[420 Girl]

San Bernardino County is proposing to extend a moratorium on new medical marijuana dispensaries for almost a year while planners put together zoning and licensing rules.

The Board of Supervisors, which approved a 45-day moratorium June 23, will consider a proposal today to extend the moratorium to June 19, 2010.

The moratorium is due to expire Friday.

County planning staff needs more time to put together guidelines for regulating retail outlets that sell medical marijuana to patients, Julie Rynerson Rock, the county's land use services director, told the board. Planners are studying zoning and permit rules in other jurisdictions, she said.

The ordinance, which will likely involve an amendment to the county's development code, must go before the planning commission for review before the board adopts it.

The extension will provide more time to complete the review and come back with a final recommendation, Rynerson Rock said. She said she doesn't expect the review to take until June and hopes to have a proposal before the commission before the end of the year.

The moratorium would expire if an ordinance is approved before the June 19 date.

Ryan Michaels, director of the Inland Empire Patients Group, a Bloomington collective that opened a day before the board enacted its moratorium, said he hoped the county would act sooner.

"It now appears if they're going to delay for another year, the process is going to slow down," he said. "In the meantime, seriously ill and dying patients go without because of a zoning issue."

Michaels said he believes his collective is free to operate because it opened before the moratorium, although Rynerson Rock disagrees. The county, however, has not attempted to shut it down.

A group called the Inland Valley Drug Free Coalition is lobbying supervisors through an e-mail campaign not to allow dispensaries to open shop in the county. The group says the county isn't obligated to allow marijuana to be sold just because it issues patient identification cards.

Several Inland cities already have banned or enacted moratoriums against dispensaries, including Colton, Highland and Yucaipa.

The moratorium will not affect the county's issuance of medical marijuana patient identification cards, which is scheduled to begin Aug. 14.

The county agreed in June to begin providing the cards after it lost its three-year legal challenge to the state's medical marijuana law.

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