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Written by Peter Gabriel Keyes
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Thursday, 16 July 2009 20:10 |
In a controversial move that instantly criminalized several known local businesses, the Sacramento City Council passed a sweeping medical marijuana dispensary moratorium on Tuesday July 14th, 2009. The “emergency” ordinance is back dated nearly a month, creating a “grey area” of legality for dispensaries that opened between June 16th and July 14th, the day the ordinance took effect. Several dispensary representatives testified that the new law made their operations illegal, even though they had opened before the moratorium was voted on.
Keith Kimber of California Cannabis Inc. began the public speaker portion of the hearing. Kimber spoke in opposition to the moratorium. “Since the Obama announcement, my collective decided to become public,” said Kimber. “We’re not an actual open storefront dispensary. That’s one of my problems with this moratorium. It also affects individual patients who aren’t running actual storefront dispensaries. We followed the California attorney general guidelines to a T. They said, ‘Sometimes for operations as a collective sometimes it’s necessary to incorporate as a business.’ The Council has already decided to take a low-key approach. I really feel that this would be a disservice to existing patients.”
Entrepreneur Dan Senna revealed, “I’m a local business man. I’ve spent about 9 months reviewing all the possibilities of a dispensary, and have come to the conclusion that there is probably about 9 or 10 other businesses that support it. As a business opportunity, I’ve met with a local business partnership on Broadway. I have put together projections for businesses including an educational school called Oaksterdam University, and hydroponics store, legal aid, financial aid. They felt that the business model that I prepared for 1730 Broadway is a good example of what a dispensary could do if they provide all the services that I believe go hand-in-hand in supporting the industry. I applied for my license before the moratorium date. I would have applied earlier, but the process of buying a building, and rehabbing and spending the amount of money that we’re going to do to put all these businesses under one roof in a professional first-class environment takes a lot of time and money. Which I have done on Broadway, and I’m prepared to do. So the license that I have, based on your criteria with this moratorium, puts me at a standstill. I’m within 10 days of opening up a retail dispensary, and within 5 days of opening up a distribution center that has uniforms and cars for delivery and dispensing.”
Poised, calm and confident, Anthony Vasquez, Manager of River City Wellness Collective and Dispensary offered, “I was here at the last meeting when the moratorium was discussed. My clear understanding was that dispensaries that were open and operating would be allowed to continue to remain open during the moratorium process. But reviewing the report that the City Manager has produced, I noticed that if the dispensary was not operating at their current location as of the 16th of June they would not qualify. We obtained our corporation status from the Secretary of State March 30th, 2009, and we obtained a business license from the City of Sacramento on May 28th. We signed a lease to lease out a building on June 1st, and due to an eviction process we were not able to get possession of the building until the 24th - which leaves us missing that deadline by 8 days. We have been, for the last 3 weeks, up and operating. We have over 200 members. We are an asset to the community, and I’m kinda concerned at this point that we’ve invested a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of good will on this, and based on the report, we’re not gonna be allowed to operate. And I’m just wondering what’s gonna be done for similar people in my circumstance. I know I’m not alone in this.”
Mayor Kevin Johnson directed Assistant City Manager Gus Vina to “answer this question offline.”
 In a customarily long-winded speech, stalwart Sacramento medicinal cannabis advocate Ryan Landers took issue with the moratorium’s definition of dispensary. “I had warned Citrus Heights,” cautioned Landers, “and the wording is the same in this. And that is – 2 or more [people dispensed to equals a dispensary] and it includes patients and caregivers. So basically, if the caregiver is growing for a patient, that’s only a garden for one person, but they are disqualified under the dispensary definition. I brought it to their attention. I told them patients’ gardens, just a few patients growing together, would be eliminated under that. They didn’t change it, and within a few weeks code enforcement went to my friend’s house, who was growing for me and a couple other patients, and they gave him 7 days to destroy the garden. And they came back and reinspected. Which was completely illegal, but that’s what happens under this definition.”
Landers proposed, in writing, an alternative definition of dispensary where, “5 people could grow together, and if you’re more than 5 people, it’s a dispensary. That way you can have caregiving. That was what we had come up with on the Task Force with Sacramento County. To allow for patients to collectively grow.”
