Nearly all medical cannabis clubs operating in Redding comply with the city’s new regulations, according to officials.
Police Chief Peter Hansen has inspected all but one of the city’s 20 clubs, the Redding Record-Searchlight reports. The inspections are the first step in a permitting process intended to weed out profit-driven marijuana dealers from legitimate nonprofit collectives.
“From my perspective, the inspections have been going very well,” Hansen said Wednesday. “The operators have been very open about the process and receptive to suggestions.”
Hansen conducted the inspections over the past two weeks with Debra Wright, the city’s code enforcement supervisor. Code enforcement participates in inspections whenever a new business moves into an older building, Wright said.
One club will not get a permit unless building code violations are corrected, Hansen said.
Another collective needs to submit all the documents required as part of the permitting process, he said.
The police chief had asked for evidence that the club is a collective or cooperative under California law, authorization from the property owner to run a cannabis club, an operation plan for the club, and floor and security plans for the club, among other documents.
All the other collectives inspected have supplied the required paperwork and meet building codes, Hansen said.
Club operators applying for permits had to submit to criminal background checks. All have passed those checks except one, Hansen said – and that failure was due to a state Department of Justice clerical error. The club owner will likely pass the background check once the clerical error is cleared up, he said.
The one cannabis club inspection remaining has been rescheduled so the club owner could be present, Hansen said.
Each inspection generally lasted about 10 minutes. That’s admittedly not nearly enough time to determine whether the club is operating legitimately as a nonprofit collective, Hansen said. But authorities were able to decide whether the club is serving qualified patients as defined under California’s Compassionate Use Act.
Jess Brewer, CEO of Trusted Friends, operates two cannabis clubs – one on each side of the Sacramento River. Both clubs passed their inspections.
“Everything went very well,” Brewer said after his Pine Street club was inspected. “I think what they were looking for is more or less what we would see at any other store. They weren’t worried about people’s names or who our customers were or who our patients were.”
Under the city’s regulations, the police chief may review a club’s books. Some club operators worried that level of access would compromise patient confidentiality. Vice Mayor Missy McArthur cited that concern over confidentiality as a key reason for voting against the regulations.
But Hansen looked at a patient log book that listed numbers rather than names during his inspection at Trusted Friends. The chief merely wanted to quantify the number of patients to determine how much marijuana the club could have on the premises, Brewer said.
Medical cannabis advocates remain deeply concerned that some aspects of Redding’s regulations are too restrictive under state law.
These provisions include requirements that patients may belong to only one collective at a time, that patients carry a doctor’s recommendation prescribing a specific amount of marijuana for one year, and that collectives can distribute only dried cannabis and not clones.
The City Council narrowly approved the medical cannabis ordinance in November after several weeks of discussion. The regulations went into effect on Jan. 1.
A moratorium on new cannabis clubs is set to expire this month. Zoning adopted by the council along with the regulations would limit new clubs to heavy commercial areas on the far north, south and east sides of town.
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