For the third week in a row, members of the marijuana industry showed up to council chambers to rail against proposed licensing rules pot businesses will have to face under a city proposal. In past weeks—and again today—owners of some of the city's 120-plus medical marijuana dispensaries complained officials' meddling could cost them their business.
They didn't stop there, though. There are concerns that Portland's rules will result in lost jobs and dashed investments, and that high fees and protections that favor existing businesses could leave new entrepreneurs out in the cold—particularly women and people of color. Every indication is that the rules the city council had before it (rules that some commissioners didn't seem to fully understand) were a work in progress.
"With all due respect to the legislative drafters," Portland attorney and pot lobbyist Amy Margolis testified, "it is terribly drafted." Plenty of people agreed, including at least one city commissioner.
And yet? Not only did city commissioners enact the rules, they passed them as an emergency, meaning they'll go into effect right away. "I would like us to vote today...so we have some regulations on time, place, and manner starting tomorrow," Commissioner Amanda Fritz told her colleagues. (City Commissioner Steve Novick was absent)
Here's the problem with that reasoning: The city still doesn't have meaningful regulations for the pot industry. It's true the law commissioners passed today puts new strictures on pot businesses, but it only does so after those businesses have applied for and received a license from the city of Portland. Those licenses won't be available for months. As we reported yesterday, the city has no ability to enforce the regulations it rushed through today. Medical marijuana dispensaries that want to open at midnight tonight to sell recreational weed are on perfectly legal ground (though many that planned to do so appear to have abandoned those plans).
Theresa Marchetti, livability programs manager for the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, told council the regulations, at this point, are "meant to be informative, not punitive."
The central beef with the city's proposed rules is a clause that says no marijuana retailer—be it a recreational shop or a medical dispensary—can sit less than 1,000 feet from another. That rule was actually created at the behest of the pot industry, but it spurred concerns that, for instance, a new recreational store might get in line for a city license before existing dispensary, then open up near the dispensary—effectively putting the medical shop out of business.
Those concerns led to complex new language that would have grandfathered in dispensaries that were open prior to January 1 of this year. No one likes that either, though the main beefs seem centered on a belief medical dispensaries are going to have a hard time switching over to recreational sales under the city system.
It's not just the thousand foot rule, either. There are issues with the 7 am to 9 pm hour limits the city's proposing, and the steep fees retailers would be forced to pay.
Commissioner Dan Saltzman emerged as something of a people's champ at this morning's hearing, when he repeatedly suggested the city should drop the burdensome 1,000-foot regulations altogether. "It just seems overly regulatory and overly duplicative," Saltzman said, setting off a wave of urgently upturned thumbs in the audience. "We should let the market establish itself and it will shake itself out."
For a minute, it looked like Saltzman might vote against the rules altogether—a defection that would have killed the law's emergency clause, and set it back for a vote next week. "I feel my power diluted, but it's pretty good today," Saltzman mused.
That set off a raft of cajoling from Fritz, Hales, and Fish, and avowals that council would correct the flawed law before the city begins dolling out licenses. And in the end, Saltzman complied.
So now we've got pot laws no one thinks are very good.
