Santa Cruz City Council adopts financial reporting rules for dispensaries

Leaders of Greenway Compassionate Relief and Santa Cruz Patients Collective praised city officials for working with them to create an ordinance that regulates medical marijuana sales without being too cumbersome for providers to follow.

“Clear guidelines are all we were looking for,” said Ken Sampson, a representative of Santa Cruz Patients Collective.

Sampson did say the new requirements to report sales by ZIP code and provide records about the kind of marijuana products they grow and sell will be expensive in terms of staff time. But he said the city needn’t worry about the dispensary making excessive profits, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reports.

“We’ve been a nonprofit from the beginning,” he said.

Council members Don Lane and Cynthia Mathews worked with the dispensaries to craft the financial and statistical reporting ordinance that a national medical marijuana group says is the most detailed in California. The idea is not to keep the dispensaries from making a profit, the council members said, but to ensure that they are reinvesting profit in the organization or their customers, as defined by nonprofit guidelines.

The new rules also require the dispensaries to provide the city copies of tax documents, which will provide further information about revenue and the salaries of directors.

The expanded regulation follows a March vote that limited pot shops to the current two.