City Council - workshop

All right, friends, let's... We have... gathered today for a council workshop meeting. Subject will be smoke and vape shops. We are, I have called the meeting to order. This is a regular, well, it's not a regular schedule. It is a scheduled Greer City Council workshop called and convened this afternoon at 5.30. With that, I will call the meeting to order. And any opening remarks, Mr. Merriman, in regards to the workshop?

With that, then I will. Ask Mr. Booker if he wants to make an opening statement or remarks, and we will move forward with the workshop.

We certainly appreciate the heads-up, too, on the items that you just named. Just, I guess, as a personal question, is this – are you – Is this a personal issue in some regard to you? Are you working with an organization? Is this a council issue? I understand the regulations. What's behind those? That might help us frame this conversation as well, too.

So just for general information before we dive too deeply in, Could we possibly have someone from planning give us sort of the 10,000-foot view of regulations that we currently have in regards to smoke and vape shops and any information regarding signage and that thing? It might help shape our conversation. I know you're both looking at each other.

Well, I think for framing the conversation, it would be interesting to us because quite honestly, I,

I think there's a couple of issues at stake here in terms of the conversation as we move along. So not very detailed, but at least give us some information that may be relevant to the conversation that we'll have during this workshop.

Four is open for discussion. Thank you all. We appreciate it.

So just for comparison, liquor stores, vape shops, how do they look from a planning and zoning perspective?

I think there's been a number of valid points made this evening. I think this— This idea that there is certainly enforcement that can be stepped up in some regard.

Some of the other things are fairly easy. I think to the point about free enterprise, I am... hesitant about how we try to enforce that. I get the idea that there are different kinds of categories of businesses and we have debated that long and hard over the last 20 years on sexually oriented businesses, on tattoo parlors, on piercing places, on now vape and smoke shops and gummies and all that kind of stuff. I think one of the things that we do have to understand is that Wade Hampton, you probably have as much of Wade Hampton in your district as anybody does, probably more. And that seems to

Well, enforcement is a directive in some regards from this group, but there's also a tradeoff as well, too. You know, do we want to... Take police off the streets to, you know, enforce, you know, looking for people that are buying underage or that sort of thing. You heard... today that, you know, there are some issues that we can address with, you know, with additional people. So that becomes a budgeting question in some regard as we move forward.

I think it was a good point made earlier. Um, this is just one piece of the puzzle because I know that we have, um, people selling food out of their homes. We've got people that, you know, um, we've got unlicensed food trucks. We've got, you know, this is, this is a growing town with a lot of opportunities. And so, um, You know, we just got to figure out how we're going to address that with the resources that we have at this point. I know we get a monthly report of activity. How about y'all make a note to get back with us, let's say, 60 days from now and – Give us a little update on where we a

I think that from a law enforcement standpoint and from a code standpoint, just a visit to say we've had this conversation would go a long way. Okay. Any other thoughts or comments before I close the workshop? That concludes our workshop for this evening. We'll gather here in about another 10 or 15 minutes for our regular meeting.