WSLCB - Executive Management Team
(May 11, 2022) - Cannabis Retail Safety and Enforcement

A comprehensive Enforcement and Education briefing delved into that division’s work in 2022 before staff updated on federal banking legislation and media engagements at the agency.

Here are some observations from the Wednesday May 11th Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board (WSLCB) Executive Management Team (EMT) meeting.

My top 3 takeaways:

• Director of Enforcement and Education Chandra Brady took the board through updates on cannabis retail safety during her briefing and responded to questions on education and youth access.
  • Brady reviewed the WSLCB response to cannabis robberies (audio - 5m, WSLCB video, TVW video).
    • She relayed that a memorandum of understanding (MOU) was almost finalized for an agency partnership with the Washington State Crime Prevention Association (WSCPA) and “local law enforcement” to provide training to cannabis businesses .
    • Brady announced that a public bulletin on a contract with Setracon, a Tacoma-based security consulting firm specializing in training and data management, would be sent later that week regarding “providing assessments to our impacted licensees.”
      • The notice stated there would be a focus on “the approximately 180 retail stores in Pierce, King, and Snohomish Counties.”
      • At publication time, Setracon maintained partnerships with commercial security organizations and corporate clients including Washington transit companies Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority (Sound Transit) and Community Transit in Snohomish County.
    • Indicating that Enforcement and Education contacts with cannabis licensees were on track to “almost double what we did in 2021,” Brady attributed the rise to both “our responsiveness to the retail robberies that we’ve been experiencing” and “operational changes that we’ve made.”
    • Board Member Ollie Garrett asked whether their work was being communicated out to municipalities, noting the formation of a task force by the King County Council and outreach by officials in the City of Seattle. She claimed local government efforts “pretty much match” what WSLCB was trying to accomplish. Brady replied that Seattle officials had started their review, with the agency “tagging onto their” local process, including a Cannabis Safety Summit on May 12th hosted by Seattle Police Department leadership. She added that WSLCB representatives would lead other groups, citing their new affiliation with WSCPA as an example of this (audio - 2m, WSLCB video, TVW video). 
      • Approval of the task force in King County renewed significant media attention on robberies in the region.
      • The Seattle City Council Finance and Housing Committee heard comments from cannabis workers about the need for a safer work environment during a meeting on February 16th.
  • More generally, Brady established that among 30,099 licensees regulated by the WSLCB including 1,809 cannabis licensees, “complaints, in all of the industries, were down for the month of April.” In the cannabis sector, there had been 140 complaints between January and April 2022, she indicated, with 27% of those “related to public safety” (audio - 5m, WSLCB video, TVW video, presentation). 
    • Enforcement and Education staff engaged in 6,773 educational contacts with licensees during the first quarter of the year, and “just one month in” to the next quarter, had made “almost 2,000” additional contacts. Brady said the 8,629 so far in 2022 put her division “on target to match last year’s number” of contacts. She placed this work in the context of pursuing enforcement violations “when education is ineffective to gain compliance,” showing that up to this point in 2022 they’d issued 338 warnings, 66 notices to correct (NTC), and 325 administrative violation notices (AVN). Brady expected that these numbers would end the year close to the totals for 2021 and felt the trend was “completely driven by compliance checks, which is youth access.”
      • Further breaking down education contacts, Brady remarked that she tended to be looking for trends showing “a progression” between their educational outreach “to help our licensees gain compliance,” as well as indications “where we’re not successful, or where public safety is at issue.”
    • Board Member Jim Vollendroff inquired how educational opportunities were identified in her division. Brady answered that sometimes it was technical assistance for a licensee, other times there’d been complaints or observation of infractions by her officers. In these circumstances, education contacts were often the first response, she stated (audio - 1m, WSLCB video, TVW video). 
    • Brady last briefed on the status of enforcement during a presentation on April 13th.
  • Brady broke down the education topics, violations, notices to correct, and warning topics her team had been fielding (audio - 6m, WSLCB video, TVW video): 
    • Education topics for all licensees in April 2022
      • Regulatory: 683
      • Youth Access: 315
      • Public Safety: 299
      • Licensing/Permits: 116
      • Tobacco Education: 93
    • Violation types issued for cannabis in 2022
      • Warnings: 17 
        • No cannabis business received a warning in April.
      • NTC: 64 
        • She asserted that “we’re not seeing a lot of the major public safety/youth access issues in this category” as two thirds of NTCs in April pertained to either “Non-Compliance with record keeping requirements” or “Failure to maintain required surveillance system.”
      • AVN: 16
        • For April, Brady noted there were six AVNs issued to cannabis licensees “Furnishing to persons under twenty-one years of age,” compared with 42 notices to alcohol licensees for “Sale or Service of Alcohol to a Minor,” and 48 to tobacco/vapor licensees for “Sale of Tobacco/Vapor to persons under 21.”
    • Brady went over alternative dispute resolutions for adjudication of cannabis AVNs from February, March, and April, with her data showing most had been either informal or uncontested.
    • Youth access to cannabis through retail shops was evaluated by employing investigative aids between the ages of 16 and 19 who assisted WSLCB officers performing retail compliance checks. The agency had four of these positions open at time of publication:
      • Eastern Washington Investigative Aide (Age: 16 to 17 1/2 years)
      • Western Washington Investigative Aide (Age: 16 to 17 1/2 years) 
      • Eastern Washington Investigative Aide (Age: 17 1/2 to 19 years) 
      • Western Washington Investigative Aide (Age: 17 1/2 to 19 years)
    • Drawing on his background in behavioral health, Vollendroff was curious about “benchmarks” for compliance around youth access to cannabis and other substances in addition to “national standards that we are aware of” to compare Washington with other jurisdictions. Brady observed there were “goals” which she’d pass along to Vollendroff and remarked that, after stopping compliance checks during the coronavirus pandemic, staff had “just been measuring what’s happening” (audio - 1m, WSLCB video, TVW video) 
      • Find out more about Underage Purchase of Alcohol and Measuring Alcohol Policy Enforcement and Compliance from the Alcohol Policy Information System at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). Check out research on the topic:
        • Current use of underage alcohol compliance checks by enforcement agencies in the United States (2014) 
        • Do Alcohol Compliance Checks Decrease Underage Sales at Neighboring Establishments? (2013)
      • Learn about the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) tobacco compliance program and see federal resources on Minimum Legal Sales Age (MLSA) Laws for Tobacco Products from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in addition to tobacco compliance and enforcement information from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
  • Brady pointed out that compliance rates in cannabis retail had declined from prior measurements given eight of 41 attempted underage buys were successful in April 2022. General premises checks by her division had reached 20% of cannabis licensees between February and April. By contrast, officers only visited eight percent of alcohol licensees, and only four percent of tobacco and vapor licensees. 
    • Believing that “you get what you measure,” Brady mentioned that her team was also measuring ID checks occurring at businesses.
  • She commented that her staff regularly conducted criminal history background checks as part of the licensing process and highlighted cannabis renewals. The Examiners unit within her division fielded requests from cannabis licensees, Brady stated, and a supermajority still pertained to the Cannabis Central Reporting System (CCRS).
    • Agency staff last briefed on the implementation of the CCRS on April 13th.
  • Endeavoring for transparency, Brady acknowledged there had been two complaints against her officers so far in 2022 of which both had been resolved. The number of vacancies in her staff was why she believed “numbers were down…for amount of work,” but her division was trying to close this gap.
  • Brady wrapped up her remarks by saying her division’s successes were due to the collaboration of other divisions within WSLCB, including when the group recently received “the agency director’s award” (audio - 1m, WSLCB video, TVW video).

