OTTAWA — Industrial-scale marijuana grow ops should be allowed in Ottawa’s industrial areas, city council’s planning committee agreed Tuesday, though councillors want to make sure you know how disreputable they think the whole idea of medicinal pot is.

The city needs zoning rules to say where the production facilities should be when a new regime from Health Canada kicks in April 1 that restricts medicinal marijuana production to heavily regulated private producers. The city has already heard from nine would-be producers, councillors heard from their top building-permit official Arlene Gregoire, and if nobody did anything they’d be allowed to set up in any agricultural zone — a designation that covers about 75 per cent of the city, including plenty of properties on the edges of suburbs and rural villages.

After months of work, the city’s urban planners proposed restricting the grow ops to industrial areas, as long as they aren’t within 150 metres of areas designated for residential uses or institutional ones, such as schools and community centres. That’s more than double the 70-metre buffer ordinarily required for “sensitive” land uses.

“It is intended to provide somewhat more comfort to members of the public,” explained city planner Carol Ruddy, and it’s the standard used in most of the American states that allow medicinal marijuana production.

Is it enough? several councillors wanted to know. What’s the biggest buffer zone anybody anywhere requires? Kanata South Coun. Allan Hubley asked her, because “maybe we should be looking to the high end instead of the medium.” He worried about smells and releases of “fumes” from accidental fires.

The biggest buffer any jurisdiction demands is a kilometre, Ruddy told him, but the planners consider that excessive. You can put a pharmaceutical plant — the most similar sort of a thing they could think of — 70 metres from houses. Nordion in Kanata, which processes radioactive materials, has a 70-metre buffer.

“This use is no dirtier, to be blunt, than any of the other uses that are permitted in an industrial zone,” Ruddy said.

If anything, Ruddy’s fellow planner Lee Ann Snedden put in, Health Canada’s strict rules for licensed grow ops will make them significantly less visible, audible and smellable than most things allowed in industrial zones. She grew up on a farm, Snedden said. She’s been married to farmers. Chickens, pigs and cattle smell. Plants really don’t. And whatever people might think of marijuana, medicinal or otherwise, this zoning change is about how growing plants in an industrial setting will affect neighbours.

Should the 150-metre buffer also apply to open-space zones like parks? Coun. Diane Deans suggested. Why? Snedden asked. It would mean “sterilizing” otherwise suitable industrial areas for no good reason.

What about traffic? Beacon Hill-Cyrville Coun. Tim Tierney asked. There shouldn’t be much, Ruddy said. The federal rules demand distribution only by licensed couriers, who’ll make pickups inside the buildings.