Innisfil residents learned more about medical marijuana production facilities in the town during an open house Thursday evening.Proposed changes to the town's zoning regulations – which will govern the location of the facilities – are being considered by council, which is gathering public input on the issue. A statutory public meeting about the facilities will be held Wednesday, Feb. 18 before any changes to the zoning take place, likely in March.Don Eastwood, acting manager of land-use planning, said the open house was one of a series of steps that began last year when a report was brought to council because of changes brought in by the federal government.Changes to the 2001 Medical Marijuana Regulations, which came into effect on April 1, 2014, will rescind personal licences granted to medical marijuana users, now numbered at about 40,000, which allowed them to grow marijuana for personal use.Instead, facilities are to be licensed by Health Canada for the legalized growing, processing, testing, storing and shipping of the drug to those with medical prescriptions."It has removed the discretion of the town to say yes or no to the locating of a medical marijuana facility," Eastwood said said. "We're not involved in issuing a licence, the federal government is. The municipalities have been told 'you can't say yes or no, you can say where'."Requirements for a federal licence state a facility must be located entirely indoors, have a high level of monitoring and security, and an air filtration system to ensure that no odors escape. They must be designed to minimize environmental impact and ship directly to registered customers, with no retail sales permitted. No signage advertising the nature of the business is to be used.The town is considering whether the operations would be agricultural or industrial and what the minimum distance should be from other land uses, including sensitive uses such as a residential areas, daycares or school.Innisfil's draft proposal suggests the facilities be classified as industrial.Policy planner Paul Pentikainenn said the buildings can be over 100,000-square-feet in size and that there is no justification for taking that amount of agricultural land out of production."In an industrial area, the producer could occupy vacant industrial buildings," Pentikainen said, adding industrial areas also provide a greater level of security, more traffic, and access to municipal services.Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) member Leah Emms argued against zoning medical marijuana as an industrial – and not an agricultural – use."I don't understand how this is a pharmaceutical process," she said. "You're growing, you're drying, there's no value added.""It's the processing, it's the testing in a laboratory environment," Pentikainen said, in addition to storage, packaging and shipping functions."It approaches the kind of process and method in a pharmaceutical plant," Eastwood said.Residents heard the minimum separation for the facilities is 70-metres — a standard already established by the province – but that attempts by some municipalities to demand a greater separation from sensitive uses have been met by threats of a challenge to the Ontario Municipal Board.Coun. Doug Lougheed questioned limiting the production facilities to serviced areas.He said many agricultural operations – including chicken farms and livestock herds – have large water capacity with private wells, probably higher than would be required by a medical marijuana operation.He also asked for better mapping that would allow residents to see at a glance if they fell within the 70-metre exclusion zone.Cookstown resident Sarah Currie urged the town to set the separation from sensitive uses as 70 metres "lot to lot, not from the building to the residence.""We're not going to have a choice," said resident Diane Sykes. "It's a matter of doing it right. We're going to have (a licensed facility) whether we like it or not."Eastwood said residents are encouraged to voice their opinions and make suggestions by written comments, e-mail, phone and social media or through their member of council."We're very much in the process of gathering information. We admit we have not thought of everything," he said.News Moderator: Jacob Redmond 420 MAGAZINE ® Full Article: Medical pot talk surfaces | Barrie Examiner Author: Miriam KingContact: miriam.king@sunmedia.ca Photo Credit: Canadian Made Cannabis Health JournalWebsite: Barrie Examiner