By Allen Payton, Publisher

Tomorrow Saturday, March 24, the Antioch City Council will receive and consider a report about possible cannabis/marijuana businesses in town. No matter how much sales tax revenue it might create for our city, if they really want Antioch to improve the council needs to reject the idea.

First of all, with crime still being a problem for our community, the last thing Antioch needs is to add any kind of unnecessary burden to our understaffed police force. We’re down about 15 sworn officers from where we were promised we would be four years ago, at 111 under Measure C. Even with that many police, it will still leave us at less than one officer per 1,000 residents. Whether it’s legal or not, the criminal element surrounding the marijuana industry will still exist. We don’t want or need that in Antioch.

Also, while recreational and commercial marijuana uses are now legal in California as of Jan. 1st, as Councilwoman Lori Ogorchock has pointed out, they’re still illegal under federal law.

Second, the council has hired two different branding and marketing consultants to help make Antioch look better in the media, to help clean up the city’s public image. Approving any kind of marijuana businesses will work against that. Besides, it’s not the type of business we want to attract to our city and it could end up hurting our ability to attract better businesses and jobs. We don’t want or need Antioch to become known as the weed capital of the Delta or worse yet, the “Gourmet Ghetto of Cannabis Cuisine” as the city’s new branding consultant proposed as one of the five “Big Ideas” in their proposal.

Just as the Antioch BART Station is about to open, new upscale housing has and is being approved and can start being built on the south side of town, and the 200-acre commercial area between Slatten Ranch Shopping Center and the BART Station will soon open up with the extension of Slatten Ranch Road, Humphrey’s has a new owner and will open as a new restaurant with a new name, and downtown Rivertown is working to be revitalized, now is our time to seriously improve things in our city. But, marijuana businesses will undermine all those positive improvements.

The costs are too great, not just from a crime and financial standpoint, but they also include the negative impacts on users of marijuana and society in general. Medical marijuana is one thing. But, promoting it as a positive, commercial industry for our city is wrong and our mayor and council members need to reject it. What kind of message does it send to our young people and students? Not a good one. The other thing we don’t need is more dumbing down of our residents in light of the abysmal test scores of our public school children. Recent studies have shown the negative impacts on the brain of those who use marijuana. www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana

No matter how positive a light the report – produced by more consultants hired by the city (Cannabis Support Services) – tries to shed on a potential cannabis industry in Antioch, with photos of smiling sales people in a retail store, the negatives are clear. At least the report included some of those: “Future federal enforcement is unclear; Lobbying effort to eliminate all cannabis specific taxes (as with alcohol or tobacco); Traditional banking access still limited – asset seizure potential limits lending; Emerging cashless sales options are not fully tested; Continued impact of the black market; Economic stability of the commercial market; Public health and safety issues – DUI, CUD, development of adolescent brain; and Available internal and/or external resources.”

Plus, just because the majority of Antioch voters supported Prop. 64, which legalized both recreational and commercial marijuana uses, it doesn’t mean they wanted to allow those uses in our city. It’s like when the Indian casinos were approved by the voters. Most didn’t expect them to locate in town. But, rather somewhere “out there” on tribal land, where it wouldn’t directly and negatively affect us.

The council must reject this idea outright and stop wasting anymore of our tax dollars on pursuing it. They need to also tell the City’s new branding consultant, who also mentioned the cannabis industry in the principal’s presentation to the council, to scratch that idea off their list. They need to send a loud and clear message that Antioch is open for good businesses, only and not the marijuana industry.

Marijuana businesses are not what anyone had in mind in any of our city’s economic development plans, ever. The council and city staff need to look in a different, more responsible direction to help bring businesses and well-paying jobs to Antioch and increase the sales and property tax revenue that our city needs.

The council’s workshop will be held at the Antioch Community Center at Prewett Park beginning at 9:00 a.m.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2018 at 7:00 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.