[Vision2020] Cit Council OKs Large-Scale Pot Growing

Tom Hansen thansen at moscow.com
Wed Jul 28 18:30:12 PDT 2010


Courtesy of today's (July 28, 2010) Spokesman-Review.

 

 

 

Oakland pot plan worries small growers

Lisa Leff, Associated Press

 

OAKLAND, Calif. - After weathering the fear of federal prosecution and
competition from drug cartels, California's medical marijuana growers see a
new threat to their tenuous existence: the "Walmarting" of weed. 

 

The Oakland City Council voted Tuesday in favor of a plan to license four
production plants where marijuana would be grown, packaged and processed
into items ranging from baked goods to body oil.

 

The plants would not be limited in size - one potential applicant for a
license wants to open a plant that would produce over 21,000 pounds of pot a
year - but they would be heavily taxed and regulated.

 

Those vying for one of the four licenses would have to pay $211,000 in
annual permit fees, carry $2 million worth of liability insurance and be
prepared to devote up to 8 percent of gross sales to taxes.

 

The vote came after more than two hours of public comment, with speakers
divided between those who opposed the measure - largely on the grounds that
it would put small medical marijuana growers out of business - and those who
said it would generate millions of dollars for Oakland in taxes and sales
and create hundreds of jobs.

 

Oakland's decision, and fledgling efforts in other California cities to
sanction cannabis cultivation for the first time, have some marijuana
advocates worried that regulations intended to bring order to the outlaw
industry and new revenues to cash-strapped local governments could drive
small "mom and pop" growers out of business. They complain that
industrial-scale gardens would harm the environment, reduce quality and
leave consumers with fewer strains from which to choose.

 

"Nobody wants to see the McDonald's-ization of cannabis," Dan Scully, one of
the 400 "patient-growers" who supply Oakland's largest retail medical
marijuana dispensary, Harborside Health Center, grumbled after a City
Council committee gave the blueprint preliminary approval last week. "I
would compare it to how a small business feels about shutting down its
business and going to work at Walmart. Who would be attracted to that?"

 

The proposal's supporters, including entrepreneurs more disposed to neckties
than tie-dye, counter that unregulated growers working in covert warehouses
or houses are tax scofflaws more likely to wreak environmental havoc, be
motivated purely by profit and produce inferior products.

 

"The large-scale grow facilities that are being proposed with this ordinance
will create hundreds of jobs for the city," said Ryan Indigo Warman, who
teaches pot-growing techniques at iGrow, a hydroponics store whose owners
plan to apply for one of the four permits. "The ordinance is good for
Oakland, and anyone who says otherwise is only protecting their own
interests."

 

Council members Rebecca Kaplan and Larry Reid, who introduced the plan, have
pitched it largely as a public safety measure.

 

The Oakland fire department blames a dramatic rise in the number of
electrical fires between 2006 and 2009 in part to marijuana being grown
indoors with improperly wired fans and lights. The police department says
eight robberies, seven burglaries and two murders have been linked to
marijuana grows in the last two years.

 

Reid and Kaplan also are open about their desire to have the city, which
last week laid off 80 police officers to save money, cash in on the medical
marijuana industry it has allowed to thrive.

 

Oakland's four retail marijuana stores did $28 million in business last
year, and if sales remain constant, the city would get $1.5 million this
year from a dispensary business tax that voters adopted last summer. A
similar tax on wholesale pot sales from the permitted grow sites to the
dispensaries would bring in more than twice that amount, the city
administrator's office has estimated.

 

"Allowing medical cannabis and medical cannabis products to be produced in a
responsible, aboveboard and legitimate way will be a benefit to the
patients, to the workers and to the people of Oakland," Kaplan said.

 

Adding to the anxiety of growers - and the impetus Oakland officials have to
get the grow tax in place - is a November state ballot measure to legalize
marijuana possession for adult recreational use and authorize local
governments to license and tax non-medical pot sales.

 

If it passes, Proposition 19 is expected to feed the state's hearty appetite
for marijuana. Backers of creating the four big indoor gardens say the plan
is not dependent on legalization, but would benefit from it.

 

"The reality is, this is an issue that is going to grow. I would like it to
grow here. I would like it to be Oakland business and not the tobacco
industry," Councilwoman Jean Quan said.

 

Regulating the supply side of the business would represent another turning
point in California's complicated, 14-year-old relationship with medical
marijuana. Although Maine, New Mexico and Rhode Island license nonprofit
groups to produce and distribute cannabis, California's law is silent on
cultivation other than for individual use.

 

Even as hundreds of storefront pot dispensaries, marijuana delivery services
and THC-laced food products have flourished, the question of where they get
their stashes remains murky: Inquiring is considered as impolite as asking
someone's income or age.

 

Industry insiders usually say they rely on a variety of sources, including
farmers who grow outdoors in the far northern end of the state, contractors
who run sophisticated indoor operations, and customers who grow their own
and sell the surplus.

 

Officials in Berkeley and Long Beach also are moving to take the mystery out
of medical marijuana production.

 

The Berkeley City Council recently approved a measure for the November
ballot that would authorize the city to license and tax six pot cultivation
sites. Companies running the facilities must agree to give away some pot to
low-income users, employ organic gardening methods to the extent possible
and offset in some way the large amount of electricity needed to grow weed.

 

Long Beach officials want to reduce the amount of medical marijuana being
sold in the city that isn't grown there.

 

The city is in the process of trying to whittle its more than 90
dispensaries down to no more than 35 marijuana collectives through a
lottery. License winners will be required to grow either at their retail
sites or elsewhere in Long Beach and to open their books to prove they
aren't growing more than enough to supply their members, said Lori Ann
Farrell, Long Beach's director of financial management.

 

-------------------

 

Richard Lee is the president of Oaksterdam University, a pot-growing school,
in Oakland, Calif., where small growers could be hurt by pot factories.

 

OaklandCannabis.jpg

 

 

How about it, Area Man?  Ya think if ya ask really really REALY nice and say
"please a lot", that . . . just . . . maybe.

 

Hey, it's just a thought.

 

Seeya round the farm, Moscow.

 

Tom Hansen

Moscow, Idaho

 

"Corporations are an oppressed minority forced to move headquarters from
state to state in search of friendlier tax codes--sometimes being forced to
live just off our shores in tiny mailboxes." 

 

- John Oliver, The Daily Show

 

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