A Covina City Council member served as a bridesmaid at a couple’s wedding just months before she voted to award two of the city’s three cannabis permits to the newlyweds.

One of the cannabis companies that failed to obtain a permit to open a dispensary is now suing the city, alleging officials tipped the scales in the favor of companies with close ties to City Hall.

Four Covina council members attended the wedding while the application process was still ongoing, according to interviews and pictures from the event.

The aggrieved company, Embarc, operating under Covina Responsible and Compliant Retail LLC, filed its lawsuit against Covina and Zen Garden, one of the winners, in August, but the case has made little progress so far.

The litigation will face its first major legal hurdle in May, when a judge is expected to weigh a motion from the city that seeks to have the case thrown out due to alleged deficiencies.

“We brought this case because we believe it is critical that municipal processes are transparent and unbiased — and we are hopeful the Court will shine a light on actions that may have occurred in darkness,” said Lauren Carpenter, the CEO of Embarc, in a statement. “As alleged in our complaint, there are serious questions about whether undisclosed relationships, pre-application communications, and deviations from the City’s merit-based scoring system influenced the outcome.”

Embarc is asking to have Zen Garden’s permit revoked and granted to it instead. Other cannabis companies are mentioned in the allegations, but not formally named in the lawsuit.

Process ‘fair and transparent’

Covina, meanwhile, stands by its process, which it described as “fair and transparent” in a statement, and maintains that Embarc’s complaint omits key facts, including that the city allowed Embarc to amend its application and change its location after the deadline had expired.

Embarc’s allegations “are a transparent attempt to make-up arguments and facts” to undermine the process and “to force the City to accept an Embarc cannabis retailer,” according to the city’s statement.

“The owners of Embarc Covina publicly praised the City for its fair process in statements to the Covina City Council at a public hearing on February 4, 2025, just two weeks prior to the selection of applicants, only to now contradict those statements and advance a different narrative once Embarc was not granted approval to proceed to the next stage in the process,” the statement reads.

Covina spent years developing its cannabis regulations and working through the selection process. The city first put out the request for proposals in 2023.

After several rounds of evaluations, the council chose Stiiizy, a major cannabis retailer with dozens of dispensaries in California, as the first winner in December 2025. Then Rilano and Zen Garden were selected as second and third, respectively, in February 2025.

All three dispensaries are now open, according to social media posts.

Councilmember Patricia Cortez made the motions and nominated each of those companies at those final meetings.

Rilano and Zen Garden passed on a 3-1 vote. Councilmember Walt Allen, who opposes cannabis in the city, refused to support any applicant, and Councilmember Victor Linares recused himself due to a potential conflict.

Personal ties

Cortez did not disclose during either meeting that she was in the wedding party of Michael Touhey, a local owner of Stiiizy Covina, and Angela Thomas, a local owner of Zen Garden, roughly six months earlier.

Cortez served as a bridesmaid at both an intimate ceremony for the couple attended by only 10 people and at a second, larger celebration that drew in elected and public officials from across the San Gabriel Valley, including three other sitting Covina council members, according to interviews.

Touhey is a well-known former member of the West Covina City Council, a former board member of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District and a regular fixture at cities’ council meetings and public events throughout the region. He often is sought out by companies for community and government affairs work due to his longstanding and deep connections in the area.

Cortez, who works as Upper San Gabriel’s director of government affairs, was hired in 2013, the year after Touhey won his seat on the water board. The pair became fast friends and remained so after Touhey left elected office in 2016.

In an interview, Cortez acknowledged the friendship and added that she is similarly close with Jorge Marquez, a former Covina council member and Three Valleys water board member, as well as transportation Commissioner Eloy Flores, both of whom were listed as owners on Embarc’s application.

“My relationship with the Touheys had no influence in my decision,” she said.

Marquez could not be reached for comment

The city in its statement about the lawsuit took a similar stance.

“A City representative knowing a person who has been active in the community for years and even being friends with that person is not a basis to sideline that City representative from participating in the process,” the statement reads.

What the law says

Though it may raise eyebrows, such a friendship would not qualify as a conflict of interest under California law, which requires a council member to have a financial interest in the decision, either personally or through a spouse.

Covina prohibited dispensary owners from having “vested interests” in more than one company and required all owners to be identified in the applications. However, it does not verify how those interests are held and did not weigh whether California’s community property laws, which equally divide ownership between husband and wife, would affect those interests.

Touhey and Thomas, who had been dating for years, were not married when they applied. In an interview, Touhey said their respective ownership stakes are now intentionally held as “sole and separate properties.”

The couple agreed that, if they were able to get permits, “hers would go to her kid and mine would go to my kids,” Touhey said.

Stiiizy approached Touhey after a different company he was working with backed out of the process, he said.

“When you do this for a living and all you do is attend council meetings and events all across the San Gabriel Valley and Southern California, you get to know people,” he said. “If cannabis is on the agenda, all of the same people are in the audience.”

Zen Garden asked for Touhey’s help, too, but he declined because he could only apply with one company and “would not cross that line,” he said. The company approached Thomas afterwards, according to Touhey.

Deep ties to community

Thomas has lived in Covina for three decades and knows many of the same people, Touhey said. The couple volunteers with and donates to a large number of community organizations.

