Situated in the heart of the cannabis-rich “Emerald Triangle,” Mendocino County has enlisted a high level of state support to help process provisional cultivation licenses. And the teamwork has proven successful to whittle down the numbers.
The county, which has been besieged with hundreds of applications and limited time in the last few years, had hundreds of requests since the initial July 1, 2023, expiration for applications. It’s been a year since that deadline. Now simple renewals on the provisional licenses are due to be processed by the end of this year. The state intends to sunset the program itself by Jan. 1, 2026.
Mendocino County now has 56 remaining out of more than 500 provisional permits that needed to be processed since 2023, county cannabis Senior Program Manager Sara McBurney reported. Provisional permits make up 69% of the county’s total cannabis licenses. The majority consists of permits for growers.
Provisional licenses are temporary permits intended to allow the growers to operate while addressing compliance setbacks until they receive their permanent licenses. Often times, those obstacles involve water-quality issues in a convoluted California Environmental Quality Act analyses process, which the state has obliged to step in to streamline.
In 2021, the county was granted $17.5 million in funding by the state for permit processing to use between January 2022 through June 30, 2025. Some of the money was allocated in separate grants to get the applicants in compliance. The funding was also earmarked to pay for staffing (six people in the department) to gain control of the provisional permitting processes.
In addition, the county upgraded its computer system to operate the program and has provided $5 million back to the state’s contractor to design the working draft of the environmental impact report (EIR).
Consequently, California designated $100 million statewide to local governments grappling with the demand to operate legally and agreed to adopt the environmental impact guidelines. These mandates represent the common cause of why growers must rely on provisional permits until their annual “permanent” licenses are issued.
The Mendocino Cannabis Alliance encouraged and commended the subsequent double teaming between the state and local governments, claiming the county had gotten too far behind on meeting the licensing demands. It sent a letter to the state requesting the intervention.
Mendocino County isn’t alone in its quest to gain control of a program labeled “confusing” and “dysfunctional” by members of a California Senate Committee on Business, Professions and Economic Development during an oversight hearing in March 2023. Los Angeles County was granted $22 million and told the committee at the time it expected to take months to catch up on the hundreds of provisional permits it needed to process.
At the hearing, the California Department of Cannabis Control reported the state overall issued 6,642 provisional permits and 5,000 annual licenses, the latter being the goal of cannabis businesses operating as the former.
When Proposition 64 made adult recreational cannabis legal in 2016 within certain local government boundaries, the passage resulted in the state establishing a system to manage the industry.
The state assistance has enabled Mendocino County to process 469 provisional licenses, McBurney reported this week.
“It’s definitely made for less of a workload (on the county),” she said. “There was absolutely a backlog.”
As for Sonoma County, provisional licenses number 56 operators. Of those, eight remain in the permitting review process.
