George Rebane

In the comment stream to ‘Medical Marijuana Cultivation Initiative’ I suggested that a better marijuana ordinance for Nevada County should be developed through a more systematic process starting with laying out what are the criteria that the provisions of such an ordinance should satisfy.  A collection of such criteria are also known as a ‘utility function’ against which candidate ordinances or their several provisions can be evaluated.  To be clear, in a reasonable development process such a utility function or set of criteria are agreed upon by the parties that will draft the ordinance BEFORE they start writing the individual provisions.

In the figure below I illustrate an example of such criteria for a marijuana ordinance (as I promised to do in the referenced comment stream).  Readers may now comment on the adequacy of what I have offered and/or suggest modifications to it.  I will do my best to incorporate all such reasonable changes, and then we can see what kind of consensus can be had at this level of developing a better ordinance.  All should understand that if we can’t agree on what a good ordinance looks like, then we have no hope of agreeing on ANY fully fleshed out ordinance, and it’s back to politics as usual.  Going through this procedure should be illuminating (even in its rejection).