Some cannabis companies, familiar with Touhey from his involvement in other cities, saw Covina as his territory and believed it was pointless to compete, according to two cannabis executives familiar with the city’s process. Both were contacted independently by a reporter and agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity due to concerns of retaliation. Neither is affiliated with Embarc.

In separate interviews, they alleged Touhey bragged in various meetings about having all three licenses secured before the process even began.

“He didn’t hide the fact,” one said.

Touhey denies ever making such comments.

“Hell no, I would never say something like that,” he said.

Touhey accused Embarc and Marquez, the former Covina councilmember, of being sore losers and attempting to use the lawsuit to sway the upcoming election in Covina toward more favorable candidates.

“I have just as many wins as I do losses,” Touhey said. “In my line of work, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but you normally don’t sue everyone in the process, you just lose.”

Rankings questioned

Embarc’s lawsuit also questions the legitimacy of the city’s ranking of applicants. Applicants went through three phases of evaluations and Embarc was ranked the highest out of applicants in the second round by a third-party evaluator.

Zen Garden and Rilano landed near the bottom at sixth and seventh, respectively.

The final ranking, tallied from interviews, moved Stiiizy to the top, Rilano to second and established a three-way tie between Zen Garden, Embarc and Culture Covina for third place.

Culture withdrew before the final vote after losing its lease on a property to Embarc. The dispute between the companies led the City Council to delay its selection of the final two winners by months.

Staff reports indicate the council did not have to follow the final rankings at all and could choose any of the applicants that scored more than 180 points, or none of them.

Cortez declined to explain why she nominated Zen Garden over Embarc due to the pending litigation. During the February 2025 meeting, she stated that her choice came down to the rankings.

“I read through all the reports, I’ve looked at all the scores and, for me, I’m basing it on the final scores that were presented, so my recommendation would be to reward the second permit to Rilano Covina and the third permit to Zen Garden, and that would be my motion,” she said.

Embarc’s lawsuit, however, argues that its combined scores from Phase 2 and 3 should have placed it above Stiiizy or, at minimum, broke the tie with Zen Garden.

The scores were not cumulative, but rather only determined if applicants qualified to move forward, according to the city.

Leases questioned

Embarc’s lawsuit further alleges the city favored applicants leasing space from the McIntyre Co., a Covina-based real estate company and developer with generational ties to the community. All three of the winners rent from the company.

“That improbable result, along with strong evidence of improper and undisclosed bias within the city’s ranks, demonstrates that the RFP process abandoned objective fairness for favoritism and insider dealing, and after steering applicants to McIntyre Company properties, the City’s decision-makers overlooked numerous disqualifying flaws in certain applications and green-lighted them when they should have been excluded,” wrote Lawrence Conlan, Embarc’s attorney, in the court filing.

In its statement, Covina called it “coincidental.” The identity of the landlord or property owner was not a factor in the evaluation process, officials said.

“In addition, any business looking to lease space would likely reach out to one of the largest landlords in the City, and the fact that one of those landlords was willing and able to rent to cannabis businesses was a business matter purely between that landlord and those businesses and not any basis used by the City to grant or deny a cannabis permit,” the statement reads.

Linares, the council member who recused himself, works at a brewery owned by Andrew McIntyre, the president of the McIntyre Co. He describes himself as an employee, though he’s been listed as an owner and a founder in the past.

Stiiizy’s dispensary is now located next door.

The lawsuit alleges Linares, McIntyre and City Manager Chris Marcarello met with at least one individual before the process began to attempt to persuade that person to apply for a dispensary at a McIntyre Co. property.

One prospective applicant contacted by the Southern California News Group claimed the three men pitched a McIntyre property as a potential location for a dispensary during a meeting in 2022. Communications shown to a reporter by that individual discussed scheduling a meeting with Marcarello at that time, but the messages did not confirm if it took place.

The city, and Marcarello, separately confirmed a seemingly different meeting with a real estate agent that same year where the city’s position on cannabis was discussed. The city denied that either the councilmember or the city manager encouraged the agent to rent from McIntyre or a specific landlord.

In an email, Marcarello said he attended the meeting with the real estate agent at the request of a council member.

“Upon my arrival, Mr. McIntyre was in attendance and I have no knowledge of who invited him to attend, nor was I aware that he would be in attendance,” he said. “We are not aware that the real estate agent participated in the RFP process or if that agent represented any eventual applicant for a cannabis permit.”

He could not recall where the meeting took place, or if he had any other meetings about cannabis with Linares or McIntyre present.

Meetings with prospective businesses are not unusual for a city manager, he said. Once the application process began, companies could only go through approved channels and were prohibited from contacting council members directly.

Linares declined to comment due to the pending litigation. McIntyre could not be reached.

City was ‘very, very cautious’

Allen, the council member who refused to support commercial cannabis after spending more than 43 years in law enforcement, reiterated his strong opposition during a phone interview.

Still, he expressed complete confidence in the staff and City Council’s handling of the process, saying he would have been the first to call it out if there were flaws.

“The staff worked on a legitimate system to really provide the most equitable process for the selection of the dispensaries in Covina and I do believe that,” he said. “The city was very, very cautious about how to go about this so we would avoid lawsuits.”