To the marijuana-business owners who waited years to finally open their doors, Long Beach will offer something of value— protection from illegal competitors. Operators of cannabis establishments are still in the process of pushing through the business-license application process, but the strict regulatory framework established in the City also means that every business owner will have to play by the rules.
Adam Hijazi, owner of a marijuana dispensary called the Long Beach Green Room and member of a medical-cannabis advocacy group known as the Long Beach Collective Association, noticed a positive change in the working relationship between the City and dispensary owners once the public openly supported their cause at the last election.
Last November, Long Beach voters passed Measures MA and MM, which together regulate and tax marijuana businesses in the city. At the same election, California voters passed Prop. 64, which legalizes recreational marijuana and provides details on how to regulate the substance in the state.
Since that time, Hijazi said in a phone interview with the Signal Tribune that members of the Long Beach Collective Association are applying for a business license with the City.
While the license process may take at least several months for a business owner to complete, the City allowed Hijazi and other operators of previously legal dispensaries to receive some priority in their applications.
Several years ago, Long Beach formerly allowed dispensaries to operate in the City, and it had even established an ordinance to regulate the business. However, after a court determined that parts of Long Beach’s old ordinance conflicted with federal law, councilmembers voted to outright ban medical-cannabis businesses throughout the city. Hijazi had owned a business affected by the ban. He acknowledged that he had been locked into a lease agreement at the time, and he did lose a lot of money when he closed his business for years.
Now that he will open his doors later this summer, he won’t have too many competitors. Measure MM allows between 26 and 32 businesses to operate in the city, provided that owners successfully complete the application process.
While the new municipal regulations also do allow for new competitors to apply for a license to set up shop in Long Beach, the City won’t look kindly on criminal operations. Earlier this month, the Long Beach City Council passed an ordinance that ultimately offers the City more power to act against illegal marijuana businesses. That law takes effect 30 days from July 11.
Now that the city and state laws are able to recognize marijuana dispensaries as legal businesses, Hijazi said he and the other members of his association support the ordinance that will be tough on the owners of illegal cannabis operations. The City will also take a harsh stand against landlords of illegal businesses.
“It just brings the best operators forward, I think,” Hijazi said of the strict regulations on marijuana businesses. “If you could survive and go through all the processes, and your building meets all the qualifications and all the background checks [!] then you’re looking at a better, stronger operator.”
Hijazi acknowledged that not every business would turn out to be good either, but the City now has a mechanism to deal with issues that might come up.
The rules under the latest ordinance allow the city attorney’s office to file lawsuits against illegal operators without the need for additional authorization from the city council, according to a staff memo from City Attorney Charles Parkin.
“The ordinance would permit a court, in its discretion, to issue a maximum civil penalty of $5,000 per violation for each day a non-licensed marijuana business is in operation,” Parkin said in his memo to the city council. “The objective is to ultimately shut down an illegal marijuana operation via court order so that any re-establishment of said operation would potentially be deemed civil contempt.”
Under the new ordinance, the City can also disconnect the utilities to illegal operators, with proper notification.
Certain violations of the municipal code could be considered misdemeanor offenses, unless otherwise considered infractions, and those penalties involve fines in amounts up to $1,000 and/or six months in jail, according to the memo.
The new ordinance does allow the City to hold landlords accountable, if they choose to ignore whether a tenant is operating an illegal marijuana business on their properties. The City could impose either one- or five-year bans on properties. In his memo to the city council, the city attorney described how those bans would work.
“The proposed ordinance,” Parkin wrote, “provides for the potential prohibition of marijuana-related businesses at a subject property where it has been established that a non-licensed marijuana business has been operating (one-year ban), as well as where a commercial/industrial rental business license for a subject property has been revoked due to a non-licensed marijuana business operating at the property (five-year ban).”
Since the City used to have a full ban on marijuana dispensaries and had taken aggressive action to close down illegal dispensaries in the years of the outright ban, the Signal Tribune asked Assistant City Attorney Michael Mais if the new law-enforcement tools under the ordinance’s provisions are very different from the previous tools available to the City during the full marijuana ban.
“We do believe the tools would have been available to us,” Mais said in an emailed response. “But the new ordinance makes clear to violators that these are potential remedies that the City may use in appropriate circumstances.”
While other cities throughout the state already established their own local laws concerning medical cannabis, Hijazi described one advantage Long Beach enjoys, since the City has only lately entered into the regulation side of the cannabis industry. The legislative minds behind Prop. 64 crafted the law around the same time local advocates crafted the Long Beach measures. While other cities throughout California adopted medical-cannabis ordinances years ago, Hijazi noted that Long Beach’s new regulations are more up-to-date with the state laws.
He noted other advantages to his industry in the city.
“I think Long Beach’s regulations are!more mature,” Hijazi said, describing how the City’s rules cover different aspects of the industry. He said that as long as an operation is in the right area, the Long Beach rules allow “vertically integrated” business models, which could cover a range of areas from lab testing to nurseries.
Hijazi said that, if all goes according to schedule, he hopes to open the doors to his dispensary by the end of August.
