Recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record, conclude the public hearing, and adopt resolution amending the Master Fee and Charges Schedule for Adult-Use Cannabis Business application fees, permitting fees, and fines and penalties for violations of Chapter 5.92 of the Long Beach Municipal Code.  (Citywide)
Thank you, Mr. Perkins. Now we can move on to our first hearing. Craig, would you please introduce the item? Hearing item one is a report from City Manager recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record. Conclude the public hearing and adopt resolution. Amending the master fee and charges. Schedule for adult use. Cannabis Business Application Fees. Fines and penalties citywide. Thank you. I'd like to turn over now to Mr. Motorcar, please. Thank you, Mr. Vice Mayor. So we will have a staff report given by AJ Callery, our cannabis program manager. AJ Good evening, Mayor, and members of the City Council. City Council approval is being requested for changes to the master fees and charges schedule to create new fees and penalties for adult use cannabis businesses. Proposed fee changes are identified in attachment A to the council letter. That proposed fees will allow the city to recoup costs associated with regulating the adult use cannabis industry. Some examples of fee changes in the report include an annual regulatory fee, application review fee, criminal background investigation fee, social equity program fee, unlicensed operator penalty fire permit fees and health permit fees. Staff is requesting approval of the proposed fees prior to acceptance of adult use cannabis applications beginning August 13th, 2018. That concludes my presentation and I'm available for questions. Fine, thank you. Is there any staff presentations on this? Okay. Fine. Okay. We have public comment. Any public comment on this? She please come back in front state your name the remains. Good evening, Larry. Good you address on file, as I have referenced before. I thoroughly oppose this. Motion. If you're going to adopt it, I would change the fee. For $1 million to $1 million per year period. I would limit the their sale of that. And the locations. To the top floor, the Long Beach Police Department. And it would be open three days a week. In addition to that. I have a 5 million each permit. They would have a $5 million bond posted. You know. I think that bond would be then forfeited. The first time there was any criminal conduct traced back to someone who used the cannabis from. That individual or from that dealer. Absent that. The crime that we have now, and that is so out of control. In this city. Even when we get a new city prosecutor, which parenthetically is going to happen in the next three months. Will be completely. Off the chart. So what I'm hoping is the council has the character and the interest in the community to stand up. And adopted suggestions. That I've set forth here and has referenced before. Thank you. Thank you. Mr.. To. Good evening. Stefan Lawson, Civil Counsel, District two. I wanted to speak about two different issues actually tonight concerning cannabis, the delivery service enforcement component that we are still looking for. As well as a kind of considerable planning delay. That is occurring right now. For applicants. In the adult use and or. At this point, just medical market regarding delivery. Service enforcement. We are in the process now. Of needing to change consumer behavior that has been shaped by. Prohibition over the last half decade or so, by directly engaging weed maps and other platforms that advertise these businesses. I believe that we can debate serious news, its problems that are. Currently proliferating throughout the city with over 80 of. These unlicensed businesses currently. Publicly advertising untested and untaxed product to really anybody. There is no incentive for the right for them right now under the. Law to do any sort of age verification. System. Unlike licensed businesses that are right and that have right now been certified under. Metric and other state regulations specifically to make sure that we are not participating in a. Nuisance activity and to make sure that nobody under the age of 21 is receiving these products. Secondly, just to kind of. To. To underline that there's also a major planning delay. Over 200 of these applications right now are currently somewhere within the process of the planning process system. We have no idea from. Our industry and despite numerous communications with city. Staff about what is causing this delay, if the city of seeking a review, planning fee or any of these other sorts of things, it really is going to hopefully incentivize the completion of these these applications right now for the for the operators who are looking to actively participate in this fully regulated business. And with taxes being directly. Being paid to the city. They're left in the lurch. They have no idea about where their applications are, what, if anything, they need to do to correct this problem. And really gets in so they can open their doors and start participating as a fully regulated. Business under these really. Well-Crafted and well. Deliberated city ordinance. