Good Hope City Planner Corey Harbison speaks during the Good Hope City Council's Aug. 23 meeting. 

The Good Hope City Council read an ordinance at last week’s meeting to establish a distance limit between certain businesses, and while the ordinance also appears to prohibit anyone in the city from owning or using fireworks, city leaders said that will not be the case in the final ordinance. 

Ordinance No. 017-2021, which was read at last week’s meeting and will be considered for adoption at the city council’s next meeting on Sept. 13, establishes limits on a few types of businesses in the city. 

If the ordinance is passed, no pharmacy can be built within 1,000 feet of another pharmacy — unless divided by a four-lane highway — and no manufactured home sales lot can be built within 1.5 miles of another lot. 

The ordinance also prohibits any new fireworks stores from being built in the city, and sets a 1.5 mile distance limit between existing stores.

The fireworks section of the ordinance also states “It shall be unlawful for any person to have, keep, store, use, manufacture, sell, or handle within the city or its police jurisdiction any pyrotechnics except as otherwise prohibited in this article.”

The exceptions listed next include current fireworks stores that are already in business in the city and are grandfathered in to the ordinance, as well as the distance limit of 1.5 miles that is set for those stores. 

City Planner Corey Harbison said the fireworks section of the ordinance has already been in place in the city for years, and the addition of the distance limits on pharmacies, manufactured home lots and fireworks stores is the portion that is being added. 

Technically, fireworks have been banned in the city since that ordinance was passed, but the city has never enforced that ordinance, and the council will be adding an additional exception to the ordinance to include private and personal use, he said. 

“We’ve never pushed for anything like that,” he said. 

Harbison said the current council may not be enforcing the ordinance, but a future mayor or council members may see the ordinance and decide to enforce it, so the council will be adding the new exception to prevent that from happening. 

Harbison said city residents who may be concerned about the ordinance don’t have to worry about their ability to shoot fireworks in their own yards, and business owners should not concerned about the distance limit because it will keep more fireworks stores from coming into the city. 

“If anything, we’re helping them,” he said. 

Good Hope’s current ordinance is almost a direct copy of the city of Cullman’s ordinance that prohibits anyone in the city from using fireworks. 

Cullman’s ordinance states “It shall be unlawful for any person to have, keep, store, use, manufacture, sell, or handle within the city or its police jurisdiction any pyrotechnics except as otherwise provided in this article; provided, however, nothing herein shall be held to apply to the possession or use of signaling devices by railroads, vessels, or others requiring them, or to the possession, sale or use of normal stock of flashlight compositions by photographers or dealers in photographic supplies.”

Cullman’s ordinance then goes on to list the same requirements as Good Hope’s ordinance for anyone wanting to put on a fireworks display.

In an email to The Times, Cullman Fire Marshal Chris Chaffin confirmed that the above ordinance does prohibit the possession or use of fireworks within Cullman’s city limits.