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DCC Interview and Mateel Center Listening Session Highlights · KMUD News

• 0:00
  Speaker A: The California Department of Cannabis Control, also known by the acronym dcc, paid a visit to Southern Humboldt this week. DCC Director Clint Kellum toured parts of the county and visited notable legacy growers like Mattole Valley, Sun Grown and Huckleberry Hill Farms. Other Department of Cannabis Control staff came to Redway for a listening session with local growers at the Matteel Center Yesterday afternoon, Wednesday, June 24, KMUD News covered the department's visit both with a sit down interview with Jordan Traverso, the DCC's deputy director of Public affairs, and by attending the full Q and A session between the department and growers at the Meteill. That event lasted two and a half hours with about 75 people in a very hot and sweaty room. There is far too much audio to share on this newscast and many of the presentations and questions from our local growers were passionate, heartfelt and sincere expressions of desperation in a legal marketplace that does not work for their needs. With that, we're announcing that on Tuesday, June 30th at 5:30pm we will have a 30 minute special presentation of the Meteill event before that evening's newscast. There's a lot to share and we want to make sure the community hears what happened at the Meteill. We'll also post this information to our social channels and we'll be uploading the 30 minute special online so so that anyone who misses the broadcast still gets an opportunity to hear what was expressed by our local cannabis community to the Department of Cannabis Control. For this newscast we want to show you a few highlights both from our interview with Jordan Traverso of the DCC and from the event itself. Here's some clips from our interview with Deputy Director of Public Affairs Jordan Traverso. The interview was conducted before the event at the meteill.
• 1:48
  Speaker B: Well, thank you Jordan for coming and visiting KMUD today.
• 1:51
  Speaker C: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.
• 1:54
  Speaker A: Can you let our listeners know just
• 1:55
  Speaker B: a little bit about the event you folks are about to conduct at the Matteel center and some of the, maybe some of the basic points for growers who can't attend today of what you're trying to express to licensees?
• 2:06
  Speaker C: Sure. So around the beginning of this year, our new director, Clint Kellam, came into service for the State. He was selected by Newsom to replace Nicole Elliott, who had stepped down. She was the first Director of the Department of Cannabis Control since the convergence of the other departments into one. And so he's only the second director and when he started he said one of the things that he really wanted to have happen was just really hearing from licensees. He started with these four goals. There was continued pressure on the illicit market, making sure they're safe and trusted product for consumers and their access and awareness, which is making sure consumers know where to buy and how to buy cannabis legally. Because there are quite a few jurisdictions that still ban it in the state, which really hinders this idea of legalization statewide. And then the last one is reduced friction for legal operators and you know, kind of maintaining trust and safety for consumers, but at the same time making sure that our legal operators have the ability to do business in the state. And with that, he really wanted to know what these issues are and what's the reality out there among licensees.
• 3:21
  Speaker B: Is there anything specific or anything proposed in your regulations that could help make the marketplace easier for small to medium sized growers in southern Humboldt specifically?
• 3:34
  Speaker C: You know, not that I'm familiar with right this second. I will say that we are always looking to hear from every size of grower and every size of business. You know, the market is, is not supposed to limit anybody. We're supposed to be able to really manage just like, you know, it should be just like a regular business. You can have a small market or you can have a huge. I'm talking about like a grocery, you can have a small grocery or you can have a huge grocery. Right. All of these should be able to function within the particular community based on what the needs of that community are. And so I think that that's what he's really looking for as far as reducing friction, trying to figure out which things are really hindering this process. And you know, because it is not lost on us that it's been really a rough. Is not lost on us that licensees are dropping out because they can't make it work. That said, I don't know that that's totally unique to this industry. I think that any industry where you kind of are starting out, there's going to be some that win and some that lose. There's going to be some that move forward and some that don't.
• 4:37
  Speaker A: And then kind of looking into informing
• 4:40
  Speaker B: folks on maybe some of the limitations of what the DCC can and can't do. My understanding is that you are regulating a market. You're not the ones who initiated it because that came from the 2016 legislation or the vote that came through. What do you say to folks who. I'm going to use an example from last year. There were some law enforcement caravans that came through southern Humboldt and made a lot of noise in the local press. And some of the folks in those caravans had a DCC logos on the clothes they were wearing. You know, how do those collaborations with law enforcement come about? I mean, what, what is or is not the involvement of the DCC when it comes to, like, legal enforcement in that way?
