It's up to the voters; Long Beach council won't compete with medical marijuana initiative

The council voted 7 to 1 Tuesday night, after an uncommonly impassioned and fractured debate, to reject Councilwoman Suzie Price’s proposal to bring forth a more restrictive ballot measure that would limit caabis providers to delivery services before city govement may grant permits for storefront dispensaries.

Price similarly pushed for a delivery-first policy before the council voted in February to scrap its attempts at drafting a medical marijuana ordinance, effectively giving the public a chance at answering the question of how city govement should gove medical marijuana.

“I don’t see how we didn’t expect the public to go to the ballot,” Councilman Rex Richardson said during Tuesday’s debate. “That’s exactly what happens when you don’t do your job.”

Going to the ballot

The City Clerk’s office is in the process of verifying signatures for a ballot initiative that would allow storefront dispensaries, generally baed in Long Beach since 2012, to retu to the city.

The measure would tie the maximum allowable number of dispensaries to Long Beach’s population. Based on recent Census estimates, the measure could allow roughly 30 caabis providers to open storefront operations in Long Beach if it passes.

Price asked her colleagues to consider a contingency for a more restrictive ballot measure that would allow four medical marijuana providers to obtain permits to deliver caabis to Long Beach patients. Her favored policy would have contained provisions that may have eventually allowed up to seven storefront dispensaries do business in to Long Beach.

Medical marijuana advocates who spoke during Tuesday said Price, who in her day job is a deputy district attoey for Orange County, simply wants to keep medical caabis out of Long Beach.

Before members of the public had a chance to speak, however, Price said that’s not the case. She said she wants a more gradual alteative to avoid overtaxing the police department at a time when the police force is short-staffed.

Price also implied it would be imprudent for City Hall to forego any research of how the prospective ballot measure may affect city govement’s tax revenues, land use policies and law enforcement efforts.

“If you’re not interested in that information, vote ‘no’ tonight,” Price said. “You’ll get a lot of cheers from the audience.”

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Price also acknowledged the possibility that Califoia voters may end up approving recreational marijuana in November. She suggested there could be an upside for Long Beach if that happens, since the city officials would not find themselves attempting to enforce different rules than what exist in nearby cities.

A divided council

Long Beach’s council members don’t often divide themselves along the kind of ideological lines that political observers can see between the likes of congressional Democrats and Republicans, but Tuesday’s debate provided an exception to that tendency.

Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal’s Idea may have expressed the most stark contrast to Price’s views. Whereas Price advocated a go slow approach, Lowenthal said Long Beach’s city govement had previously achieved a reasonable medical marijuana policy before sacrificing it to fear-mongering. Lowenthal also said it would be disrespectful for the council to compete with an initiative that may appear on the November ballot.

“I think we need to take a step back and accept that we haven’t done our duty,” Lowenthal said.

During Tuesday’s debate, Price modified her request to simply ask Long Beach officials to study the ballot initiative. Councilwoman Stacy Mungo was the only other council member to support that approach.

The council then voted in favor of Councilman Roberto Uranga’s request to squash consideration of a competing ballot measure.

The council’s rejection of Price’s request to study the potential impacts of the prospective ballot initiative does not prevent city govement from doing that kind of research in the coming weeks. City Attoey Charles Parkin said the council may vote for such a study if the initiative qualifies for the ballot.