City’s plan to nurture ‘equitable’ cannabis businesses is failing, grant applicants say
January 13, 2026
When Todgi Robinson first heard about Richmond’s cannabis equity program in 2024 her interest was piqued. Maybe she and her husband could enter California’s booming cannabis industry.
They picked up a flyer promoting the program, handed to them by Kerby Lynch, a city Economic Development commissioner, while walking downtown. After attending a city seminar in October of 2024 and filling out an application, they were notified that they fit all the criteria for a spot in the program.
Equity programs, as outlined on California’s Department of Cannabis Control’s website, have been established during the last 10 years to “support people and communities harmed by cannabis criminalization” while lowering the barriers to enter the industry for those hit hardest by the federal government’s War on Drugs.
Last March Richmond was one of 17 cities that received $600,000 to set up a program to help potential cannabis businesses establish their operations.
“Basically (we were told that) we would receive a sum of money, a grant, that would help us toward either starting a cannabis storefront or (be given) the funds and means to grow cannabis,” Robinson said. “You were going to be provided with a sum of money based on whatever you were planning on doing toward that. But it would have to be within Richmond.”
Yet more than a year after that city seminar, Robinson and 14 other equity applicants are seemingly stalled in the process without a sense of whether the program will become a reality.
“It’s just a bunch of malarkey,” Robinson said. “It is so discouraging. Things happen and then you’re doing your part but then (feel like) it’s not gonna happen.”
But the delays this crop of equity grant applicants are experiencing aren’t the first time the city’s cannabis equity efforts have stalled.
In 2021, the city received a $1.3 million grant from California GO-Biz, the acronym for the state Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, to provide financial, business and technical support to equity applicants, but because the city didn’t meet certain reporting benchmarks, including the submission of a final report, it had to return nearly the entire amount — $1.1 million — in 2023, according to records and emails obtained by Richmondside as part of a California Public Records Act (PRA) request.
According to those emails, at one point city staff asked for an extension to prepare a “more comprehensive (equity program) report” for the state but then took nearly four months to return the unspent funds.
“The grant award letter that went to (the Richmond) City Council (for approval on March 1, 2022) did not specify the (grant) period. I’m trying to understand why the funds are being requested back,” wrote Andrea Miller, then-director of the city’s Finance Department, to a number of city staff, including Community Development Director Lina Velasco and Economic Development Director Nannette Beacham.
However, city staff eventually discovered that the final grant reports were due in November 2023.
The city’s cannabis equity program, founded in 2021, was overseen by a subcommittee of Richmond’s Economic Development Commission (EDC). Members of the subcommittee, which was to handle applications, included Brandon Evans, who plans to run for Richmond City Council this year; Ahmad Anderson, another current council hopeful, researcher Ayoka Nurse, who in 2024 opened the county’s first Black-owned dispensary, which shuttered a year later; and EDC commissioner Lynch.
According to the city’s cannabis equity manual, applicants must be current or former city residents from low-income households who were either arrested for or convicted for cannabis crimes; are immediate family members of those arrested or convicted; lived in Richmond for at least four years; attended West Contra Costa Unified School District schools for five years between 1971 and 2016; lived in public housing for four years; or lost housing through eviction, foreclosure or subsidy revocation after 1995.
In interviews with Richmondside, sources with close ties to the development of the equity program raised a number of issues related to implementing it.
Lynch said that the 2021 funding was the second wave of state cannabis equity funding. She credited Nurse with having the vision of wanting to create equity in the city’s cannabis industry which has, since the early 2010s, only had three dispensaries: 7 Stars Holistic on Pierce Street, Holistic Healing Collective on the Richmond Parkway and Green Remedy in the Hilltop neighborhood across the street from the Hilltop Mall.
Nurse, a Richmond native and the former owner of Contra Costa County’s first Black-owned dispensary, the now shuttered Urban Soyal in El Sobrante, is a published research policy analyst and expert on cannabis equity.
Nurse said that though the city used her research when applying for that initial grant funding, when she expressed a desire to help implement the program, her company, Global Reach Strategies, was barred from applying to complete a $75,000 assessment of the city’s cannabis landscape.
Instead, the contract went to California-based SCI Group, citing a conflict of interest for Nurse, who was on the EDC at the time. Global Reach Strategies was also disqualified from applying for the technical assistance contract — aimed to help applicants apply for the funding — which was instead awarded to Oakland-based Make Green Go.
According to Lynch, who was on the committee that hired the technical administrator of the equity program, there were also questions regarding Make Green Go and whether they had the right track record to implement the program.
Other Bay Area-based companies — such as Oakland-based Oaksterdam — were shut out as well.
“A lot of people got disqualified,” Lynch said. “We were just left with Make Green Go.”
Lynch said that Make Green Go’s track record was not “very good,” saying it put up too many hurdles for applicants and adding that city staff believed Make Green Go was going to create the program and get it off the ground. Instead, most of the consulting hours were spent creating an online portal for applicants.
