For many years, Long Beach city leaders have never been able to come to an agreement over how to develop a local ordinance to regulate medical-cannabis dispensaries and cultivation sites. The Signal Tribune has reported in the past that the City had an ordinance a few years ago, and its staff had even conducted a lottery to determine which businesses would qualify for permits. However, the City faced numerous lawsuits, and eventually the California Supreme Court determined that parts of the Long Beach ordinance conflicted with federal law. In light of the legal challenges, the city councilmembers instituted a ban on all collectives and dispensaries.
The council didn’t stop the discussion on developing an ordinance. A task force made up of a variety of different stakeholders had made numerous and conflicting recommendations to determine how to govern the industry. Earlier this year, the council considered a proposal to regulate dispensaries, beginning with a limited number of businesses offering a delivery-only service. That effort was soon dropped.
An advocate for Long Beach Neighborhoods First, the group behind the initiative regulating medical cannabis in Long Beach, said the local measure was crafted with the understanding that voters may also be deciding whether they will favor regulations on recreational marijuana. The ballot initiative for recreational marijuana legalizes it and sets a sales-tax rate of 15 percent on that use. Cultivation taxes would be set at $9.25 per ounce of flowers and $2.75 per ounce of leaves.
Adam Hijazi, a board member with Long Beach Neighborhoods First, explained why the organization decided to gather the thousands of signatures needed to get the local medical-cannabis measure on the ballot. He said he thought that a lot of groups, which include individual patients, community members and industry professionals, had been hoping that city leaders would move forward in the efforts to bring about “safe access” to medical cannabis to Long Beach.
“And when they didn’t,” Hijazi said. “I think that prompted them to pretty much say, ‘Okay, we need to go back to the voters.'”
Right now, Long Beach Neighborhoods First’s ballot-initiative petition is undergoing the process of signature verification with the city clerk’s office, which announced on June 17 that the raw count of signatures on the petition is at 35,009.
While its main purpose will regulate the overall medical-cannabis industry, the proposed measure seeks to change tax rates that were already favored by voters. In 2014, voters in the city approved a sales-tax rate of 10 percent on medical cannabis, even without an actual ordinance on the books.
Third District Councilmember Suzie Price asked the council to consider at first a request to craft an alternative initiative for the November ballot at the council meeting on June 21, and then she ultimately requested a staff report that analyzed the impact of the ballot initiative. She scrutinized the advocacy organization’s ballot measure, explaining that it proposes more dispensaries than had been previously discussed and it did not require a conditional-use permit.
“We’re actually repealing the tax that the voters voted on April 2014 and capping it at 6 percent,” Price told the council last week. “Our residents may have something to say about that. They may want to at least know that that’s what we’re doing.”
Only 5th District Councilmember Stacy Mungo favored Price’s motion to request an analysis of the petition. The majority of the council ultimately did not agree. Vice Mayor Suja Lowenthal and Councilmembers Lena Gonzalez, Daryl Supernaw, Dee Andrews, Rex Richardson and Roberto Uranga voted against it. Councilmember Al Austin was not present for the vote.
At last week’s meeting, Uranga discouraged any efforts to put a competing ballot initiative before the voters. He noted that the council had spent many years debating the issue.
“What we have here is an opportunity to let the voters speak,” he said.
City Clerk Maria de la Luz Garcia confirmed this week that her office has until July 29 to complete the verification of signatures for the petition.
