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A former Burger King in Woodstock, across the street from the new McHenry County Election Center and Woodstock Secretary of State’s Office, soon will be home to a marijuana dispensary.
The Woodstock City Council gave the enterprise its blessing Tuesday evening. While the dispensary vote wasn’t discussed at the meeting, Mayor Mike Turner thanked representatives of the operators, Terrabis, for their investment in Woodstock after the vote.
After the meeting, Turner said he believes “we should have an option” in town. Woodstock will tax the merchandise at 3%.
“For me, it was an easy vote,” Turner said.
Missouri-based Terrabis plans to open the cannabis store soon at the former fast food joint. However, people will need to exit their vehicles and walk into the dispensary as the drive-thru is planned to be taken out.
Matt Anderson, manager for real estate and business development for Terrabis, said the store was trying to open by the end of the year but expects opening day will be closer to February.
While the dispensary has a few locations up and running in Missouri, it is expanding in Illinois. Terrabis has a dispensary in Grayville in southern Illinois near the Indiana border that opened last year. A second Illinois dispensary is scheduled to open in Plainfield this fall and the company last month announced it would open a third Illinois dispensary in Dixon later this year.
Anderson said Woodstock has been great to work with and “the city kind of wanted” a dispensary.
“We’re excited to be here,” Anderson said.
Also on the agenda Tuesday was a cleanup of the city’s marijuana possession ordinance. The City Council in 2019 had voted to add language to the city code making it illegal to consume marijuana in public; the penalty is a fine of $500 to $750 plus prosecution fees, according to city documents. However, that change never made its way to the online city code, but officials fixed that oversight at Tuesday’s meeting.
Terrabis is not the first dispensary to be approved. City Manager Roscoe Stelford said he believes it will be the first dispensary to open within city limits.
Stelford said there are not any restrictions on the number of dispensaries in town. In November 2022, McHenry voted to cap the number of dispensaries there to one, but tax the merchandise at 3%.
Woodstock last year approved a dispensary for Michigan-based Six Labs, which also sought to build a cannabis campus in town, but Turner said that project hasn’t moved along. City documents indicate city staff reached out to Six Labs earlier this year and didn’t hear back. Attempts to reach Six Labs were unsuccessful.
Woodstock joins other McHenry County municipalities, including Lake in the Hills, McHenry and Crystal Lake in having a dispensary. Last year, McHenry County received almost $900,000 in tax revenue from dispensaries.
Smokehouse Dispensary, just over the Lake County line in Fox Lake, opened its doors at the end of July, while Nobo Dispensary is set to open soon in Lakemoor near the Woodman’s grocery store.