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Why is City Attorney Patel stonewalling small businesses?
In our previous post about Tracy City Attorney Bijal Patel’s anti-business stance costing Tracy a Topgolf and its millions of dollars in sales tax revenues (read here), several readers missed the point entirely and instead tried to lay blame on ProLogis. How a company like ProLogis, who has invested millions in Tracy already, creating a significant number of local jobs, as well as generating a significant amount of money for the city coffers is to blame escapes us. (Yes, there is a broader diesel traffic issue plaguing Tracy and the surrounding area to which ProLogis plays a part, but they are not solely to blame.)
Tracy City Attorney Patel
The point missed by some is that our City Attorney has taken an anti-business stance which is not good for our community.
Why should we care about small business thriving in Tracy? In 2022, Forbes Magazine provided the answer:
“According to the U.S. Small Business Association (SBA), small businesses …make up 99.9% of all U.S. businesses and 99.7% of firms with paid employees. Of the new jobs created between 1995 and 2020, small businesses accounted for 62%—12.7 million compared to 7.9 million by large enterprises. A 2019 SBA report found that small businesses accounted for
44% of U.S. economic activity. Without small businesses, the American economy and workforce would be a pretty wild landscape to imagine.”
If you’re still not believing the City Attorney’s actions to thwart small business, then we encourage you to go back and review the “Items from the Audience” portion of last Tuesday’s city council hearing. Several residents attempting to open retail cannabis operations in Tracy, following the guidelines laid out by the city, state, and federal government, are being stonewalled by city staff.
Speaker Kimberly Cargile, co-owner from the Tracy Cannabis Collective is losing $10,000 a month in lease costs while waiting now over a year for the city to sign off on approvals, including a Community Benefits Agreement. The CBA is sitting somewhere on the desk of City Attorney Patel, who is not responding to the applicants per their testimony. A second business is also waiting for Patel’s office to draft a CBA so they too can open their doors for business. It is taking two years for them to go through the entitlement process. Note that the speaker stated they will have to abandon the business soon if they do not get their permits.
Kimberly Cargile, Tracy Cannabis Collective
Regardless of your support or opposition to retail cannabis in Tracy, the point is that Patel is playing a critical part in creating a bureaucratic juggernaut for businesses like what occurs at her previous employer, the City of Oakland.
Ast. Director of Development Bill Dean botched Tracy's cannabis permitting from the beginning.
Oakland is notorious for being a difficult place to do business and it all starts at City Hall. The city in general is a nightmare for developers, with a permitting process that is exhaustive and slow. It’s apparent that Patel is bringing this mentality to Tracy. Slow things down. Hold multiple meetings. Fill out many forms. Hold more meetings. Rinse and repeat. Take a trip to downtown Oakland and let us know how many new businesses you see operating. Eventually, many developers or small businesses get frustrated and leave. Top Golf, for instance, gave up on Tracy and located in Manteca. This is already taking shape in Tracy!