Santa Barbara City Administrator Paul Casey just selected the three recreational cannabis dispensaries that City Hall will authorize to set up shop in Santa Barbara, bringing to a close an eight months long beauty pageant pitting prospective pot retailers against each other for the right to sell weed legally within city limits. It will be months, however, before any of the three cannabis retailers open their doors to customers. The three successful applicants now have to run the city’s normal design review gauntlet, a process that could last many months. The most striking feature of the three successful applicants — 14 applied and six made the final cut — was their location. Conspicuously, none are located downtown on State Street. Only one — Coastal Dispensary at 1019 Chapala Street — is located downtown at all. Of the other two, one — Farmacy S.B. — is located in the digs of the old Video Shop by De la Vina and Mission Streets; the other — Golden State Greens — is located at 3516 State Street, coincidentally in the site of a former medical dispensary — Hortifarm — long since shut down.
Those hoping California’s new legalized pot rules, approved statewide by voters nearly two years ago, would usher in a new dawn of safe, legal, regulated, and taxed cannabis will have to hold their collective breaths for some time. In the meantime, a new medical dispensary has just opened its doors on Milpas Street — but a recommendation by a medical professional is still required. Another medical dispensary has been all but greenlighted for the 2600 block of De la Vina, but final paperwork has not been completed, nor has design review started. Assuming all are approved, built, and opened, the City of Santa Barbara will have five legal retail storefronts for cannabis consumers.
City Hall established a series of criteria by which interested recreational cannabis operators would be judged and scored. To make the final cut, applicants must score at least 900 points out of a possible 1,000. The top three, in this scenario, would get the nod, assuming they were not located within 1,000 feet of any other applicants with higher scores. In this instance, the second highest point scorer — the Arizona-based retail giant SGSB — was disqualified because it was located within 1,000 square feet of the Chapala operation. SGSB scored only three points fewer than the Coastal Dispensary. To date SGSB has not disputed the selection process, but given the closeness of results and the stakes involved — Coastal co-owner Malante Hawthorne said the partnership has spent close to a million just getting this far — a challenge would not be unexpected.