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Dazed and Confused: Tracy's Cannabis Conundrum
It’s safe to say that anyone following or actively involved with the city’s retail cannabis permitting efforts has been left, well, dazed and confused. In less than three month, the city has gone from vetting and selecting four retail operators (per the existing code) to suddenly proposing an amendment to the municipal code to allow up to eleven storefront permits. Noted public policy expert Jeff Spicoli must be pleased.
To understand how we got here one must look no further than the disfunction at Tracy City Hall.
Interim Development Services Director Bill Dean has spearheaded the city’s cannabis permitting process. Dean and staff have worked on this matter dating back to early-2019. In January 2020, council then agreed to allowing only four retail operators or 1 for every 23,000 residents, as well as choosing an evaluation system versus lottery system (used by other municipalities) to award the four cannabis retail outlets.
Fast-forward eighteen months (nothing happens quickly at Tracy City Hall) to June 2021 and the city’s selection of four applicants after months of vetting. The city narrowed the original 41 applications for permits down to 10 which scored 80% or higher. Applicants were then required to submit community benefit plans (amongst other items) until the final four were chosen. As part of the selection process, however, Dean included an appeal process for applicants. Here’s where things get messy.
Jeff Spicoli
Seven of the applicants filed appeals citing issues with the selection process and most specifically issues with the community benefits and economic inclusion portions. Numerous applicants complained that Dean either misapplied or ignored the very rules he established. Because of Dean’s inability to explain why he followed the rules for some applications but not others, or other times simply ignoring his own rules altogether, opened the door to pressure from local influence peddlers that led to the proposed Ordinance Amendment. Sometime in between the June selections and the September 7 Special Council Hearing, the city proposed wholesale changes to a process agreed to 18 months earlier and thereafter followed by 41 applicants. Perhaps the most important change was increasing the number of drug dispensary outlets to 10 from four.
Bill Dean, Interim Development Services Director
The City’s sudden change in tack is a red flag and makes it clear that Bill Dean is managing with unconscious incompetence.
At the two public hearings in September and the one in early October, Dean stressed several times that they were learning as they went and will continue to do so until they get it right. Really? How much is Dean paid to “learn”? Tracy isn’t the first municipality to license cannabis retail. Further, there are professional consultants who advise city’s on how to do this. The city is happy to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on private consultants to prepare Vargas-Sandhu’s Specific Plan proposals, but they decline to hire consultants for cannabis, which is complicating and controversial given the nature of the business.
Dean is clearly out of his element. It’s difficult to know how much taxpayer dollars have gone into developing cannabis policies, vetting the applicants, etc but the City staff admits the amount is huge. For better or worse, Dean is the city’s cannabis expert. Why no one in City Hall, particularly the City Attorney, didn’t red flag some of these issues only further points to the city’s incompetence.
Staff incompetence, led by Bill Dean and enabled by the City Attorney painted the City Council into a corner. To cover up his misdeeds and ineptness and the City Attorney’s lack of mindfulness, Dean proposed increasing the number of cannabis outlets from 4 to 10. This makes Tracy a veritable Marijuana Mecca in the Central Valley.
Fearing protracted litigation from unsuccessful applicants disgruntled with Dean’s inconsistent and arbitrary application of rules he established, the City Council had few viable options. Meanwhile, Tracy residents will have to process how its city will have the lowest ratio of permittable retail cannabis businesses - 1 for every 10,000 residents - in the state. (More on this in our next post.)
However, the debacle over the cannabis permitting is just another issue, in a long line of issues, where Tracy City Hall failed its residents. The quick about face by City Council only highlights their mistrust that Bill Dean knows what he’s doing. The Council directed Dean and his department to get money from Surland to move forward with the Aquatic Center and yet nothing has been done.
More likely than not the failure to make progress on the Aquatic Center and the failure to build affordable housing in Tracy rests at the feet of Bill Dean.
And that’s the sum of it, nothing gets done in Bill Dean’s bureaucratic neighborhood!