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Any other public hearing comment? Please come forward. And if you have if you're speaking, please make sure you line up at the podium and just save us some time as we do go through the public comments. Thank you. And I've been commencement address is six or seven Loma. I'm a resident of Long Beach for about 25 years. I'm here to represent Gold Rush Farms. We are formed from Northern California. We are licensed in the state of California to grow cannabis. And I'm here to talk to the people here in the city, tell you a little bit about my store. I have invested almost $100,000 on Northern California on the cannabis business. My team now is almost 30 people and we are growing. I live in the city of Long Beach and I feel that I would love to come here and invest money on the same industry. And I believe that the city of Long Beach is taking advantage of the taxing and is taking advantage of the fees. I would love to. And a lot of people that I know would love to make business with the city, but the city seems to care more about fees than the business. I know people who want to do business in the city, but they would rather go to Whittier or cities that are around here because this is a much better deal. So my advice to the city of lounges to think about how much you want to charge businesses because businesses will choose to go somewhere else. Thank you. Thank you. Seeing no other comment, I'm going to close the public comment part of the hearing and return this back to the council. Councilmember Richardson just wanted to say good work to AJ and the whole team and hopefully we can move this forward tonight. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Pearce. Thank you. Thank you, AJ and the whole team. I did have a couple clarifying questions as was mentioned in public comment there. We do have several businesses are still waiting to open their doors. I know we've had some conversations with Linda Tatum around resources and how we can ensure that that's going to be a process that moves along quickly. So can you talk about this in that process and the budget that's coming up and how we hopefully will get those applicants moving quicker? Sure. So I believe that the public comment related specifically to our application process, so applications that are submitted to business licensing, we received an influx of applications right around the time where we were presenting the Adult Use Ordinance to City Council. And as a results, because our attention was really focused on the adult use ordinance, there began to be a slight build up in medical cannabis applications, which we are committed to working through as quickly as possible, ideally before we open up the process for adult use applications August 13th. Great. Thank you. And just for those that have some concerns as well, I know that in the budget process will be reviewing as well, stopping and looking at some opportunities to make sure that while we're onboarding an entire new industry, that we're doing that as smart and effectively as we can. So thank you, staff, for all of your work. I know you've worked really hard on this. Appreciate it. Councilman Mongo. Yes, I spoke with our marijuana division and also with our city attorney's office. And it seems that one of the other holdups in the process is the number of applicants that are turned in where they're barely filled out at all. I mean, the number of people who submit applications to just get their place in line and don't fill out the paperwork properly and don't put in the time that the other business entities do are really clouding up the line. And so I hope that when the schedule comes back during the adoption process of the budget, that there could be a differentiator of some sort for those that have a extensive back and forth with the office, because of the complete lack of respect for turning in a completed application, that those that do fill out completed applications are not held up in the process by waiting for these high users of staff time and that if we're going to be able to fund additional staffing positions, we're going to need to be able to fund it from those who are the most users of the staff. TIME So that would be one comment that I'd like to make to staff to bring back and then also in reviewing the fee schedule and discussing with staff. I appreciate that there is a penalty placed on those who are non authorized growers in the city and that the rate was set at a number which doesn't align with any other city in the state. So I would ask that when the fee schedule comes back in with the budget, that the fees align with the other city that has penalties and that ours aren't just chosen at a lower amount or a higher amount for no reason. So if, if I need to make a friendly to make that happen, let me know if I don't. General understanding and consensus of the Council. Great Councilmember. Yeah. If it needs to be a friendly, I think. Thank you. Well, Councilman Austin. Thank you. And I just want to congratulate our staff for a job well done. This is obviously was very laborious, putting this report together and getting us to this point. And obviously, it's been a long road. I want to respond to just a couple of the public comments and looking at the the staff report here. If I could get staff to just explain where our annual fees and actual business permit fees compared to some of these other cities. I'm looking at cities like Santa Ana, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento. It seems that their fees are significantly higher than than here in the city of Long Beach. And can you speak to that? Yeah, we included in the council letter comparison for the fees that we are proposing compared to other municipalities and that the fees that we're proposing are in line with some of those other cities. I'd say compared to a city like Santa Ana or Oakland, we're definitely comparable. There are some cities that are significantly higher than the city of Long Beach for the fees that they charge. For example, the city of San Jose charges $131,000 for a annual operating fee. I don't know how they calculated that amount. So I can't comment on how they arrived at that number. But I can say that we did an analysis of the costs associated with regulating adult use cannabis businesses, with reviewing the applications and the fees that we're recommending are intended to be full cost recovery. That's that's how I would respond. Well, I would just look at this and say, based on the information in front of the council and comparatively with these other cities, it seems to me that our fees are more than fair. So good work. Thank you. We have a motion in a second. And please cast your vote for here, number one. There's. Thank you.