On Tuesday, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors unanimously passed more changes to its commercial cannabis ordinance, and most of them were procedural changes to make the process more efficient.
Would-be cannabis operators have to get county approval for a land use permit (connected to the location and site plan) and business license for cultivation, which is the most prevalent kind of marijuana business in Santa Barbara County.
The interest in making the process more efficient is to finish review on operating, unpermitted cannabis cultivations so they are either approved and have to follow all county regulations, or they are turned down and have to close.
“These amendments represent nearly 10 months of work,” Barney Melekian, deputy county executive officer, said at Tuesday’s meeting. “The goal was to bring the land use permitting process and the business licensing process into alignment.”
The changes mandate that applicants submit business licensing applications within 15 days of getting approval for a land use permit, to cut down delays between the two reviews, according to Brittany Heaton, the county’s principal analyst for cannabis.
Most of the marijuana being grown in Santa Barbara County is within legal, nonconforming operations that are in the permitting review process. They do not have county permits yet, but county ordinances allow them to keep growing cannabis while they pursue permits.
There are 270 acres of cannabis cultivation in the county associated with active state licenses (not all of those operators have local permits), and the majority of those operations are in the Lompoc, Santa Ynez and Carpinteria valleys.
The county supervisors also decided to define tax delinquency as failure to file a quarterly cannabis tax report with the Treasurer-Tax Collector’s Office or failure to pay required taxes on cannabis operations.
As Melekian has said, many cannabis operations have failed to file tax reports, or reported no income, and the county has not been conducting enforcement.
When a cannabis business entity sells or transfers any part of its corporate stock that is greater than 20% or changes ownership, a new cannabis business license must be obtained. The County Executive Office landed at the threshold of 20% in order to align with the state’s requirements, Melekian said.
Some county supervisors expressed concern about the change, saying the new requirement could slow down the licensing process if applicants would be taken off the list while waiting for the new license.
“It leaves the question, ‘How much would trigger a new application?’” Third District Supervisor Joan Hartmann said. “Where are we going to draw the line?”
Hartmann said she would prefer that the land use permit is delayed until an operator obtains a business license and that the two should be mutually dependent.
Melekian said he encourages anyone going through the application process to change ownership at the same time in order to not slow down the process. He said that any change of ownership should require a change in license, and the next bureaucratic challenge will be the renewal process that occurs every year.
“One of the challenges from the beginning has been that the ownership of individual operations is never completely stable,” he said. “We’re trying to match a single business license model process to this dynamic industry.”
The amendments are scheduled to go back before the Board of Supervisors next Tuesday for adoption, and the board is expected to discuss ownership changes again.
— Noozhawk staff writer Jade Martinez-Pogue can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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