8:00am | After two hours of discussion, the Long Beach City Council voted 8-1 to enact a ban on medicinal-marijuana dispensaries, effective immediately — with the exception of a six-month exemption for 18 (?¹) dispensaries that have been seen by the City as complying with the terms of the City’s Pack-decimated ordinance. 

Within four months, the city council is to revisit the situation and determine whether to extend the exemption.

The Valentine’s Day vote came with the full council in attendance. Relatively early in the discussion it became clear that the immediate ban on all dispensaries — favored by City Attorney Robert Shannon and LBPD Chief Jim McDonnell — was not going to happen, and in the end the question was how long of an exemption the 18 or so collectives would get: Robert Garcia pushed for six months, while Rae Gabelich pushed for one year or when the state Supreme Court rules on the Pack decision, whichever came first. 

“If the objective of the council is to ban them all,” Gabelich said, “then this […] six months is really just saying, you know, ‘Goodbye. You’ve got six months to close the door. We don’t want you anymore.’ So it’s really putting them out of business — it’s just giving them the opportunity to take six months to close down. I really think the more responsible way for us to do this is to wait for the Supreme Court decision.”

Garcia explained his tack — favored by Councilmembers DeLong, O’Donnell, Schipske, and Johnson, a bloc that has historically opposed Garcia’s votes on medpot issues but now saw this as the least unfavorable option on the table — as providing an incentive for the collectives receiving the six-month exemption to operate within the spirit of the erstwhile medpot ordinance — the rationale being that if they behave, the council is more likely to extend the exemption.

This logic, though, seemed to come as much from Gary DeLong as from Garcia. Garcia’s original rationale was that since this is a ban dispensaries and not collectives, six months is about how long it would take a group of patients and caregivers to get a collective up and functioning.²

In any case, the extension is by no means guaranteed even for the best operators. And take it to the bank: in June DeLong, O’Donnell, Schipske, and Johnson will vote against any such extension. (You read it here first, kids. Schipske has already tipped her hand, saying, “What I’d like to see added [to the temporary exemption] is that permit fees collected by the City shall be returned if those covered by the temporary exemption completely close their operations on or before the applicable prohibition is effected.”)

Had Garcia abandoned his motion and thrown his support behind Gabelich, it appears her version would have won the day. But he resisted, and Gabelich abandoned her motion — though when it came time to vote on Garcia’s motion, hers was one of dissent.

Sandwiched between Garcia’s and Gabelich’s motions was surprise of the night Suja Lowenthal’s attempt to obviate a ban altogether, calling such a move while the Pack case is under review “this rush to move forward and take a preemptive strike at it.” 

Pointing out several times that there is no legal compulsion for a ban, the vice-mayor offered a motion apparently authored by Carl Kemp, a lobbyist for the Long Beach Collective Association, which included a “request [that] the city attorney to draft an emergency ordinance to implement a temporary moratorium on the issuance of permits, pursuant to Ordinance 5.87.030(D) and (E), until 90 days after the Supreme Court issues a ruling on the Pack case,” and “to pursue injunctive relief pursuant to 5.87.100(C) for those violating zoning restrictions.”

Problem was — as Shannon and City Prosecutor Doug Haubert pointed out — LBMC Section 5.87 had been invalidated by Pack. “For all practical purposes, the ordinance as it existed before the Pack decision is a dead issue,” Shannon said. “There is no way we can go forward and affirmatively use terms of this ordinance, given the Pack decision.”

Lowenthal’s implementation of language offered by Kemp impelled Schipske to make the following statement:

When in fact a lobbyist does bring forth a proposed language to this council, I think we have the obligation to disclose it publicly, because [the public] need[s] to know how our decisions get impacted. […] I also think the public needs to know when lobbyists and collectives contribute substantial funds to campaigns when we’re in the midst of deciding how we’re going to regulate them. So I would hope at some point councilmembers do disclose if they have expected money on this issue. I have not accepted any money on this issue, and I think that’s the way we need to conduct business.

Lowenthal’s motion, along with her stated preference of Gabelich’s version of the exemption over Garcia’s, seems to show that on the question of a ban she has broken with the DeLO’DSchipson bloc, of which she’s been usually been a part, in the city council’s medpot maneuvers — perhaps even sliding past Garcia toward the Gabelich end of the spectrum (and farther away from the O’Donnell end).

Fun and games:

• Hyperbole of the night? According to McDonnell, “We have seen repeatedly a situation of crime and disorder being bred by these dispensaries throughout the city.” 

• Disingenuous question of the night: When it was apparent that some sort of temporary exemption would be part of any ban, Schipske asked Shannon what he recommended. Why disingenuous? Because the ban Shannon crafted would have gone into effect immediately for all collectives. Schipske was looking for Shannon to state that he favored the briefest exemption that had been floated as a possibility (viz., 120 days), which is exactly what he did — though as “the outer limit.”

• Best cowboy metaphors: Mayor Bob Foster likened Long Beach sans ordinance and ban as “the Wild West”; McDonnell referred to dispensaries extant without city approval as “bandit operators.”

Medpot discussion closed with Councilmember James Johnson making a motion to amend Long Beach’s federal legislative agenda so as to include a call for marijuana to be reclassified federally from Schedule I to Schedule II, so that it can legally be prescribed for medical use. His motion passed 6-1, with Schipske dissenting and O’Donnell absent.

¹ There seemed to be some question as to the exact number.

² It’s not clear where Garcia got this dispensary/collective distinction as it relates to the ban, since, the very “temporary exemption clause” Garcia put forward was authored by Shannon and begins with the phrase, “The provisions of this chapter, which prohibit dispensary and cultivation sites in the city […]” (emphasis added). “Cultivation sites” can easily be read as “any site where marijuana is cultivated (such as a patient’s backyard),” unless language to the contrary is introduced.