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In a unanimous decision on Wednesday, August 19, 2009, the West Sacramento City Council decided to have City Staff draft a new law regulating and limiting medical marijuana dispensaries within the next six months.
In a move that may disappoint some medicinal cannabis advocates, the Council simultaneously rejected an alternative proposal that would have convened a task force to write the law. Presumably the task force would have included medical marijuana advocates, giving the patient support community a real opportunity to help craft the ordinance. “Advantages of this approach are that it allows for a collaborative approach to the development of the ordinance. A wide range of views are encouraged in the issue and thoughts can be shared at the earliest possible stage, “ according to the staff report. It was predicted that this approach would take about a year.
The last time West Sacramento had a hearing on this subject, Council Member Mark Johannessen suggested convening a task force to draft the ordinance. This time Johannessen said, “One of the advantages, the staff report notes, of having a task force is more or less a brainstorming, and a collaboration that can occur from the beginning, which really helps frame what the ordinance might be. That maybe it doesn’t have to be a…long duration task force, but maybe a shortened up version, to get to the point where you can create a better framework than just the short term approach.” But the task force was clearly an unpopular idea in West Sac that day. Still, Johannessen suggested, “If we do the short term version, maybe to have at least some open meeting, some informational gathering meetings, and maybe find a way to summarize the comments and suggestions from that, that you can relay to council…”
Responding to a Council question about the City of Sacramento’s current dispensary regulation discussions, City Planner Steve Rikala noted, “They are very interested in our process, as we are in theirs.” Rikala suggested a stakeholder meeting, open to everyone, in the beginning stage of the ordinance drafting.
 Nathan Sands, representing the mostly-defunct Compassionate Coalition, a medical marijuana rights group, spoke in favor of an expedited process. Although he was a member of the Sacramento County Medical Marijuana Dispensary Ordinance Task Force, Sands made it clear that he preferred a speedy procedure. “…After hearing you deliberate on other issues, I’m much more confident than ever before…” praised Sands, a West Sacramento resident. “We do support a fast process. I kinda did like the idea of a “hybrid” process, where we could perhaps all give input in the beginning. But I also do think staff is more than competent enough to put something together, and then let us kind of debate the issues at the end, again, and say, you know, ‘are these the restrictions we want’? And I did send you the Malibu ordinance, and our thoughts on it. And the main reason for that was that I think once you read through it you see that a lot of these issues have been hashed out in other cities…So I do support a quicker process. I think as time goes on we’re gonna see more people applying for hardship exemptions or other kinds of different legalese that is going to make it harder for us to move forward and serve the patients…I think doing this faster will be better…”
Mayor Chris Cabaldon commented, “I think we’ll have more restrictions than are probably necessary at the outset…for me there’s not a large rationale to go and spend a lot of staff resources investigating, and creating - innovating in a field where there’s no empirical experience yet anyway. So the Malibu ordinance provides a template. Obviously it needs to be tweaked for our unique needs. And I read Mr. Sands comments, and I agree with most of them. Except for the issue about whether there ought to be some sort of a numerical restriction. I happen to believe in the early stage period – there’s what an ordinance ought to look like in a couple of years, once the market and everything is fully settled, we know what it looks like. Neighbors and other businesses and health care providers and everybody else knows, and is comfortable with it. But we’re not at that point today. So our ordinance needs to be staged. So that in the initial phase it’s going to be more restrictive than I think most of the advocates would like to see. At least in my view it should be. But with the path that if this goes right, that if these collectives and dispensaries operate with essentially the same standards of quality and impact as a regular old pharmacy, then that’s where we’re headed in terms of a licensure and land use regulation. But we cant just jump to that in the beginning…it needs to have some sort of numerical limit of some kind …If the City of Sacramento never gets around to adopting an ordinance, and we don’t have a numerical limit, and they have a moratorium, as does Davis and several other jurisdictions, then we’re the only place with a fully articulated, elaborated process for licensure for zoning…I don’t want us to be the center of all medical marijuana dispensation in the entire region. So we need some near term mechanisms to make sure that that doesn’t occur, without going nuts, and writing it into the Constitution that there can never be more than two…neighbors and residents are concerned…they may have fears about what the potential impacts are, they need to know their fears are unwarranted, before we loosen the chain.”
Judging from the conversation thus far, West Sacramento is likely to end up with tight restrictions on dispensaries, while allowing a small number of them to operate.
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