Six applicants have filed for four coveted medical cannabis dispensary permits, according to City Manager Gabriel Elliott.
At 2 p.m. Friday, Elliott, Mayor Rich Kerr, Mayor Pro Tem Jermaine Wright and two residents appointed at-large to a subcommittee were scheduled to meet inside Kerr’s office at City Hall to deliberate on which four applicants will receive licenses.
“We need to go over, preliminary, what we’re going to do,” Kerr said Wednesday evening. “We want to get this done and over.”
Adelanto’s push to issue licenses for dispensaries in two zones, legalized within city limits at the end of June, is fueled by two objectives: To collect on the expected revenues they’ll produce and to quickly enable patients access to cannabis for medicine.
City rules call for one dispensary for every 8,500 residents and the subcommittee, officially filled out Wednesday by the appointments of residents Robert Andrade and Maggie Airy, will act as a Brown Act body and maintain an ongoing function since permits could be relinquished in the future and the number of permits could change as the city grows.
Kerr vowed that the process would be “as transparent as possible.”
One applicant vying for a license is Victorville resident and Edible Arrangements business owner Manny Serrano, who is an executive with MJRX Corporation. Serrano and his brother, attorney David Serrano, bought the Jet Room in Adelanto in a mid-October deal brokered by Councilman John “Bug” Woodard, who later expressed support from the dais to re-zone for dispensaries the land encompassing the property.
At the time, Serrano appeared comfortable with the presumptive investment for the under-construction and would-be dispensary, a white-marbled floor facility housing artifacts of the old restaurant and pub, because he said only two applicants had applied.
With six applicants now announced by Elliott, it’s conceivable the Serranos could be left out, albeit unlikely. The two have invested up to $40 million in land purchases elsewhere in the city, Serrano has said, in industrial zones allowing cultivation and manufacturing.
credit:420intel.com