10:00am | The Long Beach Post has obtained correspondence from Parks, Recreation & Marine Director George Chapjian suggesting that permitting may have been denied for the Heal the Nation Reggae Festival, which was scheduled to take place September 11, because Chapjian was “not comfortable with the references to marijuana” in the advertising material.
Chapjian, however, denies this, stating that the permit was denied due to a scarcity of police resources — a subject the correspondence also references.
The correspondence in question is a September 2 e-mail from Chapjian to Fred Khammar, owner of Alfredo’s Beach Club, who had volunteered to facilitate permitting for the festival, which was to take place at his Cherry Beach location. The entire content of the e-mail appears below:
Jay1 is out today. I saw the flyer and really am not comfortable with the references to marijuana, etc2. If this moves forward at this point it would have to be no vendors. Just music. Sorry but I have to touch base with Jay before I decide. There apparently is also a huge car show the same day so police resources are spread very thin. Given that there are marijuana related vendors having PD there is important even though you are going to have security. I wish you would have told me that it was more than just reggae music.
When asked by the Long Beach Post whether content has any bearing on event permitting, Chapjian replied, “Not really,” but said the denial of the permit “wasn’t so much the content; it was [that] on 9/11 there was three things going on at one time, and the police department was stretched pretty thin, so they couldn’t cover it. … [T]here was the 9-1-1 motorcycle ride over at McKenna’s, there was the car show, so PD was stretched thin; they didn’t have any resources to bring in on this other event. And [the Heal the Nation Reggae Festival] had vendors, I think, and they had live music and stuff like that, so it really did require a special-events permit.”
Police declined to comment on whether the department was consulted by Chapjian about the event and whether it relayed to him that departmental resources were stretched too thin to provide necessary coverage.
When asked about the portion of the above e-mail where he expresses his discomfort with the references to marijuana, Chapjian said, “I think what that was was that Fred came in to me to appeal the special-events [permitting] to see if we could do it under our park permit. And he didn’t tell me it was a large event like that with vendors and…Well, the content, really, it may require some PD, I don’t know. There was hemp and I think some other things. … That was just my feeling about it. That doesn’t mean anybody else felt that way. Again, [Khammar] came in here, he didn’t say anything about marijuana — he just said he was going to have music, and that was it. Then I looked at the flyer afterwards and saw he was going to have vendors and [that] it was a larger event than I thought.”
Police declined to comment on whether the department feels a police presence is necessary at events that involve marijuana-related lectures and/or vendors3.
When asked about the portion of the e-mail where he expresses his belief that the presence of marijuana-related vendors necessitated police presence, Chapjian said, “It was a big event. Honestly, I mean, it was just an event that I wasn’t comfortable with, I think. [Khammar] did apply for a special-events permit, and I think that was a concern. … If I had permitted that and something went wrong…. I don’t want something to go wrong. I think I want to be as safe as possible. So whether it was that or something else, yeah, I think the content is a little — to me — is not a normal family event. Some people may say that it is, but it’s still a large event. And my concern is that with a large event, we want to make sure that we have coverage from other departments, as well. So that’s the bottom line: there was not enough coverage from PD, since they were covering two other events. … I think I said on any large event like this, it really is a special-events permit, and PD is involved with all special events. [Khammar] appealed to me to override that, and I just didn’t want to override it. It’s a special event, it’s a large event — and without proper PD coverage, I think…. Yeah, I was a little concerned myself, but that had nothing to do with it. Technically it should be a special event, and that’s what [Khammar] did: he applied for a special event. He assumed that he was going to get it. He didn’t understand there were two other events.”
Police declined to comment on whether there is a police presence at all permitted events within the city.
When contacted for this story, Khammar stated that initially he believed the festival to be only “some kind of a music/yoga thing. … We started off with what I thought was a pretty small, local event, [so] I never thought to apply for a special-events permit for that date because I thought it was going to be small and that I would be able to get a Parks & Rec permit together.”
