In a sign of the times, Salinas kills its cannabis subcommittee.

There is a simple elegance to our democratic republic. The people elect leaders to represent them. Those electeds hear from constituents. Depending on what they hear, they may change course.

Nowhere is this more visible than at the local level. People can organize to show up – and sometimes, decision-makers change their mind in real time.

So it was on the evening of Tuesday, Nov. 14 when Salinas City Council was set to consider what looked to be a rather perfunctory update to its retail cannabis ordinance. So perfunctory that it was scheduled for the consent agenda, meaning it wouldn’t even be a topic of discussion unless somebody requested a chance to discuss it. And many people did.

Over two-dozen people lined up to tell council they did not want changes to the ordinance, aggrieved primarily by a proposal to shrink the buffer zone between dispensaries and sensitive sites, in this case, houses of worship. “Our churches should be safe places along with schools and youth facilities,” one pastor said.

One speaker offered: “We really need to protect the community, we don’t need more dispensaries.”

“Every day the church is under attack,” one congregant said. “Now we have to worry about dispensaries as well.”

Another: “Can you imagine a green cross next to a heavenly cross?”

Ultimately, persuaded by the outpouring of opposition, City Council decided against the proposed ordinance adjustments. The proposed changes would have enabled the city to issue a total of eight retail licenses to dispensaries and/or delivery services, instead of the five currently allocated to brick-and-mortar and three for delivery. (All five of the former are spoken for, although two are inactive – that means with just three dispensaries in operation, permits are frozen out.) The proposed changes would have shrunk a buffer zone between dispensaries and places like churches from 1,000 feet to 600 feet.

“Seeing here a more fervent push to keep these dispensaries away, I am going to sit with community and ask that we keep the [buffer zone in effect for] houses of worship,” said Councilmember Carla Viviana González, a member of the three-person cannabis subcommittee that had reviewed the rules in advance. “It’s clear from the community tonight that there is a serious fear about how cannabis economic input would be funneled into certain communities.”

González’s colleagues on that subcommittee, councilmembers Orlando Osornio and Steve McShane, joined her in advocating to keep the ordinance as is and strike the proposed amendments.

“We have spent thousands of staff hours on this, and hundreds of thousands of consultant money on this, so I want to say, what a waste of time for the subcommittee,” McShane said. “The community has spoken, and I think we should listen. Getting a joint is not as important as fixing a road, or putting in a new play structure at El Dorado Park.” (Those numbers – thousands of hours – are hyperbole.)

Councilmember Andrew Sandoval took it a step further. He suggested not only keeping the existing ordinance as is, effectively shredding the subcommittee’s work, but also disbanding the subcommittee entirely.

The proposal to kill the recommended amendments and the subcommittee was approved 7-0.

In some ways, government may simply be catching up to the state of an industry that is imploding. The promise of cannabis as a revenue game-changer has not borne out – in Salinas, revenue has gone down every quarter since the first part of 2021. (Year over year, revenue in 2022 was down 25-percent from 2021, from $2 million to $1.5 million.) “Government hasn’t kept up with the fact that the market has really fallen apart,” McShane says.

While it seems like a good idea from a business perspective to make it simpler for new dispensaries to get licenses, only a handful of calls, roughly four, have been placed to City Hall in the last year-and-a-half inquiring about a license – there’s just no demand.

It wouldn’t be the first time governments set their hopes and dreams on a new industry to save them and the promise went unfulfilled.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com