11:20am | In March 2010, with the city council on the cusp of passing a draconic medpot ordinance, then-7th District Councilmember Tonia Reyes Uranga said what was evident to many observers: “Let’s be very clear: the purpose of this ordinance is to put [collectives] out of business.”
On Tuesday the City Council is likely to take a step toward helping Reyes put “Prophet” on her resume, as they entertain adding Chapter 5.89 to the Long Beach Municipal Code, which would “repeal the City’s existing medical marijuana regulations (Chapter 5.87) and would at the same time enact a ban on medical marijuana collectives and dispensaries citywide.”
In his letter to the council recommending the passage of 5.89, City Attorney Robert Shannon wrote, “The recent Court of Appeal decision in the case of Pack v. City of Long Beach has essentially eliminated the City’s ability to effectively regulate dispensaries and collectives.”
Because the authors of the Pack decision go out of their way to point out that their ruling does not necessarily render all portions of Long Beach’s ordinance illegal, it is the interpretation of the adjective “effectively” that may keep Shannon’s above-referenced sentence from being untrue — and that speaks to what Uranga saw from an inside-perspective nearly two years ago.
It may be conjectured that as a whole, despite the sincerity of a few individuals, the City of Long Beach never wanted to allow collectives, but did so (ironically, as it turns out) in an attempt to obviate potential lawsuits that might have resulted from an outright ban on collectives. Consider the following:
Fall 2008: Assistant City Attorney Mike Mais tells The District Weekly that the City is taking a “wait and see” attitude as regards taking a medpot position: waiting and seeing how various SoCal medpot lawsuits played out.
August 2009: The initial draft of the City’s medpot ordinance includes the medically unethical provision that collectives “provide [to the City] a list of … the qualified patients that belong to the collective.”
November 2009: On her blog, Councilmember Gerrie Schipske proposes zoning and other restrictions that would have effectively made it impossible for collectives to operate in Long Beach. When asked about this possibility, Schipske told The District Weekly, “With the proliferation of dispensaries in L.A. County, [patients] can get it elsewhere.”
February 2010: Shannon disregards a 5-4 council vote, passing a version of the ordinance because he does not believe it to be properly restrictive, in that it did not include a provision mandating that all medpot be cultivated within city limits (a provision that the court in the Pack case would later find to be illegal).
June 2010: “Honestly, I don’t want any collectives,” Schipske writes to a constituent. “I get too many complaints and as long as the drug is illegal, I can’t support the City allowing them.” (Those 26 words are the entire content of the e-mail in question; she would later say she was referring only to collectives in her 5th District.)
September 20, 2010: The City holds a lottery with a non-refundable $14,732 entrance fee for any collectives wanting to operate within city limits. (The high cost was said to defray city expenses related to instituting the ordinance, but the City never offered an explanation of why Long Beach would have far higher costs than any city in the country instituting the same type of ordinance.)
November 9, 2010: Despite having been one of the “yes” votes that in March passed the ordinance, Councilmember Patrick O’Donnell admits, “I don’t want it in my backyard. I don’t want it in my front yard. […] I just don’t want it [anywhere].”
November 2010: Schipske conducts a survey of support for two further restrictions within the ordinance, as well as asking whether residents favored an outright ban. (Participants disfavored both proposed changes and a ban by margins ranging from 12% to 35%.)
January 2011: Despite the ordinance not yet being fully implemented, the council places further restricts the ordinance.
Spring/Summer 2011: The City cites numerous collectives for operating without a permit, despite the fact that the City never got around to issuing any permits.
Because (as is pointed out in the Pack decision) Long Beach’s ordinance provides that “If any provision of this Chapter, or the application thereof to any person or circumstance, is held invalid, that invalidity shall not affect any other provision or application of this Chapter that can be given effect without the invalid provision or application; and to this end, the provisions or applications of this Chapter are severable” (5.87.130), the City is free to reconstitute its ordinance by striking out the provisions Pack found to be illegal. And that is exactly what Long Beach Collective Association — a collective of medpot collectives and their attorneys, et cetera — is asking the City to do, as outlined in a December 6 letter to Mayor Foster, the councilmembers, and the city attorney.
But dollars to donuts says the City won’t bite, because it never really wanted medpot collectives here anyways.