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Turlock now accepting cannabis applications
cannabis
A cannabis store

After reversing the City of Turlock’s ban on marijuana operations through the adoption of a cannabis pilot program last month, the town’s next step was decided upon Tuesday night when the City Council approved the selection process for potential cannabis businesses.

The City’s pilot program, adopted May 14 in a split vote, will allow up to four cannabis dispensaries in the City of Turlock, along with an unspecified number of commercial manufacturing, testing and distribution businesses. In a 4-1 vote during Tuesday’s City Council meeting, with Mayor Amy Bublak opposing, a Request for Qualifications was approved, establishing specific criteria and requirements meant to determine the most-qualified cannabis candidates.

“One of the things we’ve found out is really helpful is my office has fielded hundreds of phone calls, but when you actually ask people to put up money and give you a business plan to show that they actually have a viable business, [interest] diminishes in terms of numbers,” said City Attorney Douglas White, who has also worked with other cities to create cannabis programs. “We want to make sure the people that the staff and the City are spending their time with, number one, don’t become a burden on City resources.

“We’ve found that there are lots of people who have great ideas but don’t have the financial backing, and there are people who have financial backing and don’t have a lot of great ideas. So, we want to make sure that we get the cream of the crop and have both.”

The RFQ process will field applications for the different license types that will be available in Turlock, including cannabis retail, distribution, manufacturing, cultivation and cannabis testing facilities. Applicants must show that they are knowledgeable and experienced in developing successful businesses and include a proposal that not only addresses the potential adverse impacts of commercial cannabis within the City and how they would mitigate those effects, but also an explanation of their business’ own philanthropy and commitment to the City’s economic growth and prosperity.

Based on these applications, City staff will invite chosen candidates for in-person interviews. A joint City Council/Planning Commission meeting to determine where cannabis operations will be allowed within the City is set to be held once all applications are received and the RFQ process will aid in that decision, White explained.

“As we form where businesses are going to be allowed to operate, we want to know the types of businesses interested in coming into the community,” White said.

Since the City has not yet developed a comprehensive zoning scheme, the proposed location of the businesses will be accepted within the application but is not required.  Applicants will also include background information, legal ownership documents, a business plan, preliminary floor plan and a security proposal within their RFQs.

Also included in the RFQ is the candidate’s public financial records, which accounts for one fifth of the RFQ’s total scoring — something that concerned both Councilmember Andrew Nosrati and Turlock resident Jesse Heinrich, who didn’t want to see applicants with less money on hand receive lower scores than those with substantial financial backing.

“Locals who have been directly affected by the local ban, those who are medical-based businesses and minorities should be given more of an opportunity than upcoming monopolies for the future benefit to be truly felt by the community,” said Heinrich, who owned and operated Turlock’s first dispensary, Dry Lake Wellness, illegally during the City’s ban before the Turlock Police Department shut it down in 2018.

Nosrati said that if a business can pay the $5,500 RFQ application fee and prove that they have enough funding to operate a business, that should be enough to be considered.

“One of the things I want to ensure on the economic side is that we’re not somehow giving a high amount of wealth preferential treatment,” Nosrati said. “I think if you have enough money to run the business and the numbers all look good, then that should qualify you from an economic standpoint…and then not make it so that someone who’s backed by a ton of capital behind them is going to be receiving a higher score than someone else, even though they have the money for it.”

White argued that it takes a substantial amount of money to not only operate a cannabis business, but to ensure regulations are being met in terms of attorneys, accountants and security.

“Let’s be very candid. Setting up one of these businesses — aside from the permit process — you’re not talking about $25,000 or $50,000; you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars,” White said, though he added that the City’s to-be-determined selection committee can set its own criteria for how they will judge an applicant’s finances.

Following the selection of preferred applicants based on RFQs, development agreements between the City and applicants will be drawn up, with each project going to both the Planning Commission and City Council for consideration and approval. If approved, the applicant must then apply for and obtain a conditional use permit from the State.

White estimated that Turlock would likely see its first cannabis dispensary open between October 2019 and January 2020.

“The goal here is to get the absolute best operators in the right locations,” he said.

Dispensary applicants will have through 3 p.m. July 12 to submit all necessary RFQ paperwork, including their application, to the City Clerk. Qualified candidates who have questions about the application process are invited to attend a pre-submittal conference from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. June 25 at City Hall, located at 156 S. Broadway.

 

Costa, Gray propose congressional bill to address critical physician shortage in rural areas
Costa and Gray
San Joaquin Valley congressional members Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, left, and Rep. Adam Gray, D-Merced, are shown discussing their bill H.R. 2106 in a virtual press conference on Tuesday.

BY TIM SHEEHAN

CV Journalism Collaborative

Two San Joaquin Valley congressional representatives have introduced a bill that could help address the vast shortage of doctors in the region, particularly in underserved areas. 

Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, and Rep. Adam Gray, D-Merced, say the Medical Education Act would, if passed, establish a program of grants to support expanded medical education programs in underserved areas of the nation.

The Valley could be one of the key areas that would benefit from the legislation. California has about 90 primary care doctors per 100,000 residents statewide, the federal Health Resources & Services Administration reported in November 2024. 

