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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Ferguson intervenes in dispute over pot

Attorney general gets OK of judge in Walla Walla case

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Walla Walla — State Attorney General Bob Ferguson has been given a green light to intervene in a lawsuit challenging Walla Walla County’s ban on recreational marijuana operations.

Columbia County Superior Court Judge Scott Gallina granted the attorney general’s motion to intervene in the case of LaGranja Farms versus Walla Walla County. The Land Use Petition Act seeks to halt the shutdown of LaGranja’s marijuana-growing operation and having its operators, Creston Rogerson and Mary Hansen, pay thousands of dollars in accumulating fines.

Gallina’s order, issued last week, said the court had found “the Attorney General has an interest grounded in a common question of law” presented in the case and that those interests were “sufficiently distinct from those of the county to warrant participation as a party.”

In his motion to intervene, Ferguson said his office has an interest in the case due to LaGranja’s claim that Walla Walla County’s ban is invalid because it is pre-empted by the law approved when voters passed Initiative 502.

“Evaluating this claim will require the Court to interpret I-502 and the 2015 amendatory acts (by the state Legislature) and determine whether … state law pre-empts local authority to adopt local ordinances prohibiting marijuana business,” Ferguson said in his motion. Since his office and other state agencies are assigned responsibilities relating to implementation of I-502, the attorney general has an interest in LaGranja’s lawsuit.

LaGranja’s lawsuit is the sixth court challenge to the authority of local governments to regulate or ban recreational marijuana businesses. In the five previous cases, Superior Court judges have ruled that nothing in the wording of I-502, approved by voters in 2012, prohibits local governments from banning or regulating marijuana operations.

Ferguson has said the court decisions agreed with an opinion issued by his office in January 2015 that I-502 did not prohibit the authority of local governments to regulate marijuana operations.

“My duty is to uphold the will of Washington voters,” he said through spokesman in his office. “The drafters of Initiative 502 could have included a provision requiring local jurisdictions to allow the sale of recreational marijuana, but they did not.”

Walla Walla County commissioners enacted a moratorium in September 2013 prohibiting marijuana operations in the county’s unincorporated areas. A year later, in November 2014, commissioners followed up with a permanent ban on marijuana production, processing and sales in the county.

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