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A California county recently gave nearly $40,000 in social equity grant funding to a local business owner after he publicly attacked the county’s equity grant programs as “racist” and warned officials during a fall meeting that “white people will stand up. You will not intimidate us.”
John Loe, a pot shop owner in Sonoma County, received the grant in May as part of the county’s cannabis social equity program, which aims to help people impacted by marijuana criminalization succeed in the cannabis industry. In an interview Wednesday, Loe said that he was only awarded a grant because he was actively investigating the program.
“It’s a racist program, I called it out for what it was,” Loe told SFGATE. “I hovered over it and made sure it wasn’t racist, and because of that they were not able to be as racist as they would have liked to have been.”
Despite Loe’s description of the program, Sonoma County did not ask for applicants’ race or use race as a factor in deciding who received the grants, according to the county’s application website. Instead, eligibility was determined by whether an applicant or their close family member had been arrested for a nonviolent cannabis offense. From there, applicants were evaluated on 11 other factors, including veteran status and whether they had a “small scale” cultivation farm, to determine how much grant money they received.
The county announced in May that it had issued $635,000 in cannabis grants, sending money to all 20 people who applied for the program. County Supervisor David Rabbitt said in a May press release that the program “aims to serve socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals” in the industry, but an investigation by the Sebastopol Times found that a majority of the 20 recipients “are among the most successful and influential people” in the county’s pot industry, including four people associated with SPARC, a cannabis retailer with seven different locations across the Bay Area.
The local grants are part of a statewide initiative that has issued more than $100 million in social equity grants aimed at making it easier for low-income people and people damaged by cannabis criminalization to succeed in the cannabis industry. The local controversy in Sonoma County comes as questions mount over the effectiveness of the various cannabis social equity efforts across the state.
Cannabis social equity programs across the country have been attacked as providing unfair advantages to individual entrepreneurs. MJBizDaily reported earlier this year that these delays have severely damaged the equity programs and delayed their issuance of licenses.
Loe requested $1 million on his application. He was awarded $39,687.50, according to the Sebastopol Times.
When SFGATE asked Loe how the program was racist given that it does not use race as a qualifying factor, he said the entire Sonoma County government is racist because it uses a racial equity toolkit when evaluating policy; such toolkits are commonly used by local governments to measure how their public policies affect different communities.
Loe also pointed to a single line in the county’s equity program description that states that “wealthy, white stakeholders increasingly own the County’s licensed cannabis landscape.” A 2021 county analysis estimated Sonoma’s pot stores were owned by 75-78% white males. Loe said the county was engaging in “anti-white tropes” by conducting and stating this analysis.
Loe said that ultimately his grant was a success for white people, who he claimed were the most disadvantaged group in recent history because of affirmative action programs.
“It was a win for me and for white people who feel like these programs were written to exclude them,” Loe said.
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