Kankakee committee backs six-month moratorium on standalone tobacco/smoke shops

The Kankakee City Licenses and Franchise Committee voted to recommend a six-month moratorium on new business licenses for standalone tobacco and smoke shops and to send the proposal to the mayor’s office and full City Council for formal consideration.

The moratorium — approved in a roll-call committee vote with seven ayes and no opposition — would apply only to businesses whose primary function is the sale of tobacco and related nicotine products, not to convenience stores, and would not apply to applicants who had already submitted a business license application. The committee asked the city legal department to prepare ordinance language, using Broadview’s existing licensing definitions as a model, and to return with a proposed definition and draft text for the council to consider.

Committee members said the temporary halt is intended to give staff and legal time to develop clear definitions and a licensing framework. Committee discussion focused on how to distinguish a convenience store from an exclusive tobacco shop: members debated using a percentage-of-sales threshold (examples discussed ranged from 10% to 30% ancillary tobacco revenue), a license-class scheme (class A/B), or a hard cap on the number of standalone tobacco shops. Several members noted Broadview’s model, which separates ancillary sales from primary tobacco retailers and caps the number of licenses, as a starting point.

Committee members also discussed local applications already in progress. Members clarified that the moratorium would not immediately prevent businesses with active, pending applications from moving forward, and that any moratorium would take effect only after full Council adoption. The committee discussed allowing the two applications that were reportedly in process to proceed if they met requirements, and suggested a possible cap of five standalone tobacco licenses, with attrition-based limits (no replacement when a license is relinquished) if the city moved forward with a cap.

The committee directed staff to: provide paper copies of existing city definitions (for example, recent changes to liquor-service and service station definitions), gather sample definitions from other municipalities, and survey existing local retailers (service stations, convenience stores) for their tobacco-sales percentage to inform a sales-threshold option. The committee asked the mayor’s office to transmit the moratorium proposal to legal to draft the ordinance and noted the legal office is currently handling a heavy workload.

The committee formally recorded the vote in favor of recommending a six-month moratorium and will forward the recommendation and proposed ordinance language to the mayor’s office and the full City Council for a final decision.