Dade Passes Ordinance Against Methadone Clinic; Hancock Says She’ll Fight

  • Thursday, March 10, 2011
  • Robin Ford Wallace
Melissa and Scott Hancock plan to open an opiate addiction treatment facility in Wildwood, but the Dade County Commission has passed a
land-use ordinance to nix it. Click to enlarge.
Melissa and Scott Hancock plan to open an opiate addiction treatment facility in Wildwood, but the Dade County Commission has passed a land-use ordinance to nix it. Click to enlarge.
photo by Robin Ford Wallace

The Dade County Commission at its regular March meeting Thursday night adopted a land-use ordinance aimed at excluding a methadone treatment clinic proposed at last month’s meeting, but the clinic’s would-be proprietress says she’ll fight.

“Originally they said I had to do three community meetings, which I was fine with,” said Melissa Hancock of Rossville. “That’s what bothers me, is there were no laws or ordinances, and then after I proposed this – yeah, I feel like I’m getting railroaded. Now they’re saying no way.”

Ms. Hancock and her husband, Scott, appeared before the commission Feb. 3 to present their plan to establish an opiate addiction clinic in Wildwood and to ask Robin Rogers, the county attorney, if there was any legal barrier to doing so.

At that point, Mr. Rogers said no, but the question, posed as it was in the public forum, was enough to start a chain of reactions that ended in the creation of just such a barrier.

Commission Chairman Ted Rumley, saying he and the other commissioners had been deluged with phone calls from citizens opposed to the clinic, held a special called meeting last week to adopt a resolution against it and to ask Mr. Rogers to draft an ordinance prohibiting such facilities in the county.

Ms. Hancock said that the negative reaction was probably because of misunderstanding and fear that such a clinic would flood the county with junkies. “Some people don’t want to admit or don’t want to know, but normally what you see coming to these clinics are your middle-class people. It’s not homeless people. They’re paying for this,” she said.

She said people associate methadone treatment with heroin addiction, but actually what methadone clinics are more likely to see these days is oxycodone, hydrocodone and Oxycontin problems, of which Dade has its share. “People don’t want to acknowledge that there is a drug problem,” she said. “I’m offering a solution to this drug problem.”

Ms. Hancock says she has not retained an attorney but has sought legal guidance informally. And since news broke last week of the resolution against the clinic, questions have been raised about the intrinsic legality of the ordinance.

But first, the ordinance itself:

Robin Rogers at the commission meeting explained that it was not possible under the law to forbid methadone clinics from existing but that they could be what he called “regulated sternly” – as, he said, could hazard waste facilities and landfills, which currently the county had no ordinance for on the books.

“So I prepared a land-use ordinance that requires a special permit use for those two entities, one being the hazardous waste-slash-landfill operation and where it may be located,” he said. “The other special-permit use is for the placement of a drug or alcohol rehab facility, including methadone clinics.”

Rather than prohibit the unwanted facilities absolutely, said the attorney, the ordinance establishes buffer zones of how far away they must be from houses, churches or other buildings.

Commissioner Rumley asked that the zones in the drafted ordinance be increased for the final version, and District 2 Commissioner Scottie Pittman asked if there were a maximum distance. Mr. Rogers replied that the law requires the buffer zone to be reasonably related to the purpose – in other words, 10 miles from the closest house or church was too far.

Mr. Rogers also said that the ordinance required the appointment of a land use officer and an appeals board for administration and oversight. Commissioner Rumley said the land use officer need not be a new position and that the commission itself would hear appeals. “We represent the people,” he said. “They’re our bosses.”

Mr. Rogers further suggested reorganizing several of the county’s standing ordinances, such as ones forbidding massage parlors and adult entertainment outlets, respectively, to put them under the same governance. Previously, he said, the county didn’t really have a good way to manage them. “In my mind, it makes sense to put all those ordinances under this, since they’re kind of headed in the same direction,” he said.

And he admonished the commission to look carefully at that direction: “In one sense, you’re restricting what someone can do with their property, and you need to be sure that what we’re doing accomplishes the public purpose as well as makes it possible to protect the private purpose,” said Mr. Rogers.

He said that governments needed to look carefully at a list of factors in deciding what and how to regulate. “It’s a balancing test,” he said.

If Mr. Rogers seemed to be skating with lawyerly prudence around the “Z-word,” it did once escape his lips as he explained the ordinance to the commission. “In a typical sort of zoning statute” – he began.

But Rumley interrupted before the sentence could grow to maturity. “We’re not going to zone,” he said. “I don’t even want to bring the word up, ‘zoning.’ We want this to be kept out of Dade County unincorporated, which we have authority to do.”

District 3 Commissioner Robert Goff interceded to clarify that the commission was not trying to impose zoning on the citizens of Dade but to protect them from something they had made it abundantly clear they did not want. “Unfortunately, sometimes you can’t have it both ways,” he said. “There’s things that we may not like but we deal with, but there’s some things that it just is apparent to me that nobody wants and nobody thinks we should have in the county, and this is one of them.”

Mitchell Smith, in whose District 1 the Hancocks proposed to put their methadone clinic, said the Wildwood area did not have the infrastructure to deal even with the car traffic such a facility would bring; and Sheriff Patrick Cannon also spoke against the clinic with some feeling. “In law enforcement, we have a tough enough job getting all the drug dealers and addicts off the street as it is,” he said. “We don’t need to bring someone else’s problems to our county.”

The land-use ordinance passed easily, with only a few amendments and corrections suggested, and the commission set another special called meeting for 6 p.m. on March 31 for the second reading to make it final. Unless, that is, there is some legal barrier to doing so.

Asked Monday whether the ordinance was legal, Ted Rumley referred the question to the county attorney, Mr. Rogers, who refused to comment. So for an answer we look to another Dade County legal mind, attorney John Emmett.

Mr. Emmett would not venture to pronounce on the legality of the ordinance, which he had not seen, but said it wouldn’t surprise him at all if county commissions passed ordinances that were not permissible under the law. “County commissions do what is politically expedient,” he said.

Referencing the Prohibition era and to current laws that still keep some counties “dry,” Emmett said governments constantly struggled with what they could ban to please voters and what they had to put up with under the law. “That is the age-old question,” he said.

The specific question in this case, he said, was whether anyone would mount a legal challenge to the ordinance.

Ms. Hancock has not specifically said she would do so, but she made it clear Friday she was still in the fight. “We’re really not planning to give up,” she said.

And she will continue to try to make her side heard, she said. “Even you and I are one day away from where they (her prospective clients) are,” she said. “We could have a car accident, have to have a back surgery, be prescribed oxycodone for six months, get hooked, and then your doctor stops prescribing them. What do you do?”

Robin Ford Wallace
robinfordwallace@tvn.net

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