I attended the Jan. 10 Planning and Zoning meeting concerning stronger ordinances for detox facilities and sober homes in our community. It was a packed house, standing room only. Everyone who spoke had serious concerns about the lack of oversight and lack of strong regulations in our town.

The only administrative requirement that our town requires for a sober home to open up next to your home is a $50 business license. There are more regulations and code enforcement in this town for when someone puts a garage sale sign on the wrong street corner.

People shared, including myself, that other towns and cities did so much more, especially Prescott, which saw the proliferation of sober homes mushroom to 200 before they implemented stronger ordinances and more robust administrative requirements, including inspections, code enforcement, documentation requirements and limits on who can live in a sober home, just to name a few, to better weed out predatory sober homeowners.

There is so much more that Mayor Dickey and our Town staff can do to protect our residents, neighborhoods and even the vulnerable people who live in sober homes with commonsense, reasonable administrative requirements as we wait for the Planning and Zoning Commission to finish the hard work of crafting stronger ordinances for sober homes in our neighborhoods.

Whenever I have attended Town Council meetings and the topic of detox facilities and sober homes are discussed, the discussion always focuses on all of the things we can’t do. Apparently, we can do a lot more than what we’ve been told. Just look to other cities, especially Prescott.