Landers also identified a local dispensary that will be negatively impacted by the moratorium. “I’ve worked to move several dispensaries for Council Members. I believe it was in your district, Mr. Cohn. ‘E’ Street, right by McKinley Park. I had asked them in December, and worked with them, and continually hounded them for a while, and got them to move and we got them out of that location. But they did reopen on the 1st, so what’s written here they would be disqualified. But they did move, and they did it for the community.”
Regarding Landers’ proposed dispensary definition change, Council Member Sandy Sheedy said, “This we’ll take a look at, but we can’t do anything with it this evening. So I’ll keep it, we’ll look at it when we do the stakeholder’s meetings, and have other public meetings.”
Landers replied, “The definition is in this ordinance. I’m more concerned with the definition going forward tonight, because we could have patient gardens destroyed in a matter of weeks if you approve this.”
Sheedy said, “Right, but tonight it’s just the emergency ordinance.”
Landers protested, “But the definition is in the urgency ordinance.”
Sheedy cut Landers off, “That hasn’t been vetted yet. O.K.? Thank you.”
Jesse Paquin, founder of “E” Street Health Center substantiated what Landers had said about his facility. “I first met Mr. Landers when we incorporated December, ’08, when we first started doing business,” informed Paquin. “Mr. Landers suggested from the very beginning that the location we were in probably wasn’t the best location for the type of business that we were. We’ve been actively looking for a new place. We’ve recently found one, and we had moved in there, basically in an attempt to cooperate with the City.”
Lanette Davies, one of the founders of the local dispensary Canna Care, spoke in favor of the moratorium, but against a numerical cap on dispensaries. Davies has more recently started introducing herself as a representative for Americans for Safe Access, a national medical marijuana advocacy group. “I would like to thank the city for taking this stance, for making Sacramento safe,” praised Davies. Continuing, she advised, “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel here in Sacramento. We have ordinances in other cities, like the Malibu ordinance. All the work’s already been done, so all we have to do is take a look, and create our own city’s.”
Leading the charge to move forward, Council Member Steve Cohn said, “I think it is time for the city to take this step to not only adopt this ordinance tonight, but more importantly announcing our intent and giving direction to staff to work on a more permanent ordinance by which we would actually permit and regulate. We need to be out in the open. We need to have it very clear where these types of dispensaries are allowed, and under what conditions. So everybody understands what the rules are. That may be ambitious to do that in 45 days, but I think we need try to do it as quickly as possible.”
Council Member Cohn briefly considered changing the cutoff date to July 14th, but ultimately declined to do so, stating, “There have been a number, I think, opening up in recent days, thinking, whatever, I don’t know, ‘get open and operate,’ but weren’t really in operation before that. So I think there’s some benefit to leaving June 16th as the date.”
Jesse Paquin must have been substantially relieved when Cohn specifically addressed his dispensary. Cohn mentioned, “The one example that was given, the person was seeing patients at a different location, and moved shortly after the June 16 date. But because we wanted them to move! So I hate to have a ‘gotcha’ situation where they were fine if they had stayed where we didn’t want ‘em but then they moved in order to accommodate the community.”
Council Member Sheedy concluded, “I think that this does what we hoped that it would do. What we’re trying to do is make it safe. It’s not safe the way it is. It’s not safe for the clients, it’s not safe for the business owners, it’s not safe anywhere. They are out in the shadow areas, which means the industrial areas, mostly. And they’re there all by themselves. And when something happens, I don’t know if they call the police. I probably doubt that. It is a use that’s out there. And it is a need that is out there.”
For the first time, Council Member Kevin McCarty indicated that the Council had a majority that favored permitting medical marijuana dispensaries. McCarty quietly pointed out, “The headline of this tomorrow is we’re establishing a moratorium which means: we’re done with this, we’re banning it, we don’t like it. But I think the more important words after the headline is that we want to allow these types of establishments, but set rules and regulations to make sure it works for everybody. Because I do think these types of establishments have a value in our communities, but we need to set some parameters as to where and how and so forth.”
Apparently saving at least one dispensary, the language mandating that current dispensaries be in operation, “at their current location” since June 16th was changed to read, “in the City of Sacramento.”
But will the other “grey area” dispensaries be protected from police raids? The city is making no promises.
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