That’s more than the ratio in some states, and less than some others. The nationwide ratio is about 84 doctors per 100,000 residents.

But in the San Joaquin Valley, home to about 4.3 million people, doctors are much more scarce – about 47 primary care physicians per 100,000 residents, according to Dr. Tom Utecht, chief medical officer at the Fresno-based Community Health System.

That number is “a little over half of what is necessary to take care of a population,” Utecht said Tuesday in a video press conference. “We have the lowest physicians-per-capita rate in all of California, in the San Joaquin Valley.”

Introduced last month, the Medical Education Act is something of a placeholder for the time being until the Congressional Research Service can weigh in with financial estimates of what is needed in different parts of the country, Costa said. 

A companion version was introduced in March in the U.S. Senate by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-West Virginia, and Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles.

At this point, the legislation does not specify how much money will ultimately be sought or how grants would be structured.

Costa said the shortage of doctors in the region “is combined with language barriers, cultural barriers and distances … and that would really go for rural parts of our country regardless where folks live.”

“If you live in rural areas, it’s just more difficult to have access to good quality health care,” he added.

Costa said the legislation, if it can survive a Republican-controlled House and Senate and a Republican president, “would be transformative because it would invest expanded resources to minority-serving institutions and colleges located in rural and underserved areas to establish schools of medicine and osteopathic medicine.”

The bill would also create an avenue for more historically Black colleges and universities, as well as Hispanic-serving institutions, to establish medical education programs, Costa said.

Gray noted that when he was in the state Legislature, he and colleagues “worked to get hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to expand the UC Merced campus, to ultimately secure the funding to put the first medical education building up on campus.”

Gray added that the UC San Francisco’s medical education program in Fresno “is an important part of creating the (medical) workforce of the future for the valley, but more importantly, solving this access to care issue that plagues Valley communities.”

At UC Merced, director of medical education Dr. Margo Vener said there has been a surge of interest in the university’s program that funnels students through an undergraduate program for their bachelor of science degree through a medical school degree in collaboration with UC San Francisco.

“All the students that we are enrolling are from the Valley and for the Valley, because they want to really make a difference in promoting health in their communities,” Vener said. That, she added, is likely to eventually translate to those would-be doctors to stay in the Valley to practice medicine.

“The data suggests that two factors really strongly influence where physicians stay to practice,” Vener said. “One of them is where they’re from, which, of course, is why we’re recruiting students from the Valley for the Valley just to stay (and) be doctors for their community. And the other factor is where you went to residency. Those are the two biggest drivers.”

That’s something that was underscored by Dr. Kenny Banh, assistant dean of undergraduate education at UCSF Fresno. “Regional campuses such as UC Merced and UCSF Fresno not only grow doctors, but they take those doctors, physicians and medical students from their communities in the region, and train them in those regions to go back to be physicians in those areas,” he said.

While the costs of the Costa-Gray legislation are yet to be determined, Banh said there are also costs associated with doing nothing to expand medical education.

“There’s health care costs, regardless of how we work it, if we don’t invest in having an adequate supply of physicians,” Banh said. “There’s a cost on the human that can’t access care” and doesn’t get to a doctor until a condition is not treatable “or with significantly worse morbidity and mortality outcomes.”

“And that cost is borne by health systems taxpayers, one way or the other,” Banh added.

But even if the Costa-Gray bill were to pass in this congressional session, the payoff of home-grown medical schools producing a bumper crop of physicians in the Valley or other deprived parts of the country would be years down the road.

“I think it’s really important to understand why we need to invest now for our future, because it takes so darn long” for a student to go from being a college freshman to a practicing doctor, surgeon or specialist, UC Merced’s Vener said. 

After a four-year bachelor’s degree, a student must then complete four years of medical school, which in turn is followed by a residency of three to five years.

“Then often people will do a fellowship to become, for example, a cardiologist or a gastroenterologist or something like that,” she added.

“If you start investing in just one student now, it’s going to take such a long time before they really are there to take care of you at that moment when you need them to be your gastroenterologist, your cardiologist, your emergency physician, or, dare I say, your family doctor,” Vener said.

That, she said, is why it’s also necessary to expand residency programs that can attract would-be physicians into the region in hopes that they will remain once they complete their training. “We need those doctors now, and that’s why this effort is important,” Vener said, “because this is what will both inspire people to stay, but also inspire people to really come and embrace the communities and serve them.”

In a related development, state Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria, D-Fresno, recently introduced a bill for the University of California system to develop a comprehensive funding plan for expanding the current SJV Prime+ BS-to-MD partnership between UC San Francisco and UC Merced, with the goal of transitioning the program to a fully independent medical school operated by UC Merced.

“We have seen firsthand the impacts of medical workforce shortages throughout the Central Valley,” Soria said in a prepared statement. “AB 58 would help ensure the Legislature is equipped with the information needed to secure appropriate funding for the medical education provided for our community at UC Merced.”

— Tim Sheehan is the Health Care Reporting Fellow at the nonprofit Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. The fellowship is supported by a grant from the Fresno State Institute for Media and Public Trust. Contact Sheehan at tim@cvlocaljournalism.org.