Hopefully new people will run for office so that voters will have a real choice — and will hold the Councillors who gave us this mess accountable.
Greg — OON’s real “rookie mistake” was ever thinking that the City Council propot clique — or Mayor— ever wanted a clear and unambiguous articulation of the voters’ desires on Local Control.
Wow. What a theatre of the absurd this discussion has become.
Greg – I don’t know how you do not lose your mind reading this stuff.
Greg,
RFSN lost actually. Our (at least my) objective was to get limits and put City Council in control of administering those limits. Opt Out Newton was successful in its goal of preventing a compromise coalition. It achieved one of its two objectives.
@Dulles: Yes you favored 2-4 but what was your second choice? A ban or eight stores?
Some here are quick to blame Opt Out for the fact that the least popular option won and yet they leave RSFN and RTV and the city council blameless in this whole affair. Let’s take a look at the “blameless theory”:
1. RSFN and RTV falsely claimed that opt out was trying to re-vote something we had already voted on three times when Question 4 clearly gave each town the right to vote on local control.
2. They tried to tarnish Opt Out as an underhanded group by blaming the whole group for things individual citizens may or may not have said or done.
3. RSFN claimed to be a grassroots organization yet they fail to mention that they benefited from a second RTV ballot committee, financed by marijuana stores, that spent heavily to support their shared position against the ban.
4. Opt Out had legitimate reasons to call the 2-4 option a “sham” when the city council was under no obligation to honor the so-called “limit” either now or in the future.
5. Many here are in denial about the fact that the least popular option won since that was their preferred outcome, and seem to have little concern that it was pushed by corporate interests.
Jesse: Please reread my original post.
Actually it’s Opt-Out supporters who are trying to blame the mayor and city council. I never “blamed” Opt-Out, I just suggested that their strategy was a gamble that they did not win.
The 2016 law won at the ballot box THREE times, but the prohibitionists keep calling it the “least popular option.” Clearly it was the MOST popular option since it won three times…
The prohibitionists also claim the mayor and a majority of the city council supported keeping the 2016 law. This is a demonstrable misstatement of historical fact.
It’s hard for me to understand why this discussion is still going on. The vote is over. The ban lost. The 2-4 limits lost. The 2016 vote to have adult marijuana stores won. I wish the “regulate it like alcohol” had also won but I’m fine with the zoning ordinance going forward.
I voted no on both questions – treating them as two individual ballot questions as intended and I got what I wanted – 8, or as many applications up to 8 that actually are granted special permits, retail marijuana stores in Newton. Clearly the most popular option won. No ban. No limits.
Sarah, when you say “@Greg why are you not blaming RSFN for urging their voters to vote against the Prohibitionist ban? If they didn’t want the 8+ stores, shouldn’t they have urged their voters to vote for the ban as a backup in case the 2-4 store limit failed?” You totally miss the point.
Because it would have been totally against their mission which was first and foremost to vote NO on the ban!
No, there’s not. Let’s move on.
All of this other hogwash is just that.
The side that did not win at the ballot box looking for someone to blame other than recognizing that their methods and their message was not what voters wanted. It’s becime typical to blame the side that won or other made up forces that thwarted them instead of accepting any responsibility.
If you cannot just stand up and admit that a ban of recreational marijuana stores was not wanted in Newton, then at least just accept that it’s over. Nothing – not your opinion or your made up conspiracy theories – will get you anywhere.
There are other issues in Newton. I’m sure you can find something else you want to badger residents about – another ban perhaps.
Oh. My. Goodness. The ONLY thing that caused Opt Out to fail is that more people voted against it than voted for it. That’s it. The vote wasn’t “split” because the 2 questions were independent. You needed to get more people to vote Yes than No on your question to win. You didn’t – you focused on game theory and calling 2-4 a “sham”. Game over.
@Greg, you’re right, rather 8 than ban. People for limits explicitly voted against the ban, just like people for the ban explicitly voted against limits.
Reading between the lines, I think one belief is that if compromise had been removed from the ballot, “8 stores! 8 stores! 8 stores!” could’ve been the rallying cry to flip another 5% or so of the vote. One of several “if things had been different, we would’ve won” scenarios.
The fault lies on Newton residents and city leadership who listened to both sides and tried to find common ground that was not a ban. How dare we/they?
Wow. Jessie – OON put up a sign calling the position of citizens who disagreed with them a “sham”. The message simply didn’t wear well over time. You were within your right to use a derogatory term like that on a lawn sign, but it wasn’t the wisest political decision.
RFSN did not engage in a campaign that included personal attacks. I have no idea where you are coming from on that. We were very clear from the get-go that we would run a fact based campaign, using local and MA state documents that outlined how shops would be regulated.
We used the regulations developed by the Cannabis Control Commission and Newton’s Planning Department zoning recommendations to answer questions related to locations, edibles, and other issues. Most importantly, we focused our campaign on the ballot question – why a ban was a bad idea for the city and why the 2 to 4 limits made sense.
RFSN never denied that OON had the right to collect the signatures to get a question on the ballot. I personally never understood why the organization didn’t realize that another question would be on the ballot when it had been approved by the city council just 7 weeks before. Why did OON think the city council was going to remove a ballot question it had very recently approved? I’ve never understood that one.
