Tarek Tabsh applauds Councilman Dennis Zine's suggestion on capping… (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles…)
The Los Angeles City Council took several key steps Tuesday toward completing an ordinance that would regulate the city's multiplying medical marijuana dispensaries, voting to sharply limit the number and location of stores.
The decisions, reached after hours of often heated debate, came more than 4 1/2 years after the council first looked at the issue. At that time, there were four known dispensaries in the city. Hundreds opened while the city failed to enforce a moratorium on dispensaries and pass an ordinance.
The council voted to allow 70 dispensaries. But it also decided to allow those dispensaries that had registered with the city and are still open in their original locations to continue to operate. The city attorney's office put the number at 137. The cap would take effect only if the number of dispensaries dropped to 70.
In a final bid to clamp down, the council also tightened the location restrictions, deciding that dispensaries will not be allowed within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, libraries, residences or sites with other so-called sensitive uses. Supporters of that restriction said it was critical to protect neighborhoods, but opponents and dispensary operators insisted that it would eliminate most locations in Los Angeles, where commercial strips are often next to houses.
The council plans to vote today on the overall measure.
The debate has seen the council try to find a balance among medical marijuana advocates who have demanded safe access to the drug, homeowners who have protested the rapid expansion of dispensaries into residential neighborhoods and prosecutors who have insisted that collectives cannot sell marijuana and must grow it on-site.
Councilman Jose Huizar, who spearheaded the push for the cap and other attempts to stiffen the proposed ordinance, said he believed the city needed to start with the most restrictive approach. "If we allow for permissiveness in this ordinance, people will take advantage of it," he said.
Most council members appeared to agree, including Ed Reyes, who oversaw the drawn-out drafting process and who had reduced the allowable distance from schools and other such sites to 500 feet. He reversed himself Tuesday.
"I really think we sent a strong message that we want to take our city back," said Reyes, who intervened several times as the debate strayed to urge his colleagues to finish the ordinance. "We have to clean up a real big mess now."
L.A. has almost no control over its medical marijuana dispensaries. An L.A. County Superior Court judge recently declared that the city's moratorium on new outlets, adopted in 2007, was illegally extended and could not be enforced. Dispensaries are still opening and have clustered in neighborhoods such as Eagle Rock, Hollywood and Woodland Hills, drawn by empty storefronts or by proximity to night life or cities that do not allow pot dispensaries.
Michael Larsen, public safety director for the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council and one of the most vigilant neighborhood activists, said he was pleased with the cap and the location restrictions: "We see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I don't expect any real change in the situation until late spring or summer, realistically."
The only other city among the state's 10 largest to impose a cap is Oakland, which has less than one-tenth the population of Los Angeles and allows four dispensaries. Those operations have become extremely successful, splitting about $20 million a year in sales. Berkeley, with a population of 107,000, allows three shops; Palm Springs, population 47,600, two; West Hollywood, population 37,000, four; and Sebastopol, population 7,700, two.
Jane Usher, a special assistant city attorney, told the council that she did not believe a lawsuit challenging a cap would be successful. "If you can have an outright ban," she said, "then assuredly you can have a cap."
Council members wrestled with whether to cap the number at 70, as Huizar proposed, or 186, as Councilman Dennis Zine suggested. Zine and several other council members argued that the city needed to respect the dispensaries that had followed the city's requirements and registered to operate under the moratorium.
Zine spoke strenuously against the proposed 70 limit. "I don't think that is fair to those that opened up legally," he said. "I think that we should hold true to those that followed the rule."
But Huizar noted that the 186 did nothing more than fill out paperwork. "There's good ones, there's bad ones," he said, adding that city officials had not vetted them.
He also maintained that 70 was all that the budget-strapped city could oversee. "We don't have sufficient staff right now," he said.
