SAN DIEGO AWARDED $880,000 EQUITY GRANT

Money will be used to help boost local access to legal cannabis industry

San Diego’s long-awaited cannabis equity program has been awarded an $880,000 state grant to help people affected by the war on drugs enter the legal cannabis industry.

It’s the first such grant received by San Diego, which didn’t create its equity program until last year — several years after other large cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento and Long Beach.

The money will be used to help eligible people with startup loans, fee waivers, help finding business sites and other incentives. It will also help people expunge cannabis criminal convictions from their records.

San Diego County got a $350,000 state grant for similar purposes during this round of funding, which totaled $15 million.

The city got the seventh-largest grant, after Oakland and Los Angeles with nearly $2 million each, as well as Sacramento, San Francisco and Long Beach at $1.5 million each and Humboldt County with $1.2 million.

A cannabis equity assessment San Diego completed last year to be eligible for the grant found the biggest hurdles to entering the industry are lack of capital, lack of training, problems finding suitable sites and complex government regulations.

The assessment also found that people of color face steeper challenges than Whites.

An ownership study, which covered the entire county rather than just the city, showed 68 percent of cannabis business license holders are White and not Hispanic, even though non-Hispanic Whites make up 44 percent of the overall population.

Latinos, who make up 34 percent of the overall population, hold only 14 percent of cannabis business licenses. Black people fare better, making up 5.6 percent of the county

population and controlling 7 percent of cannabis licenses.

“The historical enforcement of drug laws produced profound disparities in business ownership, wage earnings and mass incarceration within the criminal justice system,” said Kim Desmond, who leads the city’s Office of Race and Equity. “An acknowledgment of historic institutional racism and systemic inequity is

key to understanding disparities in the cannabis industry.”

Lara Gates, who runs the city’s Cannabis Business Division, said the initial wave of funding will make a big impact.

“Receiving this critical funding source is vital to jump-starting our cannabis equity program,” Gates said. “These dollars will provide a solid foundation for our initial cannabis equity applicants to get a strong foothold in the legal cannabis market.”

To be eligible for a canna

bis equity grant, people must have either been convicted of a cannabis crime, or had a family member convicted of one, after 1993, within the San Diego city limits. They also must have lived for at least five cumulative years in either Barrio Logan, Linda Vista, southeastern San Diego, Encanto, Golden Hill, North Park, City Heights, the College Area or San Ysidro.

Applicants must also meet two of four other criteria. Those criteria are having a household income below 80 percent of the area median, being in the foster care system any time between 1971 and 2016, attending school in the San Diego Unified School District for at least five years between 1971 and 2016 and losing housing in San Diego through eviction, foreclosure or subsidy cancellation after 1994.

San Diego was awarded a $75,000 state grant two years ago to complete the equity assessment. Vista was awarded a $75,000 grant for the same purpose as part of this round of funding.