In a blue-collar town north of Detroit, the city council’s latest meeting echoed debates simmering at countless city and township halls, over what some call a curse and others a blessing: legal marijuana.

Earlier this month, the elected leaders of Madison Heights exchanged opposing views about letting marijuana businesses bloom in their industrial districts. But even with Madison Heights' council split 4-3, the slim majority is ready to welcome commercialization of the drug, Mayor Brian Hartwell said.

“We still have to hold a public hearing, but a majority on council feels strongly that we can overcome the concerns you keep hearing, and we think this will really help our city,” Hartwell said.

A few miles northwest, in upscale Birmingham, where the median household income of $108,000 is nearly triple that of Madison Heights, officials voted in mid-November to zone out commercial marijuana. That decision came less than a week after Michigan voters, including those in Birmingham, approved legalizing recreational marijuana. The city's stance could change, but there’s no rush to reverse it, City Manager Joe Valentine said.

Birmingham's elected officials “plan to monitor how the legalization of marijuana in this state is handled, and we can assess at a later time if permitting facilities is in the best interest of the city,” Valentine said in an email.

Using the language of state law, prosperous Birmingham has chosen to “opt out” of commercial cannabis. In contrast, blue-collar Madison Heights expects to “opt in.”

That means allowing marijuana sales outlets and other commercial investment, at first only for medical marijuana but ultimately to include recreational products, Madison Heights officials said. It also means collecting the considerable local tax revenues that will accompany this new economy.

So, who else is opting out and who’s in? The Woodward Corridor communities of Oakland County reflect a general trend, statewide and nationwide, according to urban experts and others charting marijuana’s sea change in American culture.

Wealthy areas, like Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills and Troy, have voted to opt out. That fits with these communities' generally conservative political profiles.

In contrast, blue-collar bergs grasping for economic rebirth — including Madison Heights and Hazel Park — are likely to snatch the new investment. Both got a bright-green light in November from their left-leaning voters, who gave overwhelming support to legal marijuana.

Moderately affluent areas, like Ferndale and Royal Oak, are postponing the decision, despite having residents who also resoundingly approved legalizing marijuana.

In Ferndale, long a marijuana-friendly electorate, Mayor Dave Coulter has said he expected the city ultimately would opt-in after studying the issue. Still, the city lived through some law-enforcement trauma that marijuana brought, Coulter said, recalling a county-orchestrated police raid in Ferndale in 2010 that permanently closed one of Oakland County's first medical-marijuana dispensaries.

Huntington Woods is an outlier, where affluence doesn't translate to opting out, but where sheer lack of commercial space could lead to de facto opting out.

The small town beside the Detroit Zoo is almost entirely a bedroom community, with mere slivers of commercial space on its borders. The community boasts one of the region's highest median family incomes — more than $115,000 in 2015, according to SEMCOG — but along with that wealth comes a very liberal voting bloc, one that should be marijuana-friendly.

Still, the city's leaders "want to go slow and think about this carefully," City Commissioner Jules Olesman said. The city might eventually accept a dispensary or other cannabis facility, in principle, yet be unable to offer an appropriate site, Olesman said.

He added: "There's certainly a lot of vacant commercial space west of us" in Oak Park and at the south end of Berkley.

The Berkley City Commission is holding a town hall meeting on Feb. 19 to get resident feedback on whether the city should allow pot shops.

“We really want to engage our residents in this process so that as a council, we consider all available information before making this important decision,” Berkley Mayor Dan Terbrack said in the meeting announcement. “We want to make sure whatever decision we make is in the best interest of our city.”

In Royal Oak, city commissioners voted 4-3 in November to prohibit recreational marijuana establishments, while requesting that city planners solicit public comments to help plan for potentially reversing that decision this year. Online listings show two sites in the city that have been medical-marijuana sales outlets, although it's unclear whether they are still operating.

Hazel Park always figured to be a key player in the new cannabis economy, City Manager Ed Klobucher has said for years. And members of the Hazel Park City Council, in a town that bled jobs for decades, could hardly ignore their residents' emphatic thumbs up to legal marijuana in the November election, with a 75.1% margin of yes votes.

"I'm planning a study session in the near future," so that city council members can learn about how cannabis investment could come to town, Klobucher said this week.

Many of the "opt-in" and "opt-out" decisions are being written ostensibly to apply to medical-marijuana retailers, often called dispensaries. But city attorneys, mayors and economic planners generally agree: Once Michigan’s state regulators decide on how to implement new laws for recreational marijuana, many of the medical-marijuana dispensaries will seamlessly become retailers of the recreational drug as well.

For Madison Heights, the decision boils down to socio-economic needs outweighing the ideological objections to marijuana, and it follows from the wishes of voters expressed in November’s election, the city's mayor said.

“I view cities like Birmingham through a political lens," Hartwell said. "The Birmingham zoning scheme can’t support industry, so their politicians send a virtue signal to please their constituents” by rejecting marijuana investors.

“Our city was designed for industry, and our residents went on the record in 2008 and 2018 to directly deliver a message — we support marijuana. Clearly, they are going to be welcoming to having secure, professional, hidden marijuana businesses in our industrial zones,” he said. In November, Madison Heights voters approved legal marijuana with a 65.3% margin of yes votes.

A warm welcome to marijuana must come with strict caveats, Hartwell warned.