Whenever an election is focused on changing an industry, you should assume that the industry will form a ballot committee. Who do you think funded the No on Question #1? The healthcare industry put millions of dollars to defeat that question. Several years ago, a referendum question to allow alcohol to be sold in supermarkets was on the ballot. Guess who funded the No campaign? The alcohol industry. The referendum question that would have raised the charter school cap in 2016 was funded by out of state Wall Street hedge fund managers and the Walton family to the tune of $18 million. They ran one of the worst campaigns ever and lost so money doesn’t guarantee a win.
Everyone on the steering committee and a small group of volunteers worked extremely hard on this campaign. It was a 24/7 effort for eight weeks. We used completely different campaign strategies from OON, but to imply that we weren’t all in on this campaign is erroneous. We presented before every group who would have us – area councils, Newton Dems and Republicans, LWV – any group having a meeting from Sept. 11-Nov. 6. We canvassed. We phoned. We had countless conversations with people throughout the city.
The major advantage RFSN had over OON was a steering committee whose members had been involved in many local campaigns over the years. We used the knowledge gained from past experiences to run an efficient campaign that communicated our basic message to the community in a short period of time.
@Jessie M,
You believed point #4?
The city can only reduce the cap below 8 by ballot question. The city decided one option to put on the ballot was to limit (2-4 shops), the other option brought to ballot was to ban (0 shops). Both used the exact same legal mechanism, the only difference was in the number of stores: 2-4 (limit) or 0 (ban).
In theory, the Council could raise the cap above 0 or above 2-4 without going back to the voters. But the City Council takes the will of the voters very seriously. That’s why it instructed Opt Out Newton to collect 6,000 signatures to put its question on the ballot, because Opt Out reversed part of Question 4. Whether the cap was 0 or 2-4, I firmly believe the Council would have let it stand.
Once again, I think saying that Opt Out people voted yes on 2-4 is incorrect. I think the votes for yes on 2-4 were either from people who wanted shops, but wanted less than 8, or from people like me who did NOT want a ban, but who voted yes on 2-4 as a hedge in case OON got a higher proportion of votes (over 50% ) than 2-4 did. I knew that the council could increase the number past 2-4, but voted yes on 2-4 ONLY because it would allow some shops, and not ZERO shops as OON would. Why would anyone voting Yes on opt out vote for a limited number of shops? You either want some shops or no shops. Again, I only voted yes on 2-4 to hedge my bets against OON getting more than 50% of the vote.
Stupidest comment award from last night’s pitiful City Council meeting discussion on the size of pot shops under the proposed zoning code: Size needs to be sufficient to allow for lactation rooms. Credit: Allison Leary. More than idiotic.
No regard for the impact on the community and nearby residents. No concern that the proposed size is 2x+ the massive City Council Chamber.
No common sense!
Actually Abe the stupidest comment came from the city councilor who suggested that since 1800 plus people voted for the ban and 1800 plus voted for the 2-4 limits that meant 3600 voters wanted either a ban or a limit (vs the 20,000 plus who wanted no limits.)
@Abe Zoe–your anger is misplaced. A 20 square foot lactation room will not make a difference. Have some empathy!
Correct, Mike Singer.
The point is that she was, as always, missing the forest for the tree huggers
@Greg: Who said that?
Councilor Cote.
The problem with Councilor Cote’s math is that 40,802 voters pulled municipal ballots for the marijuana questions. 21,764 voted against any limits. That leaves 19,038 who didn’t.
There is no way to interpret that as meaning anything other than “no ban” was the voters’ preference.
I think the debate is moot as the votes didn’t authorize a ban or a 2-4 limit. CC has to go forward with stores.
I think OON’s point is that voters went into the booth with 1 of 3 preferences. For round numbers, let’s say there were 10 voters.
8 wanted limits
2 wanted no limits
Of the 8 wanting limits, 4 wanted ban and 4 wanted 2-4.
Let’s say the limiters follow the ballot committee instructions and do NOT hedge their votes by voting yes on other question:
Then the votes go as:
Opt-out: 4 Yes, 6 No (defeated)
2-4: 4 Yes, 6 No (defeated)
If the ban hadn’t been on the ballot, there is a good chance 2-4 would have passed (opt-out folks plus some concerned with scale and their neighborhoods)
On the other hand, would the ban have passed without 2-4? Seem’s less likely, but probably something only the strategy firm knows for sure.
And in any event, what is clear is that a very significant segment of the community has legitimately concerns and their concerns are being wholesale disregarded by the propot faction of the City Council.
The City Council should be attempting to create a balanced approach and represent ALL residents, not just concern themselves with how to bend over backwards and prioritize catering to the wants and preferences of pot shop investors which was what was demonstrated repeatedly in the discussion at Monday’s City Council meeting.
@abe zoe – I don’t get your point.
If the Opt-out ban had passed would you be arguing that a very significant segment of the community voted against it, and that Council imposing a ban is disregarding their concerns and that we should open a few pot shops.
We voted, we waited two years, we voted again. The voters of the city have expressed their clear preference on the matter, in nearly identical numbers twice.
The city said they would need until Sept to figure out the zoning. It’s now nearly December. It’s time to license the shops and move on.
We had an election. The ban lost. Move on.