With the state flush with piles of cash generated by dotcoms and One Percenters who earned prodigious profits during a Pandemic that featured lockdowns across the economic spectrum, Gov. Gavin Newsom last Friday, May 14, announced a proposed $738.1 million for cannabis-related purposes, including $100 million in grant funding for local governments with pot regulatory programs to complete environmental studies, license reviews, and mitigate environmental impacts. The proposal supports a broader effort to transition cannabis farmers into the regulated market and to allegedly reduce barriers to entry for small businesses. The plan also proposes to allocate nearly $630 million in cannabis tax funds to public health, environmental protection, and public safety initiatives.
Mendocino County is slated to receive approximately $18 million from the $100 million grant fund.
The new found money is all part of the so-called “May Revise,” an annual intermediary budget step where governors revise the proposed budget introduced in January. The whole process is subject to approval by the state legislature.
According to Newsom’s office, the goal is “to help local governments and aid licensees in successfully and swiftly moving from provisional licensure into annual licenses, and to do so in a way that supports the environmental compliance requirements. The grant program is intended to:
• Aid local governments in processing substantial workloads associated with transitioning businesses to a regulated market.
• Incentivize local governments to modify their permitting methods to better align with the state’s effort to remove barriers to licensure.
• Support provisional license holders by allowing local governments to pass through funding to applicants for purposes of assessing and mitigating environmental impacts.
• Provide more financial assistance to licensed cultivators and localities that license them, as both often experience enhanced environmental compliance and resource challenges when transitioning operations to annual licensure.
• Provide enhanced support to eligible jurisdictions that are implementing social equity programs. This grant program targets funds in a way that seeks to maintain stability across the supply chain and distributes these one-time resources to a significant number of jurisdictions implementing local equity programs, transitioning larger populations of legacy operators to the regulated market, and/or that are located in areas rich in natural resources and require additional capital to meet environmental compliance standards.
“This grant funding aims to serve local governments and a significant portion of the provisional license population, including a number of small businesses and equity operators,” said Nicole Elliott, Governor Newsom’s Senior Advisor on Cannabis. “We are committed to maintaining stability across the cannabis supply chain, supporting our local partners, and transitioning provisional licenses into annual licensure more swiftly, without sacrificing California’s environmental commitments.”
Under current statute, the provisional license program will sunset on January 1, 2022. Newsom’s plan proposes allowing provisional licenses to be issued until June 30, 2022, makes explicit environmental compliance requirements necessary to attain and maintain a provisional license, mandates the Department to specify through regulation what progress is required to maintain a provisional license, and removes the sunset date, thereby allowing a provisional license to be maintained so long as the applicant is making measurable progress toward achieving annual licensure.
The plan also proposes $9 million in funding for a Sustainable California Grown Cannabis pilot program which will provide funding to incentivize licensed outdoor cannabis growers to participate in the collection of data to benchmark best practices that reduce the environmental impact of cannabis water and energy use; pest management and fertilizer practices; and, to enhance soil health. The purpose of the pilot program is to establish science-based data for the future inclusion of cannabis in current and future state and national voluntary programs to advance environmental stewardship and to develop and advance Best Management Practices for Sustainable Cannabis Growing.
The Budget plan estimates $629.1 million in cannabis tax funding will be available for public health, environmental protection, and public safety initiatives, a 41.9 percent increase from the Governor’s Budget estimates in January. The funding will be allocated as follows:
• Education, prevention, and treatment of youth substance use disorders and school retention — 60 percent ($377.5 million).
• Clean-up, remediation, and enforcement of environmental impacts created by illegal cannabis cultivation — 20 percent ($125.8 million).
• Public safety-related activities — 20 percent ($125.8 million).
Another part of the plan involves a new Department of Cannabis Control that will be formed on July 1, 2021, pending approval by the state Legislature, and will combine the cannabis licensing and regulatory functions currently performed by the Department of Consumer Affairs’ Bureau of Cannabis Control, the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s CalCannabis Cultivation Licensing Division, and the California Department of Public Health’s Manufactured Cannabis Safety Branch.
* * *
California gas prices increase as trucker shortage grows.
As the Colonial Pipeline gets back up to speed after a recent ransomware cyberattack, many gas stations are still facing fuel shortages nationwide. The sudden, sharp reduction of supply is already driving up fuel prices and the ongoing professional truck driver shortage can’t keep up with the simultaneous fuel scarcity and burgeoning demand.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics there was a shortfall of 65,700 drivers for 2020, when compared to 2019. COVID-19 brought on a surge of early retirements for many of these drivers, and the trucking industry is struggling to make up for the shortfall.
A national tanker-truck association estimates 25% of industry vehicles could sit idle this summer because there simply aren’t enough drivers.
To make matters worse, as more people become vaccinated and want to resume travel plans this summer, and with the mask mandate recently lifted, the demand for gas is expected to grow exponentially this summer. The lack of drivers available to transport that additional fuel will likely cost consumers more at the pump.
(Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, observer@pacific.net, and is also the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org.)
Be First to Comment