Applicant says there was miscommunication about how the applications would be heard.
By Knowles Adkisson / The Malibu Times
Joshua Krane, whose application for a conditional use permit to operate a medical marijuana dispensary was passed over by the Malibu Planning Commission last week in favor of another application, said he would appeal the ruling to the city council. The commission had approved the application by James Erickson of Malibu Collective Caregivers.
Krane said there had been a miscommunication between city staff and his team, because he believed the commission was supposed to hear both applications and then decide which one was best for Malibu. Associate Planner Ha Ly disagreed, saying both applicants were informed early in the process that the applications would be heard in the order they were completed.
Erickson’s application was heard first, due to it being deemed complete by city staff about two weeks before Krane’s was submitted. After approving Erickson’s application, the commission was required to deny Krane’s due to a city law limiting the number of dispensaries in Malibu to two (the dispensary PCH Collective is already in operation in Malibu).
For the city council to overrule the planning commission’s decision, it would have to be persuaded that Erickson’s application was deficient in some way. That seems unlikely, although the staff report did raise concerns about parking at the proposed site for Malibu Collective Caregivers, located on Pacific Coast Highway behind Giovanni’s restaurant. The traffic engineer suggested limiting appointments at Malibu Collective Caregivers to four per hour as a mitigation measure for parking, but that condition was removed by the commission due to an inability to enforce it. Chair John Mazza said he used to have an office in the area, and he had never seen problems with parking there.
Krane said he and his associates had spent several thousand dollars during the application process and consulted experts in medical cannabis. Had he known that his application could not be approved unless Erickson’s was denied, Krane said his team might have gone about the process differently. Krane said they are currently working on the appeal to reverse the ruling granting Erickson’s application, which must be filed within 10 days of the ruling.
Krane said city staff had indicated to his team that the hearing would operate the same way as the commission’s 2009 hearing of the farmers’ market applications, when two organizations vied concurrently for one conditional use permit. Ly acknowledged using the example of the farmers’ market hearing to Krane’s associate, Mark Reitman, but said it was in response to Reitman’s question of whether the applications would be heard in the same hearing.
Ly said she told Reitman, “Since the first project [Malibu Collective Caregivers] is complete first, then they’re going first and you’re going second.”
Don Duncan, the California director for Americans for Safe Access, a medical cannabis advocacy group, attended last week’s meeting to speak on Krane’s behalf. Duncan told The Malibu Times it was “odd to me that they would schedule two applications, and then vote without hearing both. I don’t think it would have been an unfair process to hear both and then vote on either one. It seems strange; why put this on the agenda if they don’t intend to hear it.”
Gregg Kovacevich of the City Attorney’s Office said applications are always heard in order of completion in the interests of fairness.
“If your application was completed first, you get hearing priority first,” Kovacevich said. “So it’s no different in this case… Both applicants were notified upfront that the first one to be completed is the first one to be heard.”