Plans to construct a marijuana research and development facility at the former Nortel site at 250 Sidney St. may not be up in smoke.

However, until the Local Planning Appeal Tribunal (LPAT) hears Toronto Capital’s appeal of Belleville city council’s decision to turn down a request for a zoning bylaw amendment that would have cleared the way to build the facility, it could take awhile to sort things out. No date has been scheduled for a hearing.

Toronto Capital is the owner of the former Nortel building and the R & D facility would create upwards of 50 white lab-coat jobs, with the potential for many more. The company has plans to convert the Nortel site into two sections, a 60,000 sq.-ft. research and development, testing, labs and extraction facility plus a 45,000 sq.-ft. education centre. They have also been in preliminary discussions with Loyalist College on the education and training front.

Loyalist received approval from Health Canada for a controlled drugs and substances licence for the purpose of research and analysis using medical cannabis. Currently, Loyalist is the only college in Canada and the only Ontario academic institution to have a laboratory approved to conduct research activities with cannabis under the narcotic control regulations.

Just two weeks after council originally rejected the zoning bylaw amendment at its April 9 meeting, Loyalist announced it was launching an eight-month Cannabis Applied Science (CSGS) Ontario college post-graduate certificate program with funding approval by the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development.

Monday, Belleville city council voted not to direct the city solicitor to defend the city at the LPAT, which recently replaced the Ontario Municipal Board as the mechanism to review council decisions. Council turned down a request at its April 9 meeting for a zoning bylaw amendment that would have allowed the facility to be built.

Two weeks ago, it defeated a motion to reconsider that decision. By denying the request to direct the city solicitor to get involved, council has left staff to defend the decision and not contest the appeal. During discussion on the matter at Monday’s meeting, councillors had no interest in spending money to defend a decision many consider was the wrong one.

Coun. Mitch Panciuk said he hoped the tribunal rules against the city so it comes back to council to deal with again. “I don’t think we should pay a hefty legal fee to defend what I think was a mistake,” he said. “We should do the right thing now, and the right thing is not to spend more good money after bad.” Coun. Jackie Denyes, however, disagreed and said it was incumbent upon council to be represented by a lawyer at the hearing. “It’s a new form of appeal and due to the fact we haven’t gone through this appeal before I think it would be in our best interest to have legal representation,” she argued.

Coun. Paul Carr said the problem, both at planning and at council, was that the proposed facility operator was not in attendance to answer questions and deal with concerns. “The lawyer did his best, but he was not well enough versed in the operation,” Carr said. “And the reality is his presentation changed. I don’t see the need to spend money on the city solicitor to fight this. I voted in favour at planning. I voted in favour at council. I voted in favour for reconsideration. I can’t get more clear on how I think we should proceed on this.” Coun. Egerton Boyce, who tried to bring the issue back for reconsideration two weeks ago, said he was frustrated it was coming back to council.

He noted he warned council the decision would be appealed and the city would have to make a decision on how to fight it. “It bothers me we are looking at spending money on lawyers for this issue,” he said. “It frustrates me that this has gone this far.” One of the difficulties of staff defending the decision is that staff recommended council approve the rezoning.

As noted in the report to council, staff may be called to provide evidence in support of the application. Another complication is that under the city’s procedural bylaw, once it rejects reconsideration of a motion it has to wait a year to bring it forward again. City clerk Matt MacDonald said LPAT is a provincial body, whose rules usually supersede a municipal one.

He said should the tribunal send the issue back to council, council may have to move to waive its own procedural bylaws in order to deal with it. If the issue doesn’t come back to council before October’s municipal election, a new council could possibly deal with it immediately because it would not be bound by decisions of the old council.

The motion was defeated 6-2 in a recorded vote with Councillors Boyce, Panciuk, Carr, Garnett Thompson, Kelly McCaw and Jack Miller voting no, and Denyes and Mayor Taso Christopher voting in favour of having legal representation at LPAT. Coun. Mike Graham was absent from the meeting, In a related matter, council agreed to direct staff to prepare a Community Standards bylaw to regulate medical marijuana production facilities.

Denyes raised the issue of such a bylaw at the April 9 meeting, and she informed the planning committee, which she chairs, there are several cities and towns who have already established such bylaws, and said the May issue of Municipal World contains guidelines on how legalization will impact municipalities.

Bovay said it would take several weeks to prepare the bylaw, and the facility is slated to be on the agenda for the city’s planning meeting next Monday. “There is a provincial planning process we have to follow. Until we have the bylaw in place we have to take the rezoning requests as they come in,” Bovay said, noting because some communities have bylaws in place the city can use as a guide it should be quicker to develop the bylaw than if the city were doing it from scratch.