• 5:28
  Speaker C: So we do have teams that go along with, say, cdfw. I'm sorry, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. They are really looking for environmental crimes, but we would sometimes participate with them. There's. There's a number of multi agency enforcement operations that happen. Sometimes they're led by local police departments or sheriff's offices. Other times they're led by state. Sometimes they're even led by feds. There's lots of different ways that those can come to be. Sometimes when our department is involved, it's actually not our enforcement team. It would possibly be our compliance team that was going along with somebody else's lead investigation or operation. There are times that they are. They are DCC led, I would say. I think a lot of our enforcement efforts focus on retail shops that are not licensed. There are a lot of shops out there that really look legitimate but have no licensure whatsoever. And so that is a focus for us is making sure that those don't take away from the market. There's other pieces of the market that are failing based on what else is competing with them. And so unlicensed shops is one of them. Another one is this issue we have with banned jurisdictions, right? Places that people don't even know that they're buying something that isn't legal there. It really does need to have. We kind of need to even the playing field. And that is one of the things that we're working on pretty hard is trying to get ban jurisdictions to open up to cannabis sales. I think that that would actually be really beneficial for the market. We're trying to operate right now with only a little piece of the pie when if we were able to go statewide, I think it could really help this market.
• 7:18
  Speaker B: It's a weird market because your slice of the pie is one part. But then there's all these kind of like almost unregulated sections that they are trying to crack down on, but still very much exist. It's interesting.
• 7:29
  Speaker C: It is interesting to think about what illicit cannabis means because I think there's an image, right, of cartel Gro, some kind of organized crime. And that's not always the case. Sometimes there's an operator who's popping up a shop in LA on a street and people go there and shop. We shut it down and they are right back up the next day. So there's. It's difficult to battle this illicit market.
• 7:55
  Speaker A: After meeting with DCC Deputy Director of Public Affairs Jordan Traverso, KMUD attended the meeting between the DCC and local growers held at the Metiel center in Redway. We would like to give a big thank you to Jim Fulton who provided recorded audio of the event. We'll start off with Galen from Whitethorn Valley Farms who emphasized contradictory regulatory practices and enforcement in the DCC's marketplace and across different government agencies.
• 8:23
  Speaker D: As a small operator we cannot be in compliance with every single agency at the same time. Sometimes the agencies contradict them each other on the same exact rain catchment pond. This happened on my property. Fish and Wildlife said it's non jurisdictional. State water board says it is. That's a problem. DCC issues a notice to comply and I'm in the middle trying to water my crops so I can harvest them, so I can hopefully sell them, so I can hopefully get paid so that I can pay my license renewal fee. In order to be in compliance most of us would have to have an effect full time staff person just doing that and the numbers just aren't there. We are being out competed by large scale operations.
• 9:13
  Speaker A: DCC Director Clint Kellum's response focused on how small and large scale operators are allegedly treated the same regarding compliance enforcement.
• 9:23
  Speaker E: I want maybe just to go back to some of your earlier comments here that you know, we're not, we're not giving anybody a pass in compliance. We're looking at everybody and where we find, I mean we've taken down 100 burners in the last couple of years. They're very resource intensive to do so. Right. And so like why do we have so many small distros and like there are equity operators that want small distros to actually be small business operators too. And so like there's all these challenges within that. We are not purposely dragging our feet on anything.
• 10:03
  Speaker A: Next is audio from Indy Riggs, local grower and board member with the Humboldt County Growers Association. Indy commented on the large scale consolidation that is currently occurring across the cannabis industry.
• 10:17
  Speaker F: I think a lot of these things that people are bringing up, the questions they're asking, the issues they're bringing up all boil down to what is occurring in the industry, which is consolidation and it's occurring at a rapid, more rapid rate. My concerns are these unannounced inspections, broader enforcement Action. New regulations that are being released are encouraging that consolidation and maybe the department might be feeling some pressure to spur that along.
• 10:52
  Speaker A: Clint Kellum responded to Indy Rigs by claiming the DCC does not favor large operators with their regulations.
• 10:59
  Speaker E: I don't think that in there it is saying that we favor big operators over small operators, because that's not true. There's never a moment in our department where we're like, yes, we want to favor the large operators over the small operators. I've never heard that uttered in my 18 months at the department. And so I do sit with the folks that are making the policy changes at the department, so I can feel fairly confident on that.
• 11:27
  Speaker A: Burdensome regulations that disproportionately impact small scale cannabis growers and businesses across the Emerald Triangle were a constant theme of the DCC's listening session. Perhaps the most emphatic speaker was Michael Hakubel, owner of the Plant Humboldt Nursery, who carried thousands of DCC tags to the microphone to make a clear point on excessive regulatory burdens for small operators in the cannabis industry.
