9:00am | Despite Mayor Bob Foster’s attempt to dissuade Councilmember Steven Neal from forwarding his motion to postpone discussion of the City’s proposed ban on medical-marijuana collectives until the full council is present, in the absence of Vice-Mayor Suja Lowenthal the council voted 5-3 to take up the matter on February 14.
“You are in a situation now where you have a proliferation of collectives and no ability to deal with that,” Foster said. “And I’m just going to state this: I think we need to resolve this issue sooner rather than later. Sooner or later there’s going to be a problem with this, and it is going to become an issue that this council wishes it had resolved. Both the city attorney and the police chief are telling this council it needs to be resolved. We’ve been told why: we’re under a Court of Appeals’ decision [viz., the Pack decision] that says our ordinance is invalid. We need to remove the ordinance. If we don’t replace it with something, then you have no control at all. […] Here’s the problem: you have no ability to stop anything without an ordinance banning it.”
City Attorney Robert Shannon stated his hope (which is not to say his belief) that the Supreme Court will hear the City’s appeal of the Pack decision — a decision they are slated to make on February 8 — but noted that if it does, “there will be a nine- to 12-month hiatus in which there will be no regulations in effect, because you have no effective ordinance at all; and we will revert to that particular […] lawless period of time in which there were no regulations of dispensaries.”
But whether or not the Supreme Court takes the case, Shannon said, “There is a need for [the council] to act — and, in my opinion, to ban dispensaries in Long Beach.”
Given an entrée by Councilmember James Johnson — who, as part of the council bloc that is clearly in favor of banning medpot collectives, urged a vote on the ban despite Lowenthal’s absence — LBPD Chief Jim McDonnell said that medpot dispensaries “have been the source of a number of crimes and a drain on police resources.” He named among the crimes “murder […] violent crimes […] shootings, robberies, arson, burglaries, [and] money laundering.”
Councilmember Robert Garcia suggested that, with or without an ordinance, the police might enforce otherwise illegal activities in and around dispensaries. “I would encourage our police department — and I’ve had conversations […] with our city prosecutor — that we need to put down the full extent of the law for those that are breaking the law very publically in these communities.”
At one point Chief McDonnell claimed that the Pack decision has had no effect on the LBPD’s ability to enforce the law, claiming that despite the Compassionate Use Act, “It is still against federal and state law to do what we’re doing here. It’s permitted by this City administratively — basically a business permit — but it’s still against the law. So by your action in putting us in the position we’re in, you’ve hamstrung our ability to be able to enforce the law as a police department. So since the Pack decision or before the Pack decision, we’re still in the same position.”