LaWanda Knox, CEO of Make Green Go, disputed the idea that her company wasn’t fit for the technical assistance contract, citing its track record of being the first-of-its-kind organization in the nation after Oakland’s equity program launched in 2017.
“We were optimistic about working with the Richmond program because it was new and it was taking a while to get up and running,” Knox told Richmondside, adding that it took the city about a year after the bidding process was over to award a contract.
Knox said that, in addition to providing assistance to applicants to get their business off the ground, Make Green Go helps market the newly-created businesses afterwards. She said she believed her organization was chosen because it already had established online technical assistance courses for other cities, including San Francisco and Fresno.
“Richmond was able to piggyback and rinse and repeat what we had already developed without having to pay for development,” she said. “There was no new content that needed to be developed for technical assistance because we were already doing it for other cities in California so all we had to do was make it available. Basically they were licensing our online courses to make it available so that applicants could get their business plans written.”
However, Knox said, once Make Green Go’s contract — which was amended by the Richmond City Council to include grant management under the same budget — was finalized in September 2023, she was told that the city was already in the process of sending back the $1.1 million.
“On the day of the kickoff meeting for our contract they said, ‘Oh, by the way, we’re sending the grant funds back,’ ” she said. “It was wild. This wasn’t revealed to me until after we got the contract.”
Knox said that once city staff shared this, they asked her if she could assess what “problems” Richmond was facing.
“This is not just a regular technical assistance contract. They’re in crisis mode. They have already failed,” she recalled. “You have to talk about how you use the funds and you have to be actually serving equity applicants. Well, there were no applicants in the pipeline. Zero.”
In addition to not having any applicants, Richmond lacked an equity ordinance — something Lynch and Knox said they worked to draft and gave to the planning commission. It hasn’t been brought back to city council for final approval.
“In my assessment, and this is in writing which I sent to them, I told them, ‘You don’t have an equity program’,” she said. “ ‘You have a manual that was approved by the city council (for cannabis equity) but you didn’t actually implement it at a city level. Hiring me isn’t going to fix that.’ ”
Knox told Richmondside that certain issues, like no fee waivers, hurt the program and put undue financial strain on would-be applicants.
“The whole goal is to reduce and lower the barriers of entry,” Knox said. “(In Richmond) there are no fee waivers, no priority licensing and the people who are operating with licenses now should have to incubate an equity applicant to have their permits approved.”
“On the day of the kickoff meeting for our contract (city staff) said, ‘Oh, by the way, we’re sending the grant funds back.’ It was wild.“
— LaWanda Knox, CEO of Make Green Go, which had a contract to help Richmond set up its cannabis equity program
Richmond’s equity program manual defines incubation as a way for established cannabis businesses to directly support equity applicants through workspace, equipment access, employment, contracting opportunities, or actual ownership stakes.
The incubator classification appears in the manual to be voluntary and is described as a way for cannabis businesses to receive “priority processing” for their permits as a benefit, rather than a requirement.
Additionally, Knox said she flagged concerns about not including cannabis delivery licenses in the ordinance since, due to the city’s licensing requirements, applicants must have a physical location secured before a dispensary license is awarded — something that she said is often a barrier for equity applicants.
“A lot of the cities in the Bay Area will have those delivery licenses,” Knox said. “What happens is that deliveries from Oakland and other cities come and deliver in Richmond but their cannabis tax goes back to the city they are licensed is. The city is losing tax revenue by not allowing delivery.”
Lynch told Richmondside, in addition to the lack of city staffing dedicated to the program, the city’s dispensaries found themselves in the midst of a cannabis antitrust lawsuit — a first of its kind in the nation.
In 2021, John Valdez, of the Richmond Compassionate Care Collective (RCCC), who was one of the city’s first-ever cannabis license recipients, won a $15 million antitrust lawsuit that found that the city’s three dispensaries colluded to prevent his business from becoming the fourth dispensary and retail store in the area.
In the Valdez lawsuit, there were allegations that in each neighborhood that Valdez attempted to find a place suitable for his business there was a seemingly organized push-back that hindered his business ever opening up.
“That (monopoly lawsuit) also put a really hostile climate on the topic of cannabis in general, which was around 2022 as well,” Lynch said. “Those conversations were coming to the council. They weren’t really moving at all or really implementing because they wanted to get out of the red with that (lawsuit). But then also they didn’t even have any staff who could even work on it. So really we had this (grant) money and it was just sitting till 2024 and the state of California said, ‘Well you gotta give that money back.’ ”
Evans said he believes the program failed in 2021 because existing dispensary owners didn’t want the competition.
“Behind the scenes, internally, the city was getting a ton of pushback from the existing operators in terms of not circumventing that (distributing cannabis license), from ever happening,” Evans said.
In records obtained by Richmondside, Zeead Handoush, owner of 7 Stars Holistic Healing Center on Pierce Street, sent an email in June 2024 to then-council member Gayle McLaughlin that linked to an SFGate article pointing to declines in cannabis sales statewide.