• 11:54
  Speaker G: Hello, my name is Michael from Plant Humboldt Cannabis Nursery. We're right up the street here. I brought y' all a present and. Yeah, bring it up here. So this present is really damn heavy. It's like £10 here. And I want to tell you why it's. Why, why I brought it to you because it's emblematic of the absurd, burdensome nature of the regulations that all small businesses are crushed under. So I've been here since all of you, before all of you had jobs, before these agencies even existed, right? So 2018, you come in and you throw this massive dump truck of wet cement of regulations on us that make zero sense, that don't map to anything actually on the ground. So my one little business where we, you know, where we take some a pot full of dirt and we put a seed and we grow it out in the sun and then we sell it to people, is suddenly three businesses. We need three licenses, triplicate. Everything I had to do five different criminal background checks just duplicates. It's absurd. I'm sure that you're correct in that no one has ever said, let's screw all the small cultivators, let's get them out. Let's get all these ruly hippies out of here. Yeah, let's screw them. I'm sure there's never been anybody in a smoky back room. None of that happened. But there's a maxim that says something in the fact that a regulation, a rule, a law is what it does. The purpose of it is what it does.
• 13:13
  Speaker A: Dcc Director Clint Kellum's response to Michael Yakubel of Plant Humboldt Nursery focused on the DCC's regulatory obligations due to existing California law and didn't offer a direct response.
• 13:26
  Speaker E: Appreciate all the different thoughts there. I think it is important maybe too for the room to say you're right, we weren't here in 2016, but actually this was a voter approved initiative that had a lot of statutory rules included in it, including track and trace and all of those details. And so regulations are really can't be in place without the state laws that drive them. And so we're just really doing what the state laws require of us.
• 14:01
  Speaker A: Many earlier speakers at the meeting talked about the anxiety of unannounced inspections by the DCC and the manner they are currently conducted. Cassandra Taliaferro of Green Ox spoke on the sheer fear she and her employees feel on a daily basis due to the threat of DCC inspections.
• 14:20
  Speaker H: The level of anxiety my staff has because we didn't get our annual inspection. It's punitive and unjust. Like I get being the owner and being somebody who is a legacy farmer. Like I have way more PTSD from a no knock inspection than I ever had from being rated by Camp.
• 14:43
  Speaker A: Cassandra also spoke on DCC staff needing personal experience with metric and the regulatory burdens cannabis operators deal with, and DCC Director Clint Kellam admitted he was not very familiar with the system.
• 14:58
  Speaker H: I mean, I don't know how many of you have actually tried to use metric sandbox and make yeah, I have
• 15:04
  Speaker E: not spent an extensive amount of time in metric, but it does seem cumbersome as well.
• 15:09
  Speaker A: Tina Gordon from Mood Maid Farms was the last grower who spoke at the event and emphasized that the DCC should place more inspection burden on known bad actors and also spend some time in the shoes of local growers. DCC Director Clint Kellam did not respond to Tina and ended the event with a general statement on differences of perspective.
• 15:30
  Speaker I: What if there's a reason why complaints or multiple complaints and or multiple dirty coas coas come up flaring with pesticides? Yes. Pay a visit. A no knock visit. But what about if there's never been an issue with someone's coa? They've never had a complaint. Why would they why do a no knock? Why do a no knock inspection? Right. We live in rural areas. Oftentimes we don't have service where we're working and we're always working and so it just kind of doesn't make sense on either side could imagine what our job is like, even maybe do a little exchange for a day. If everyone on this panel has grown a plant before by chance and just has that experience of what that might be like, and then maybe we can really have that conversation about how do we serve the consumer? Because I think that that's why we're all here and that's what we want to do, is we want to make sure that these people have access to the most powerful plant on the planet in a way that's truly going to help them. So thank you so much for being here.
• 16:41
  Speaker E: Thank you, thank you. Well, I appreciate everybody being here. Hopefully you felt this valuable in some way to at least exchange information. I think it's fair for people to have different perspectives on the same issue. It's what makes the world go round.
• 17:06
  Speaker A: There were many more in depth regulatory points and lengthy discussions at the DCC event from both sides. With talks lasting two and a half hours. We will be airing a lengthier and less edited version of the California Department of Cannabis Control's listening session at the Meteal center on Tuesday, June 30th at 5:30pm Other growers like Huckleberry Hills, Johnny Casale asked pointed questions on very specific regulatory issues and those in our audience who work within the DCC marketplace will gain more knowledge from our special 30 minute edition. What is clear is that while the DCC took the time to listen to our local cannabis industry, they either do not understand the needs of small cannabis operators in the Emerald Triangle or lack the regulatory and legal authority to make significant positive changes in the near term. Reporting for kmud, I'm April Lewis.