• Director of Legislative Relations Chris Thompson brought the board up to speed on the status of the federal SAFE Banking Act and the timeline for 2023 agency request legislation.
  • Thompson associated the bill with cannabis retail store security because federal requirements forced cannabis retail transactions to be in cash. He told agency leadership he’d been working with staff at the governor’s office “and others” to help lobby for the legislation. He spoke of a meeting with Washington’s senior U.S. Senator Patty Murray “that went extremely well" (audio - 2m, WSLCB video, TVW video). 
    • Thompson emphasized that representatives of the Washington State Office of the Attorney General (WA OAG) along with Washington Lieutenant Governor Denny Heck and Washington State Treasurer Mike Pellicciotti were also advocating on behalf of the legislation. He said the existing strategy from Murray was to have the SAFE Banking Act language amended into the America COMPETES Act however a “primary impediment" was Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Cory Booker who didn’t want to pass banking reforms until “broader cannabis legalization legislation is enacted.”
    • Thompson was scheduled to meet with staff for Washington’s junior U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell to get a better read on her position on the bill.
    • Murray had grown more vocal in her support of the SAFE Banking Act after hosting a local press conference on April 20th along with comments to national media outlets on the topic.
  • Turning to the 2023 legislative session, Thompson reported that he’d been modifying “our agency legislative request process and timeline” and reached a point where he was inviting “division directors to work with their staffs” on possible legislative needs for the coming year. He anticipated an internal meeting on June 10th to see what had been submitted and “do some further refinement of those ideas” through the “middle of July.” From there possible request bills would be presented to the board and governor’s staff, Thompson indicated, aiming to draft “a fully fleshed out proposal with fiscal note, stakeholder feedback” and other supporting materials by September 14th (audio - 2m, WSLCB video, TVW video).

• Director of Communications Brian Smith discussed media inquiries around cannabis retail safety, social equity rulemaking, and rule implementation (audio - 5m, WSLCB video, TVW video). 
  • Smith considered media outreach to have been “consistent for the last month" with one or two inquiries coming in each day and robberies continuing as "one of the hotter topics that the media wants to talk about."
    • Smith promised that besides announcing their partnership with Setracon and WSCPA to address the “onslaught of armed robberies,” his team would send out updates to licensees in the coming days.
    • Cannabis Observer previously speculated that the March 19th killing of Tacoma budtender Jordan Brown during a robbery may have been a watershed moment in public attention on cannabis business robberies. In the two weeks prior to his killing, 16 armed robberies and one attempted robbery were identified in Uncle Ike's spreadsheet. In the weeks since Brown died only five robberies, and one “smash and grab,” had been identified at time of publication. 
  • Following the withdrawal of social equity rulemaking earlier during the board meeting, Smith commented that he’d heard “immediately” from "a legal…media organization that follows our stuff” wanting comment on the action. He added that agency social equity resources had been updated to reflect the rulemaking postponement.
  • On HB 1210 Implementation, he pointed out that Jessica Dang, WSLCB Policy and Performance Manager—who joined the agency in March—was working to update the agency website and documentation. Smith expected the process to be concluded along with the expedited rulemaking in August.

Information Set