County Councilmembers Jared Mead and Sam Low, and Snohomish County senior code enforcement officer Stephanie Lyon listen to an audience question during the Clearview meeting Tuesday, March 25.
Photo by Michael Whitney.
CLEARVIEW — A second marijuana retailer wanting to open along Highway 9 aroused not just a formal complaint to county officials filed by a competitor but also a room-filling meeting about the topic last week.
Hangar 420 recently filed papers to open at the corner of Highway 9 and 180th Street, sharing the yellow building that has Woodinville Saws & Mowers.
Another pot shop, The Kushery, vacated the building and relocated about a mile away.
The formal distance between the two is 1.1 miles. For the county’s current zoning rules, that’s too short. A change in 2023 reset the rule to require 10,000 feet -- just shy of 2 miles -- between shops in rural areas.
A county official said their office would intervene if Hangar 420 opens here.
Right now, it’s just remodeling being done in a building.
“I haven’t violated anything,” Patrick Gahan, the owner of Hangar 420, defended himself to the Clearview crowd last week.
But if Hangar 420 opens, “there will be a code violation” and the county prosecutor’s office would be called to file an injunction, county senior code enforcement officer Stephanie Lyon said at the meeting.
Gahan told a Tribune reporter he has a five-year lease for the spot. He didn’t have a firm answer if he’ll commit to open.
More than 50 people, almost all area residents, filled the Horseshoe Grange near the Y of Elliott Road and Broadway Avenue for the March 25 meeting. It featured County Council members Jared Mead and Sam Low, and Lyon from county code enforcement. The crowd was a small sliver of Clearview’s populace living in unincorporated Snohomish County on both sides of Highway 9 south of Lowell-Larimer Road.
The Clearview Community Association doesn’t want Highway 9 to “turn into Highway 99,” group secretary Lori McConnell said. They fought that fight about 10 years ago when no restrictions existed. Four pot shops lined this one mile. Council set a localized moratorium in 2015, with the four being allowed to stay through historical exemptions. Over time, some closed. The Kushery was the sole survivor.
The rules morphed over time, but Clearview’s moratorium was kept intact. In 2023, this all changed. A 10,000-foot buffer between shops was developed for all rural areas, and the Clearview moratorium lifted.
At the meeting, Gahan said his broker advised him the Highway 9 location met what was understood as the county’s 2,500-foot zoning rules by being 6,000 feet away from The Kushery’s Clearview store. Nobody would share with the Tribune the broker’s name.
“Nobody knew about the 10,000-foot rule,” Gahan said in a post-meeting interview.
Gahan also said the county isn’t following its own rules, giving an example along Highway 99 of two pot shops practically next to each other.
For all unincorporated urban areas, the buffer rule is 2,500 feet in county code.
Sam Guter, a state Liquor and Cannabis Board spokeswoman, said the state agency wouldn’t license operations at the Highway 9 location unless Hangar 420 meets all the zoning requirements, including local ones.
The state’s base rule is a 1,000-foot buffer between stores, with stipulations of larger buffers near schools, arcades, day cares, parks and other places with children. The state defers to local zoning rules before giving a licensee the final OK to operate at a location. It’s why in the past there have been odd cases of licensees that stalk spots in cities that fully prohibit retail — they’ll secure a good store location, then wait and hope the local ban ends.
The rural zoning rule’s architect County Councilman Jared Mead told the crowd he designed the new 10,000-foot buffer with the goal that there is no way for more than one marijuana shop to be allowed in Clearview.
Mead told the Tribune that The Kushery approached him in 2021 to find a way to allow them to relocate, which developed into the code change approved in 2023. Without the moratorium lifting, they were non-conforming and couldn’t legally move.
Lyon said the existing marijuana business’s location sets the 10,000-foot exclusion zone which no others can locate within.
The Kushery made its move in 2024, buying its own building with better parking when opportunity came up.
Sticky on rules
Leaders at The Kushery openly say they blew the whistle against Hangar 420 a couple of months ago, filing the complaint to the county and reaching out to County Councilmembers and the Clearview association.
“We’ve been following the letter of the law” for all this time, Josh Estes, a spokesman for The Kushery, said, “and to have a store move in and ‘take advantage’ is concerning.”
Hangar 420 got to this point after taking over the state marijuana license of Green Lady Marijuana, a closed store in Lynnwood. The liquor board approved the ownership change in mid-March. On March 22, Hangar 420 submitted papers to begin the process to move that license to the Clearview site at 180th and Highway 9.
Gahan said pursuing a Clearview location wouldn’t be to replace the Hangar 420 near Harvey Field in Snohomish. More recently Hangar 420 also grew by taking over a location in Lynnwood that was previously run as Puff N Chill.
