Vice Mayor Wants Cannabis Restart on Future Council Agenda

Councilman Tyron Hampton is requesting the City Council discuss restarting the city’s cannabis process.

The new process would prioritize local residents and contain a social equity factor.

The council will consider placing the item on a future agenda at Monday’s meeting, which starts at 2 p.m.

Hampton, who also serves as vice mayor, has long been a critic of the city’s cannabis permitting process.

In January, Hampton said permitting has proven to be a failure and should be stopped and overhauled because the process was unfairly designed in a way that favored only the wealthiest people and companies. Hampton also said the city’s screening processes were not conducted properly, and that the conditional use permitting process has been mishandled and favors certain applicants.

“This incredible wealth opportunity should have been preserved for Pasadena residents and people whose lives were ruined because of very harsh and restrictive marijuana laws,” Hampton said in a statement issued in January.

“Instead, the application process awarded points based on size and experience in a way that favored only the richest, most elite operators who otherwise have no connection to or interest in Pasadena. It now appears that the Pasadena cannabis market is set to be largely dominated by only three operators, two of which are multibillion-dollar corporations. This monopoly will lead to black-market sales and the drug turf wars engaged in by street gangs. The city’s application process placed its thumb on the scale of fair dealing and pressed heavily against Pasadena resident businesses, which I find disturbing.”

In 2019, voters passed Measure CC, the city’s highly regulated process which allows only six marijuana dispensaries, and only one in each of the city’s seven council districts. The measure also requires dispensaries to maintain strict distance limits from schools, libraries, churches, and residential neighborhoods. Nearly 200 businesses applied to do business in Pasadena.

Harvest, Integral, Varda, MME Pasadena, Sweetflower and Atrium were chosen by the city.

Each of the applicants paid the city a $14,000 application fee.

So far, Harvest Pasadena, Integral Dena LLC and Varda (Tony Fong) have received conditional use permits.

Sweetflower and Atrium have been removed from the process and MedMen has come under fire after the city determined a material change in the control of the company.

Several of the companies later filed lawsuits against the city amid finger-pointing and accusations of eligibility by competing dispensary owners.

After unsuccessfully attempting to appeal the city’s decision not to select his company, Damian Martin of WOW Health and Wellness accused city Planning Director David Reyes of covertly changing the rules of the process in a “secret, illegal, and total underhanded fashion.”

Reyes later announced that only three dispensaries would probably be able to open due to the regulations in the ordinance. That number was later amended to four.

Pasadena’s cannabis ordinance required each application to be separately scored by three different individuals, and then their scores would be totaled and averaged. Instead, according to Hampton, three of the top six applicants appear to have been scored by just one person, a former supervisor of Humboldt County, a place known for illegal marijuana production and distribution before California legalized cannabis.

The remaining three applicants also appear to have been scored by just one person, a former state of Colorado marijuana investigator, Hampton said.