Didn’t have a link for this so I’m passing on the entire message:
The Los Angeles City Council has scheduled 28 medical marijuana hardship exemption application hearings for their Tuesday July 14, 2009 meeting.
Council will be hearing the 28 applications that appeared before the Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee on June 29, 2009. The PLUM Committee denied all 28 applications and has recommended that council do the same.
The term hearing is actually a misnomer in this case as City Council is not required to debate or take any further comment on any of these 28 applications since public hearings have already been held on these items (The PLUM Committee hearing was the public hearing on these items).
Normally if people come down to the Council meeting and fill out a speaker card for a specific item that has already had a public hearing the Council President will usually ask that that item be called as “special” and additional comment may be allowed. But again, the Council is not required to take any further comments on these items even if people fill out speaker cards and request time to speak.
Just part of the kangaroo court that these hearings have been up until this point. When someone challenges the rulings in these hearings in court down the road (and someone will) is when it will get interesting and people will then have an opportunity to speak.
The meeting begins at 10:00 AM Tuesday July 14, 2009 at Los Angeles City Hall, 200 N Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles.
You can also view the City Council meeting live via the internet at:
http://lacity. org/lacity/ YourGovernment/ CityCouncil/ CouncilMeetings/ LIVE\andON-DEMANDVideo/ index.htmYou can listen live via telephone: COUNCILPHONE, A dial-up system which allows the public to listen to live coverage of the Los Angeles City Public Meetings from any phone. The numbers may be used from any location, not just in Los Angeles. Dial up and listen in. Use any of these 4 numbers- (213) 621-CITY, (310) 547-CITY, (310) 471-CITY or (818) 904-9450.
[These "hardship exemptions" are the loophole that has led to the explosion in dispensaries in LA county, so that there are now over 1,000, even after the county put a moratorium on more dispensaries. This is no fault of the people trying to open the dispensaries, rather the inevitable result of lax regulation and oversight, Attorney General Holder's pledge to end DEA raids, and entrepreneurial spirit. The problem for the movement, however, is now the floodgates are open for the unscrupulous dispensary owners to make the genuine compassionate collectives look bad, right in the middle of the 2nd-largest media market in the United States. I believe in patient access as much as anyone, but 1,000 dispensaries in one county, even in a county of 10,000,000 where only a minority of those folks are medical card holders, seems a bit much even to me. --"R"R]
The problem is that the City created the Hardship Exemption clause specifically for those collectives which opened pre-ICO and were displaced by DEA Landlord Letters. But two years later, there are still no regulations and an explosion of new dispensaries, which have all filed a for a hardship exemption. The City Council, now under pressure to clean up the mess caused by their own failure to come up with permanent rules & regulations – has refused to make any distinction between the dispensaries who actually qualify for the hardship exemption (estimated to be less than 40) and those who do not (approximately 600.) The PLUM committee hearings were an abomination – as is this entire process. The city will likely face serious legal repercussions for the manner in which they have handled the matter of the hardship exemptions.
Thank you for posting the story and getting the word out about what is going on here in Los Angeles. I originally posted the story in my Marijuana News Group (http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/mmjnews/), at http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/mmjnews/message/4771 and the posted an update with a link to the city council agenda for the meeting July 14th at http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/mmjnews/message/4790.
Once again, thank you.
Peace
brett
I’d love to have that problem here in Texas!