Barstow’s unelected staffers gave the public shorter-than-usual notice and a whopping 1,961-page packet to prepare for a slew of controversial votes the City Council is set to cast Monday night with high stakes for residents, out-of-town investors, and California’s legal-weed industry.
The public meeting opens at 7 p.m. Monday and will include periods for those in attendance to speak their mind to the elected council and unelected staff in Barstow City Hall.
Amid a flurry of business, including more than two dozen scheduled public hearing votes, one issue stands out as the most prominent in scale: the legally-questionable return of a 29-acre “Cannabis Super Center” pitch that out-of-town entrepreneurs with high-level political connections have been pursuing since before Barstow’s first cannabis-biz applications opened in December 2021.
Many cannabis-industry players have marketed, invested in, and even finished months of construction in Barstow’s abandoned Factory Merchants Outlet Plaza on a bet of easy local-permit approvals. Tensions ramped up when the City Council killed the plan proposed at a Nov. 21 meeting by city staffers and Jon Zimmerman, a cannabis-services director for Los Angeles consulting firm Macias Gini & O’Connell LLP.
The failure came amid controversy and legal concerns over undue influence of city electeds by pot-mall backers, sweeping requests for exceptions to commercial-cannabis rules the City Council greenlit last year, and a mix of outside players who helped shape the complex plan before public review, the Daily Press previously reported.
The sweeping proposal is coming back to Barstow’s elected council Monday night in what appears to be essentially the same form as the failed pitch last month. It would give dozens of recently-created business entities unique benefits in the High Desert’s newest cannabis market: Less public oversight than local competitors and an ability to cover every step of the legal-weed supply chain under one roof in the lucrative multi-highway hub that Barstow offers midway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
The city released its 1,961-page agenda packet for Monday’s City Council meeting online around noon Friday, later than its standard of posting by mid- to late-afternoon Thursdays despite its length dwarfing all prior agendas in a tumultuous two years since the first-time elections of Mayor Paul Courtney and Councilwomen Barbara Rose and Marilyn Dyer-Kruse.
Separate from the pot mall, the City Council is also supposed to hold what would likely be an extensive hearing for a “vote of no confidence in Mayor Courtney,” previously requested by Rose and Mayor Pro Tem James Noble.
The no-confidence vote was tabled after being put on the City Council’s Dec. 5 meeting agenda. If passed, it would mark the latest reprimand by Barstow’s district-elected council against their elected-at-large peer amid a handful of lawsuits alleging crimes and corruption by Courtney that could hit city taxpayers for years to come. The Daily Press previously reported – adding to a ban from City Hall and a private investigation that cited the mayor for eight abuses of power.
With that, November election winner Carmen Hernandez will be sworn in for a third term as a returning City Council at the meeting after a send-off for 16-year Councilman Tim Silva, per the agenda. Silva chose not to seek reelection this year and made one of his last acts on the elected body, pummeling the pot-mall proposal the previous month with a line of questions and an idea “to take this across the hall, shred it, burn it and bury it.”
Yet, more than 1,800 pages of the City Council’s Monday agenda focuses exclusively on a second-effort pitch for the pot mall now stuck in limbo as a project that’s been rejected but already deeply funded and months into construction.
The pitch is for dozens of recently-launched business entities to function on paper as separate cannabis operations but for their operations to be regulated through a single business entity that holds a “master lease” for all 23 abandoned buildings, Merchants Barstow LLC. This entity would also handle some responsibilities usually tasked to individual cannabis shops, such as running security for the entire pot mall and paying the city all standard fees owed by the pot-mall operators.
Merchants Barstow already locked in a “master lease” for the abandoned mall of 10 years, with an option to renew another decade after that, according to its proposed “master development agreement” that the City Council already rejected once. Approval of the pot mall is critical in its plan to cover the rent it owes during this time to the property owner, Barstow Outlet LLC, by subleasing space across all 23 buildings to the entities that would act as pot-biz operators.
The whopping agenda adds numerous new questions to unresolved fears that arose last month. At least a few Barstow-area activists plan to express their outrage Monday night at City Hall.
One question is how exactly the pot-mall backers can pitch what amounts to the same agreement that’s already been shot down once.
The “multi-tenant development agreement” coming back on Monday’s agenda contradicts an explanation City Attorney Matthew Summers gave on Nov. 21 for how the pot-mall backers could work back from square one to get a newly-structured version of their plans approved.
Courtney motioned for a City Council vote to approve the Merchants Barstow LLC and Barstow Outlet LLC pitch at the November 21 meeting but faced silence from his elected peers.
When no councilmember answered Courtney’s motion with a “second,” the Merchants Barstow agreement died in effectively the same way as a City Council vote to reject it, the city attorney explained at the time.
“The applicant’s remedy at this point,” Summers said in the Nov. 21 meeting, “would be to apply for 24 separate development agreements” covering each entity planning to get its permit for its cannabis operation in the mall.
“The overall cannabis project can still move forward,” he continued, “if they: A) make that choice to apply for individual development agreements; and B) each [individual agreement] is itself reviewed and approved through the standard process, returns to the Planning Commission, is recommended for approval by the Planning Commission, and then would come to this council.”
“Yeah, that’s correct,” Courtney added from the dais.
But the process Summers described as necessary for the pot-mall project’s revival hasn’t occurred.
The City Council’s Monday agenda includes partial copies of 23 “Cannabis License Applications” supposedly submitted to staff before the Nov. 21 meeting by each entity seeking to act as individual businesses under subleases with Merchants Barstow LLC.
None of these pot-mall applications had been made public before Barstow staff released the latest agenda last Friday, nor would they have needed to face any public scrutiny to obtain permits if the City Council had voted on Nov. 21 to approve the all-encompassing Merchants Barstow contract.
“This application came before the Planning Commission for review at its October 10, 2022 meeting,” the agenda for Monday’s meeting states.
Yet, Barstow’s Planning Commission – a subcommittee that vets many projects and policies before they can go to a City Council vote – hasn’t held a public meeting since Oct. 10 and thus couldn’t have given its usually-critical public review for any of these pot-mall applications or agreements in the past month.
One council member, Dyer-Kruse, probably won’t participate in the pot-mall debate on Monday night. She had to recuse from the item and leave the Council Chambers on Nov. 21 due to a conflict of interest: Her employer, real-estate mogul, and City Treasurer Michael Lewis own commercial land that directly borders the abandoned mall and currently houses a Jersey Mike’s and Starbucks.
Charlie McGee covers California’s High Desert for the Daily Press, focusing on the city of Barstow and its surrounding communities. He is also a Report for America corps member with The GroundTruth Project, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists in the U.S. and worldwide. McGee may be reached at 760-955-5341 or cmcgee@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @bycharliemcgee.