According to the state, cannabis excise tax revenue has fallen steadily since 2021, from $1.5 billion to $1.2 billion in 2025. In September 2025, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that temporarily rolled back the cannabis tax, from 18% to 15%, seemingly to boost the lagging market.
Another email sent by Handoush about a month later to the entire city council cautioned that “equity programs are not doing what they were intended to do.”
“Instead of helping uplift and empower our marginalized entrepreneurs who have been affected by the war on drugs, it has instead caused a financial burden and hardship on the equity applicant,” Handoush wrote. “It has also allowed big multistate operators to come in and pick up the stressed licenses for pennies on the dollar, which has made it difficult for small businesses to compete.”
Richmondside reached out to Handoush and Holistic Healing Collective owner Rebecca Vasquez on Monday for comment but did not hear back by publication time. Since the Valdez lawsuit, Green Remedy in the Hilltop Neighborhood has since changed ownership.
Evans acknowledges that the economic development department was understaffed at the time, however he said the subcommittee was on track to rolling out the program and believed that the city of Richmond was on track to becoming one of the first cities in west Contra Costa County to successfully launch a cannabis equity program.
“We had the expertise, the subcommittee was there to assist with rolling out the initiative … we had all of that in place … we were absolutely on track to create an equity program,” Evans said. “The subcommittee was putting in a lot of time, reaching out to the folks in San Francisco, reaching out to the folks in Oakland. It was a couple years behind their program, so like they had already kind of, you know, figured out what was working at that time. We were timely … we had all the people at the table but we did not have a council that supported it, and we did not have a staff.”
After staff told Lynch that the city had to give back those funds, she worked with community member Kathleen Sullivan to recruit a cohort to show the state that the city was still working on an equity program.
In total, Lynch said she and Sullivan brought in over a dozen potential cannabis equity applicants, including Robinson. Knox said she was also involved in getting those applicants “queued” up for the process.
“Then the state gave us $600,000 at the beginning of 2025,” she said. “We haven’t touched the money because again, no staff. There’s no planning staff. No economic development staff.”
Once the $600,000 in funding came in, it also brought new staff, Knox said, who changed the way that the city wanted to facilitate getting the funds to applicants, going from giving applicants the funding and having them report on how it was spent to submitting individual invoices for expenses like city permitting fees.
Knox told Richmondside she felt that her organization was being made a scapegoat for the program’s inability to get off the ground.
“We actually got them the closest,” Knox said. “They had nothing and we got them actually through the pipeline of getting them stood up to be ready to receive the grants and then nothing happened. We hit a wall.”
Knox added that after she voiced her concerns, the city stopped communicating with the organization at the beginning of April 2025. Make Green Go’s contract expired at the end of 2025.
It is unclear if the city’s subsequent application for the state GO-Biz grant for $600,000, which Richmond received in early 2025, was affected at all by it having to return the previous grant.
When asked about Richmond cannabis equity program funding, California’s GO-Biz office declined an interview and only provided reporting requirements by email.
“GO-Biz reviews budgets proposed by jurisdictions at the time of the application and provides approval only after the expenditures within the budget are deemed acceptable,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “Grant funds are disbursed in increments of 25 percent, with each disbursement subject to receipt of appropriate documentation of expenditures consistent with the jurisdiction’s approved budget and grant agreement. Further, each grant agreement requires jurisdictions to maintain records detailing the expenditure of all grant funds for a period of seven years after the end of the grant term, and to provide this information to GO-Biz for audit purposes.”
Velasco told Richmondside that the equity grant was administered by the city’s Economic Development Department under Beachum.
Beachum did not respond to multiple requests for an interview over multiple months about the equity program and why the money had to be given back.
Lynch said that compared to other cities that received GO-Biz funding in 2021, Richmond is behind in implementation.
“We were the second wave of cities starting to implement cannabis equity,” she said. “San Diego County (one of the applicants) is further along than we are.”
According to San Diego County’s website, its equity program is currently finalizing environmental reports and planning on presenting the final program to the city’s respective planning commission and county board of supervisors.
Lynch said Richmond is behind because the city council must hold a hearing to adopt changes to the cannabis ordinance and expand the available licenses from the three dispensaries currently operating but staff shortages have left the ordinance not yet approved by the planning commission for city council to review. (The city’s planning commission has had an ongoing shortage of commissioners) She also said that she believes that there is no motive or incentive to change the ordinance.
“We’re really at a stalemate with the cannabis equity program,” Lynch said, adding that she is stepping down as an economic development commissioner and hasn’t been kept in the loop as to how it is progressing.
Knox told Richmondside that there needs to be “political will” at every level of government to set up the program, but she doesn’t think there is.
“There’s just no political will to put them (applicants) first,” Knox said. “It’s really simple. If we put them first, what needs to happen falls in place.”
Meanwhile, applicants such as Robinson are skeptical of the city’s desire to establish any type of equity in cannabis.
“It’s like, it’s a total time waster,” Robinson said. “It just pretty much proves the stigma that’s already out there: That there is not much help or a huge push or priority for people of Black or brown color to advance (in cannabis).”
Search
RECENT PRESS RELEASES
Related Post
