ARLINGTON — The Arlington City Council cast votes Feb. 1 on marijuana laws and lodging tax distribution, and the controversial vote was not necessarily the one you might suspect.

With Debora Nelson out, only six council members were left, but they voted unanimously to approve revising the city’s laws governing marijuana producers and processors.

Revisions were already needed, because the city’s cap on the number of producers and processors it would allow (14) had expired at the end of last year.

The council’s Monday vote also relaxed its limits on those businesses’ canopy sizes — 10,000 square feet for producers or processors, or 15,000 square feet for combined producer/processors — and instead defaulted to the state standard of 30,000 square feet.

“The conclusion we came to was that we as a city didn’t need to be so strict, since the state is taking more of an active hand in fine-tuning its rules,” said council member Jesica Stickles, who noted that the state had finally formed a marijuana control board, after allowing the state alcohol control board to regulate marijuana. “We simply wouldn’t be able to do the amount of research that they are into this, so it doesn’t make sense to try and come up with our own guidelines.”

It was on the issue of this year’s lodging tax grant awards that Stickles and Sue Weiss broke with the rest of the council, splitting the vote 4-2 in favor of funding 13 applicants with a total of $129,000.

Stickles explained that she and Weiss went against the Lodging Tax Advisory Committee’s recommendations not because of any qualms with their recipients, but because they harbored misgiving over the amounts the applicants would receive, as well as the process by which those amounts were determined.

She elaborated that the city has been collecting lodging tax revenues to use for tourist promotions since 2005, but it had previously fallen under the county’s purview.

“We did think the city regs were specific enough about how projects could qualify,” Stickles said. “It used to be a heads-and-beds thing, where we’d bring folks in, collect tax revenues from them, and channel them into projects that would bring more folks in. Our current wording needs to be clearer.”

Without any members of the committee or the pool of approved applicants in attendance, Stickles was left with no answers to her questions.

The groups included the Arlington-Smokey Point Chamber of Commerce, the Arlington Arts Council, the Arlington Fly-In, the Downtown Arlington Business Association, the Northwest Genealogy Society, Vision for a Cure, the Wounded Warriors project, and the city’s parks and recreation department.

“They’re all deserving of funding, and they all have fantastic ideas,” Stickles said. “It’s just the metric by which they’re awarded that needs to be looked at.”

Stickles expressed optimism that the council would be able to address this issue during a retreat that’s been tentatively scheduled for April.