A ballot proposal to enact an ordinance to ban adult-use marijuana establishments in Benzonia Township has been removed from the Benzonia Township ballot by a court order.
The ballot item asked voters if they wanted Benzonia Township to craft an ordinance that would ban adult-use marijuana establishments within the township, and cited sections of the Michigan Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act as the legal framework to craft the ordinance.
There are four adult-use marijuana businesses in Benzonia Township. Lume was the first, opening in January 2020.
The petitions were circulated by Mary Haan. She said she was the sole petition collector in an interview with the Record Patriot.
It is the sixth time she has tried to put an item banning marijuana establishments in Benzonia Township on the ballot.
The order came after a hearing on Sept. 3 in the 19th Circuit Court of Benzie County. Judge David Thompson granted the plaintiff Prosperity for Benzonia a Writ of Mandamus stating the ballot items should not have been placed on the ballot.
A brief, filed on Aug. 19 on behalf of Prosperity for Benzonia by attorney Kevin Blair of Honigman Business Law Firm, says the ballot item is “predicated on petitions riddled with numerous fatal deficiencies, the result of which is that the petition sponsor simply failed to submit enough valid signatures for its proposal to be certified.”
The brief claimed the petition forms were worded in at least two differnet ways, interchanging the word “ordinance” and “ordinances,” as well as “Benzonia Township” and “Benzonia Townships.”
It also said there was no copy of the proposed ordinance on the petition form, only a concept.
“The conceptual proposal language on the Haan petitions cannot possibly be deemed to constitute the requisite actual ordinance because it varies amongst petition sheets, and no iteration garnered enough signatures to appear on the ballot,” reads the brief.
Blair said in an interview with the Record Patriot that he was pleased with the judge’s ruling.
“The ruling confirmed that this does not belong on the ballot and ineligible to be printed on the ballot because it does not conform with Michigan election laws,” he said.
According to court records, a similar ballot item initiated by Haan was removed by a court order in 2022. Benzonia for Prosperity was the plaintiff in that case as well.
Haan brought a lawsuit against Benzonia Township in 2021 for not putting a similar proposal on the 2020 ballot.
Haan said not only was she not notified that there was a hearing being held on Sept. 3, but that the voters of Benzonia Township are being circumvented.
“If a citizen hadn’t walked into Benzonia Township and asked about the marijuana petition being on the ballot and alerted by the township clerk that it had been scrubbed, we never would have known anything,” Haan said. “Our rights as a circulator certainly were pushed aside.”
She said the people behind Prosperity for Benzonia will “do anything” to keep people from voting on the issue.
This story was written by Colin Merry,