“Don’t expect anything like you saw on 8 Mile Road in Detroit to materialize here — there will be not one flashing green cross,” he said, referring to the symbol adopted by a string of dispensaries that once dotted Detroit’s border with Oakland County, in the early years of legalized medical marijuana in Michigan, when dispensaries opened in abundance in Detroit.

They did so because Detroit and Wayne County authorities were generally tolerant of the newly blossoming retailers, while suburban police -- especially in Oakland County -- consistently raided dispensaries north of 8 Mile.

Along Detroit's side of the dividing line, green crosses on dispensaries became so widespread that homeowner groups insisted they were hurting Motor City property values. That led to Detroit City Council passing an ordinance that strictly limited the number and locations of dispensaries without banning them altogether. The effect has been to vastly diminish the visibility of shops and green crosses on Detroit's borders.

But unlike the “opt-in” that occurred when the Detroit City Council officially accepted and regulated medical-marijuana shops, towns seeking to keep out recreational marijuana business must “opt out” by passing an ordinance, according to municipal attorneys and the Michigan Municipal League.

The League says no action is needed if a community wants to to allow recreational marijuana facilities, but "under this new act, every municipality is considered to be ‘in’ unless it takes specific action to opt out,” the organization advises on its website. It even provides sample "opt-out" ordinances, such as those of St. Clair Shores and Sterling Heights.

In Madison Heights, cannabis businesses will be strictly limited to a few industrial areas, positioned well away from churches, schools, day-care centers, residential neighborhoods and retail stores, Mayor Pro Tem Mark Bliss said. And unlike communities so desperate for traditional jobs they must dangle tax abatements and other incentives, Madison Heights can be picky about who gets a marijuana license to do business, Bliss said.

“We're only allowing two dispensaries, so we'll be able to pick the very best applicants" -- that is, those willing to make major investments, with the edge given to investors who renovate derelict properties, Bliss said.

"The prospect of seeing millions of dollars invested in buildings that have sat vacant here for five or 10 years should be very appealing, even to opponents" of legal marijuana, he said. Besides dispensaries, marijuana investors under the city's proposed ordinance could apply for licenses to process marijuana, or to operate grow houses, or for testing and transport businesses. All require separate licenses according to a new state law, said Bliss, who is marketing vice president for a technology start-up firm in Madison Heights.

Already, one prospective applicant for a marijuana business license in his city is planning a multi-million-dollar construction project, Bliss said. The licensing process will include police-conducted background checks, much like those required of would-be liquor licensees.

And zoning rules will be very similar to those for liquor stores, so that none of the marijuana businesses are close to schools, day-care centers, houses of worship or residential areas, Bliss added.

Madison Heights once had industrial zones studded with auto parts suppliers and metal fabricators. Now, after the nation's half a century of off-shoring and out-sourcing those jobs, it has one in five households at or below poverty level in Madison Heights (the median family income was $41,000 in 2015, according to SEMCOG). The city is a Rust Belt survivor, aching to reinvent itself. It has an avenue of trendy Asian diners, fresh acres of robotic fabricators for the defense and energy sectors, and --- now — investors ready to pounce on Michigan's leafy new Monopoly board.

In sharp contrast is Birmingham, hosting a negligible industrial base but jammed with luxury dining and shopping spots.The city boasts a high median household income (more than $108,000 in 2015, according to SEMCOG). And it shows no sign of needing entry-level jobs like "bud tenders," as sales clerks are called in dispensaries. In similar status are other well-to-do "opt-out" cities, including Troy, Northville, Allen Park and the city of Grosse Pointe.

Opponents of marijuana continue to voice long-standing fears — that marijuana stores and processing businesses will lure "criminal elements," addict local children as well as increase traffic deaths and erode community morals.

But proponents of legal cannabis say the experience of Colorado and other states, along with new research studies, are dispelling long-held fears about marijuana. Almost identical sentiments were voiced as alcohol Prohibition stumbled to its scatter-shot end in the early 1930s, first on a city-by-city and county-by-county basis around the nation, then with Michigan becoming the first entire state to repeal, according to online history pages of the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University.

Elsewhere in Michigan, far from Oakland County, decisions on whether to opt in or out are similarly taking place largely following the red versus blue pattern — that is, upper-class opposition versus working-class acceptance, said Tim Beck, a former employee health insurance executive in Detroit, now retired to a farm in western Michigan, and a long-time advocate of legal pot.

“The city of South Haven which is seven miles from me is pretty bourgeois and they don't like cannabis at all,” he said.

“On the other hand, the city of Bangor is seven miles east and it's a red-neck utopia. They now have a dispensary and will be opting in for more businesses down the road,” said Beck, who lives with his wife and several horses in Grand Junction.

A similar pattern occurred west of metro Detroit: Leaders in moderately affluent Pinckney in Livingston County voted to opt out immediately after the November election, while hard-scrabble Ypsilanti in Washtenaw County opted in months earlier.

Exceptions to the usual pattern — that of affluent professionals opting out while working-class stiffs opt in — include well-to-do Ann Arbor and Traverse City, both of which have opted in to allowing marijuana facilities in some form. In those liberal strongholds, Beck said, pro-marijuana political views clearly outweighed the linkage that exists elsewhere between wealth and moral opposition.

The opposite can be seen in those cities that have socially conservative electorates, yet which have moderate to low household incomes.

To outsiders, they might seem to need the economic boon of Michigan's coming cannabis economy, but their leaders thought otherwise, Beck said. Such locales include the "opt-out" surprises of Livonia, Pontiac and Monroe.

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Contact Bill Laitner: blaitner@freepress.com