By Griffen Thorne on December 29, 2018
On January 1, 2019, the City of Pasadena in Northeastern Los Angeles County will open up its 30-day window to apply for one of six retail, four cultivation, or four testing facility permits. These 14 licenses will be highly coveted and sought after, and the winners will not be derived from a lottery system, but selected instead on scored applications. For anyone looking to get licensed in Pasadena, it’s going to be a busy month and an uphill battle.
Licensing in Pasadena is based on the June 2018 approval of local ballot measures CC and DD, which allow these limited permits and establish local taxing regimes. These ballot measures set hard caps on the license types as noted above. Unless Pasadena elects to allow more license types or licenses at later dates, this one-month window will be the only time to apply for commercial cannabis licenses in this city. And where the majority of California cities and counties still ban commercial cannabis activity, having Pasadena come online is a big win for overall legalization.
Notably, section 17.50.66 of the Pasadena Municipal Code precludes businesses from being licensed within the same building or even within 500–1,000 feet of one another, depending on the license type. In other words, Pasadena won’t be allowing combined license types in the same building or even anywhere near one another (which is much stricter than applicable state laws). Nor will it allow manufacturing or distribution, so there won’t be complete vertical integration for businesses in the near future in Pasadena.
Pasadena’s official screening information can be found here. To summarize, Pasadena will require information about owners of the business and about the proposed business generally. This includes detailed operations and security plans, statements of the owners’ previous experience, and statements of how the proposed business would be compatible with the surrounding community. The paper applications will have a hard cap of 100 pages. If you tried for a license in West Hollywood earlier this year, this should all sound very familiar.
Every aspect of these written plans will be reviewed based on scored criteria (found here). This scoring, in combination with the detailed plan requirements and page limitations mean that applications will need to be both comprehensive and polished. Pasadena will be evaluating these applications for owner experience, and if the applications are not well done or formatted properly, they may be dead on arrival.
Applicants may be tempted to approach this like a lottery as there are relatively few spots open. But this process will be very different from a lottery, where putting together a quick application or using a lot of the same boilerplate materials from other applications may be in the applicant’s best interest. Here, Pasadena has made pretty clear that it wants to see top-shape applications from folks with business acumen and industry experience. It’s even more important to ensure that applications are as perfectly formatted and complete as they can be, as the fee is a whopping $13,654 per permit.