QUESTIONS & ANSWERS ABOUT END HARM PROPOSED ORDINANCE
QUESTION: Can the City Council direct cannabis business tax revenue in the General Fund to the programs and services identified in the END without having to initiate a ballot measure?
Technically, yes. But doing so would be an historical anomaly for the City of Oakland which has allowed redlining, disinvestments, and over-policing in the targeted neighborhoods identified by END HARM for generations. We need a powerful community-based initiative to reverse this historical trend.
QUESTION: Doesn’t the City of Oakland already allocate resources for the types of programs and services that END HARM seeks to support?
END HARM seeks to target resources to a specific constituency – individuals and their family members who have been directly impacted by the War on Drugs. Though there may be existing City programs that benefit this targeted constituency, they have been insufficient and/or inconsistently funded. For example, the much-touted Cannabis Equity Program has received minimal support from the City of Oakland, largely relying on State grants. Another example is the “Community Healing & Restoration” sponsored by the Department of Violence Prevention.
In its 2022-2024 RFP, the program only allocates $1.0 – 1.3 million for BOTH “Healing Activities and Restorative Practices” and “Therapeutic Supports” services over two years. END HARM will provide consistent and more robust funding for these essential services for individuals and families impacted by the War on drugs.
QUESTION: Isn’t the proposed END Commission duplicate the functions of the current Cannabis Regulatory Commission (CRC)?
The purpose and core functions of the current CRC and the END Commission not similar. The CRC’s core functions, as defined by the City Attorney in a memo dated 4/17/19, are to (a) ensure the implementation of “lowest enforcement priority policy” for cannabis, and (b) to make recommendations to the City Council regarding implementation of City licenses, taxes, and regulations for audit of the use of cannabis. The END Commission is tasked to make recommendations to the City Council on investment priorities to address the harm caused by the City’s pursuit of the War on Drugs on individuals, families and neighborhoods.
QUESTION: Isn’t the intended use of this new Fund too broad? How can we measure the impact and effectiveness of the Fund?
END HARM is laser-focused on its intended beneficiaries – individuals and their families directly impacted by the policies and practices pursued by the City of Oakland under the guise of the War on Drugs. It sets clear criteria to accomplish this goal: first, the person and/or family member must have resided within the Police Beats and/or census tracts that show the highest incidences of cannabis arrests, AND that the individual or family member was directly harmed by Oakland’s War on Drugs policies, including but not limited to, cannabis-related arrests, Anti- Loitering Ordinance, and confiscation of assets and property without a conviction of a crime through the Civil Asset Forfeiture Program.
QUESTION: The Equity Program needs more than 20% of the END Fund to ensure that those directly impacted by the War on Drugs can survive in the industry.
As of October 28, 2021 there have been 61 individuals that have received a grant and/or a loan under the City Program. The City has issued 369 equity licenses out of 920 equity applicants.
There were 12,665 cannabis-related arrests from 1995-2015, and many thousands more who were subject to the policies employed by the War on Drugs including the Anti-Loitering Law, and the Civil Asset Forfeiture programs to name a couple. Therefore, the proportion of the Emerald New Deal Fund dedicated to the Cannabis Equity Program is very generous in relationship to the overall number of those affected by the War on Drugs.
The END HARM ordinance allocates 20% of the proposed 35% Fund allocation to support City- sponsored services and programs that benefit intended beneficiaries.
# # #