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August 17 \u2014 A consent calendar item on the agenda for this week\u2019s Board of Supervisors meeting revived concerns about mismanagement and delays at the equity cannabis grant program, which was the topic of a recent Grand Jury report.\n\nAnd cannabis issues will now be directed to the General Government committee, a standing committee that meets every other month under Brown Act requirements and will bring proposals to the full board. Cannabis advocates have long requested a standing committee, but will now work with two supervisors who have not been serving on the more limited ad hoc.\n\nThe equity grant is a state-funded direct grant program that is supposed to provide some assistance to people in the cannabis industry who can prove they were harmed by the war on drugs. In 2020, the county received $2.2 million in round one funding. It has also received roughly $800,000 in round two funding. Ten percent of those funds can be used for administrative costs.\n\nOn Tuesday, the Board was asked to approve an amendment to the contract with the company hired to administer the grant, Elevate Impact, by over $83,000 in back pay, for work performed between February and August of this year. The expectation was that the contractor would do 95% of the work administering the funds, but that number has been closer to 50%. \nFive checks have found their way into the hands of applicants, and 47 approved grant applications are under review at County Counsel\u2019s office, to make sure the funds won\u2019t be misused .\n\nSupervisor John Haschak pulled the item for a more fulsome discussion, saying, \u201cdealing with this amount of people and almost $300,000 of administration and untold amounts of administration from our cannabis department, because we\u2019re taking on half of the workload\u2026I would just like to see the county compensated, rather than these outside entities.\u201d\n\nMonique Ramirez, a grant recipient, reeled off a list of difficulties she\u2019s encountered with the program. \u201cI have a really hard time seeing us potentially give more money to the LEEP program when they have not effectively done their job to this point,\u201d she said. \u201cBack in February, I submitted a very lengthy memo about the equity program, detailing, I believe there were 123 emails with the correspondence in the back and forth that I had to go through just to get to the point of finally getting my check\u2026even my check wasn\u2019t issued correctly.\u201d \n\nHaschak had a number of complaints about the contract with Elevate Impact. \u201cThe county is expending time and resources on these equity grants,\u201d he declared. \u201cBut we do need to get the equity grants out. It\u2019s been way too long, and it\u2019s been way too micromanaged.\u201d When Supervisor Ted Williams asked him if he would be willing to bring back an agenda item with a proposal, Haschak said he thought the cannabis department should bring back a proposal to the Board, \u201cbecause I don\u2019t understand the contract. None of us understand the contract with Elevate. We haven\u2019t seen any information for it.\u201d\n\nThe Grand Jury report, called \u201cBuilding the Airplane While It\u2019s Flying,\u201d found that Elevate Impact, the contractor hired by the county, lacks experience in rural capital improvements projects. Cannabis Department Director Kristin Nevedal said the contractor does not have a team of planners on staff, and that the county didn\u2019t have enough information about the applications in advance to realize that planners would be necessary.\n\nShe also said the program had been on hold for months, starting in April. \u201cIt was on hold for three months,\u201d she said, \u201cduring which time we could not proceed with county reviews. We proceeded with department approval, but we couldn\u2019t proceed with moving those proposals through Cobblestone,\u201d the county\u2019s multi-department contract management system.\n\nThe information about the pause was news to Michael Katz, the Executive Director of the Mendocino Cannabis Alliance, who also said that growers have long been trying to bring their parcels into compliance with CEQA. The earliest iterations of the program, he said, required the involvement of Planning and Building Services. In an interview, he lamented that from the beginning, \u201cexpert stakeholder input was not integrated to create a more successful program.\u201d\n\nTo the question about whether or not the county will be able to pay itself for administering the grant, Nevedal said that, with the payments to Elevate Impact, the county was close to the $300,000 administrative cap that\u2019s allowed for the $3 million in grant funds.\n\n\u201cWIthout the contract administrators, we would have to drastically staff up,\u201d she said. \u201cWe do not have allocations for staff for grant purposes. Nor have we budgeted for staff for grant purposes\u2026if the Board were to not proceed with the Elevate contract, we would have to cease processing equity applications until such time as we had allocations from the Board for staffing specific to this program.\u2019 \n\nCounty Counsel Christian Curtis told the Board...