St. Louis County, MN Cannabis Regulations: Buffer Zones (2026)

Section 5 of Cannabis Ordinance 68 sets the county's siting buffers by adopting the distances fixed in Minn. Stat. § 342.13(c) (2024): a cannabis business cannot operate within 1,000 feet of a school, or within 500 feet of a licensed day care, a residential treatment facility, or an attraction within a public park that minors regularly use, including a playground or athletic field. The Department of Planning and Zoning measures these distances when it reviews a land-use permit or performance-standard permit application under Section 7, and a site that falls inside a protected buffer cannot be certified for a cannabis business license regardless of the zoning district it sits in.

The buffer applies on top of, not instead of, the district-based siting rules in Section 7: retail cannabis operations are already confined to commercial (COM) districts and non-retail cultivation, manufacturing, and wholesale operations to limited-industrial (LI) districts under the county Zoning Ordinance, Ordinance Number 62. A parcel zoned COM or LI can still be disqualified if it sits inside one of the Section 5 buffers. As with the rest of Ordinance 68, Section 2 limits this buffer rule to land where St. Louis County itself exercises planning and zoning authority: the unincorporated county and townships without their own zoning controls. Duluth, Hibbing, Virginia, Eveleth, and other incorporated cities set their own buffer distances for cannabis businesses within city limits, separate from the county's 1,000-foot and 500-foot standards.