The Lagunitas School Multipurpose Room was filled with up to 200 people Tuesday evening, the vast majority for the same reason: to oppose two applications for medical marijuana dispensaries in West Marin.
Most of the three-and-a-half-hour meeting, the second of three convened by the county this month to let the applicants present their proposals to an advisory committee and take public comment, focused on the application for Forest Knolls Wellness, which would be located at 6700 Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. Scores of opponents, many wearing red NO! stickers, detailed their objections during a lengthy public comment session. The other group, Craftcanna Health Center, which hopes to call the Marshall Tavern home, took less time; still, public comment from residents was largely against it.
The county advisory committee is made up of Charles Dresow, a lawyer at a San Rafael law firm; Michael Frank, head of the Marin General Services Authority; Joseph Kreins, recently the interim chief of police in Novato; and Wendy Shearn, who works at Kaiser Permanente. The group will offer recommendations to the county administrator, who will decide which of the 10 license applications for Marin to approve.
The meeting came just two days after supervisors voted to prohibit recreational marijuana businesses for the time being. “That is a sign that the board is not interested in mixing recreational and medical. We’re looking for the best providers of medicine,” said Tom Lai, assistant director of the Community Development Agency.
Craftcanna argued that mission made it a good fit. Cabral Bonner, a Stanford lawyer and legal adviser for Craftcanna who largely led the presentation, said his group’s dispensary is “first and foremost about craft—small-batch high-quality medicine” for West Marin. They said they have no interest in recreational marijuana. “We’re focused exclusively and in perpetuity on medical,” he said.
Craftcanna’s general plan is to park a mobile unit near the derelict Marshall Tavern and use proceeds from the dispensary—which will mostly focus on deliveries, in Chevy Volts—to renovate the property. Delivery requests would need to come in at least one full day in advance and Mr. Bonner said little product would remain on-site.
The application said the group would buy the tavern, for roughly $525,000. But during the presentation, Mr. Bonner said that in fact they would probably try to coordinate an investment firm buying the property, and Craftcanna would rent space from them.
The group said it had the right experience for running the dispensary. Jyoti Sroa, the group’s managing director, touted his family’s business in Fairfax, Lotus Cuisine of India, as proof of the group’s dedication to quality: the restaurant has a green business certification, a food-to-energy recycling program and earned praise in the Pacific Sun for over 15 years, he said.
The executive director of Craftcanna, Aaron Godbout, said he had “extensive experience,” having owned a medical dispensary in Denver that he later sold.
Mr. Bonner noted there’s already a coastal permit for the Marshall Tavern. The Craftcanna application said they may have to start from scratch, but he hopes the permit can simply be modified, to turn one of the rooms into a medical marijuana showroom of sorts. He said the group hoped the other rooms could be used for resident housing, not vacation rentals.
He understands concerns about whether the group can follow through on the tavern plans, but argued that the license could be conditioned on the work getting done.
The advisory committee expressed skepticism. “The location seems really bizarre to me,” one person said. Mr. Cabral replied that a very small number of parcels that fit the criteria are for rent.
Multiple speakers said they enjoyed Lotus’s food, but Marshall residents expressed concern, particularly in regard to whether the tavern would really be renovated. One woman named Nancy described the prospect of renovation as “a shiny penny” the applicants were presenting to secure community support.
Another resident said that Marshall was “one of the least accessible places in Marin County,” adding that putting a mobile unit on Tomales Bay would be viewed by residents as “an abomination.”
But Avi Atid, a current co-owner of the tavern, said that it is incredibly difficult to make the tavern pencil out financially. He and a business partner spent five years and three brokers trying to sell the bayside property, to no avail. Now they are trying to sell it for less than what they paid originally, and that’s after all the permit fees. Perhaps, he suggested, this is the way to make it work for a buyer.
The night’s other presentation, for Forest Knolls Wellness, was also largely led by a lawyer, Natalia Thurston, though three directors for the nonprofit also spoke, as did one of the current owners of the building, Rebecca Lepori.
The nonprofit’s president, Kip Baldwin, a 15-year San Rafael resident, said he became interested in medical marijuana when he became a caregiver for a friend with lyme disease. He said his work on the reality show “Weed Country,” now a hotly critiqued topic in the San Geronimo Valley, showcased how a young child with epilepsy greatly benefited from the medicine.
The star of the show, Matthew Shotwell, who is interested in purchasing the building, was not present.
The advisory committee asked the group pointed questions. One member said that none of the nonprofit directors had experience with medical marijuana dispensaries—to which Ms. Thurston replied that Mr. Baldwin’s retail experience was similar enough (an assertion that drew disbelief from the crowd). “He has the management skills,” she said, while she and their other attorneys would help them navigate the highly regulated industry.
Mr. Dresow noted all the NO! stickers and signs in the room and said it didn’t seem that the community felt their concerns have been addressed. “I really didn’t hear anything in your presentation about how you’ll…address community concerns…the very, very legitimate concerns of this community.”
“And where is Matthew Shotwell?” he added.
Ms. Thurston said he was a potential buyer of the building, not a nonprofit director. “I don’t know where he is,” she said.
As for the concerns, she mentioned a proposal to move the entrance to the back to try to address concerns about children walking by. But she also said that many people who supported the dispensary and have contacted her personally are “afraid to vocalize” their support.
Another advisory committee member, Ms. Shearn, said she was confused about Mr. Baldwin’s bio in the application, specifically his interest in something called the “Just Love Movement.” The bio says the movement is about “no longer making the choice to have our experience of life and LOVE, as one of being perpetually afraid. This is not to say that we will no longer fear, as fear has it place in the experience, it is a useful tool and should be experienced as just that, a useful tool, not the foundation for our individual being or the collective we are now describing as human ‘civilization.’”
Mr. Baldwin said it was about the fact that his “every waking moment is to make the world a better place.”
The presentation did not change many residents’ minds. Attendees continued to clamor for a denial of the license during the public comment, given concerns about proximity to the school, crime, traffic, the area’s light police presence and the fact that the star of “Weed Country” is interested in buying the building.
“There is no other safe route to school. I can’t even believe we’re having this meeting,” said a man named David, a parent of two Forest Knolls children.
Laura Shain, the principal of the school, said she had concerns about safety, particularly because the district—a half mile away—does not have a fence around its property. She worried that students walking by each day would normalize drugs at a time when the school is trying to promote healthy choices.
“If this application is approved, it makes our jobs a lot harder…. We’re not equipped to handle wayward people,” she said.
“I really question their sincerity,” said a woman from Woodacre named Marlene, adding that it wasn’t a question “of whether pot should be legal… it’s about this dreadful location.” “Our community has ways for those in need to get [marijuana],” she added.
A decision on the applications is expected in March or April. Whichever application or applications the county approves, an advisory committee member said it must make “a difficult decision” weighing patient needs and community needs.
“We’ve heard now six of these applications,” he said. “I’ve not heard of any location that people are for.”