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City Sidestepping Real Cannabis Issues
It is clear the city is ignoring the concerns expressed by Tracy residents and business owners as it relates to cannabis. One just has to look at tomorrow night’s city council agenda to understand the issue. For the past several weeks, small business owners have spoken at public comment during council meetings begging the elected officials and city staff and the police department to finish processing their applications to allow them to open business. We have posted a couple of these testimonies and will continue to post more.
These businesses are losing tens-of-thousands of dollars in their investments because the city will not move. Several of these businesses will not open because they will run out of money.
Yet note that the cannabis situation is just the tip of the iceberg. Every day difficult city officials thwart the efforts of dozens of local, family-owned businesses, but because these disputes are not played out in front of the city council, we don’t learn about stress and pain suffered by these local businesses. Nevertheless, the cannabis situation highlights the extreme anti-business bias held by certain public officials.
Kimberly Cargile of Tracy Cannabis Collective
The city council, meanwhile, has been waving a carrot in front of these businesses, saying they are taking up cannabis issues on April 18th. However, tomorrow’s agenda (link here) will deal with only one part of the bigger picture problem:
The issue at-hand is that the City of Tracy’s policy is more stringent for cannabis owners than defined by the State of California. The city is requesting “Live Scan fingerprinting” to provide the Tracy Police Department both their California and Federal Criminal Records. The problem is that city staff hadn’t worked out all the details when city council made their final decision, and now the city, including the Tracy Police Department, are being denied access to the Federal database, with no resolution to the issue in site.
This is government bureaucracy at its greatest – a conundrum of issues with no clear resolve!
Bill Dean, Asst. Director of Development Services
The implication as read in the staff report, and as has been heard at council hearings, is that this is causing infinite delays. It’s a tricky issue and one that should have been dealt with before the city started doling out cannabis permit applications. Or, put another way, the city should have hired an expert in putting the cannabis program together versus relying on Bill Dean, who clearly was out of his comfort zone in the whole process.
We covered this debacle back in October of 2021 (read more here).
The stonewall in the City Attorney Bijal Patel’s office that is single-handily stopping several permit applications from moving forward purposely NOT on the agenda.
Patel’s anti-business agenda is the serious issue in City Hall that is being side-stepped. One wouldn’t be surprised to think that Patel has directed the police department from processing the cannabis permits. All things must go through Patel’s office and, yet nothing ever comes out on the other side!
Patel doesn’t care if these small businesses owners run dry or not! She doesn’t live in Tracy, so why the hell should she care? It’s not the first time Tracy taxpayers have had to deal with an out-of-towner making serious decisions for the residents for better or worse. Several members of city council continue to praise City Attorney Patel for ‘playing hardball’ with the business community, so she feels more emboldened now than ever. This is dangerous territory for a city with poor and lacking infrastructure, as well as much needed public amenities.