Khammar said that it was approximately one month before the scheduled event that Shakti provided him information pertaining to the “event footprint, and I go, ‘Okay, this is a little larger than I had anticipated, so let me reach out to Parks & Rec and make sure that a permit to gather is going to work for this thing.’ And lo and behold, it was not fine. … So I went down to the Special Events Department … and I laid out the paperwork for the … festival, [and was told] this is definitely too big an event for a Parks & Rec permit. And as I found later in that day, they did not have time in order to process the permit.”
Dharma Shakti, the festival’s co-organizer, disputes Khammar’s account of how he was made aware of the scope of the event. “All along he knew everything we were doing,” she says. “He knew about all the talks, all the lineup, everything. … He told us at the beginning of August that he had the permits. And then toward the end of August he told us that he had underestimated the size of our project. …He got very nervous, because he knew the potential for the event to be very big was very high. And so he said, ‘I just want to clear it with the City to make sure they know I’m not trying to sneak anything past them. … He said, ‘Don’t worry, honey. The City trusts me, and you should trust me.'”
Khammar supports Chapjian’s assertion that the permit was denied because of the scarcity of available police resources on September 11. Khammar agreed to produce for Long Beach Post all of the e-mail communication between himself and Chapjian concerning the festival; however, since then Khammar has failed to produce any such communication and has not replied to repeated attempts to follow up with him.
Shakti says she is not surprised at Khammar’s unwillingness to be forthcoming. “Fred did all this work behind the scenes,” she says, “and we don’t really know what he did.”
She did, however, see the e-mail in question and feels it confirms her belief that permitting was denied because of the event content. “I got this e-mail that said they were uncomfortable with all the references to marijuana,” she says. “And that’s when … we’re like, ‘Okay, now we’re dealing with a political issue.'”
Shakti says that Khammar has made statements to her intimating this. “He said we wants to make it up to us,” she says. “He said he thinks he can get the permits [to have the event at a later date] — we just have to restructure the event. Pretty much he wants us to take out the medical cannabis [portion] and make it just yoga, but we don’t want to do that, because we’re not doing anything illegal.”
Deputy City Attorney Gary Anderson states that the City cannot deny permitting based on speech content of an event.
But Anderson hastens to add that he is familiar with the issue of the Heal the Nation Reggae Festival, in part because Shakti spoke about the matter at the September 6 city council meeting. “I can tell you [the permit] wasn’t denied because of content,” he said. “They never submitted an application. And I think they wanted to do this on like four days notice? … It was the weekend when we were already booked for city events, and we couldn’t cover it on such short notice.”
When queried about Chapjian’s e-mail, which Anderson confirmed he has seen, Anderson said, “I can’t speak for George, but I think he was referring to the fact that because they were going to have marijuana vendors there, a police presence was definitely needed — and because of all the other events going on, the police presence was already thin at best at that point. It wasn’t denied because of advocating marijuana use or having vendors there. That wasn’t the basis of the denial.”
Shakti, however, isn’t buying it. Moreover, she feels her reputation as an event producer may have been damaged by this incident, as she reports several people who had not gotten word of the cancelation showing up from cities such as Ojai, Ventura, and San Diego. “It was a free reggae festival. Half Pint was the headliner,” she says. “It doesn’t take much for that word to travel fast.”
Shakti states that currently she is mulling over her legal options, and that she hopes one day soon the festival will take place. “We still want to make the event happen,” she says. “But because we’ve already created such a ruckus, I know they’re going to give me a hard time no matter what we do.”
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1) Jay Lopez, who acted as departmental liaison in pertinent discussion. Lopez declined comment for this article, citing departmental policy regarding press contact.
2) Event co-organizer Dharma Shakti says that four of the ten scheduled lectures were to pertain in some way to medical cannabis. The Website for the event can be viewed here.
3) Not including smoking and paraphernalia sales, practices Shakti says were not to be allowed or encouraged.