Allegations of corruption, rigging of Fresno social equity pottery shop picks

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A candidate for one of Fresnos’ social equity cannabis licenses claims the city has chosen its favorites and been the subject of corrupt deals, in stark contrast to the fair and just process promised for those affected by the war on drugs.

Last week, the city awarded three preliminary social equity licenses to the three top-ranked applicants: Fresno Canna Co. Dispensary, Viola Fresno and Traditional.

Mark Mabutas, a disabled veteran, placed fifth on the city’s final list of 17 social equity contenders for cannabis retail dispensaries. Her partner was incarcerated for six years in federal prison due to his involvement in an approved dispensary in Sacramento, Mabutas said.

These social equity programs are meant to help those who have been incarcerated, who have been affected, but who saw a lot of city councils or a lot of people rigging the process to distribute it to people they have connections with, said Mabutas.

Mabutas says the three social equity clinics that have obtained preliminary licenses are involved in corruption at Fresno City Hall.

A lawsuit against the city could be initiated, Mabutas said, once he and his partners can gather enough evidence.

For us, we would like the process to be frozen and rejected because from the start it was not fair and equitable, Mabutas said.

He specifically challenged how the city’s ranking system for social equity applicants differed from the scoring system in place for standard retail applicants.

As part of the application process, the city awarded a score percentage out of 1,600 overall points to each standard candidate. The scores have been made public.

On the other hand, the city simply ranked each candidate for social equity without any additional details.

Fresno specifically chose this program so that it could manually select winners using an interview process, Mabutas said. They can say, we gave an interview to just 20 people, but we were going to select these three people just because we like them better. There were no scoring criteria to choose these winners.

After the Standard Applicants submitted their locations to the city, Social Equity Applicants had a month to find real estate for their proposed dispensaries.

What we found was that everything was basically grabbed by most of the standard candidates, Mabutas said. They basically left the leftovers available. It was so that they could make sure that the social equity reserve was very low.

Once all the documents were submitted to the city, the social equity candidates were interviewed by a panel of three where they had the opportunity to present their case.

Mabutas said the panel asked a few questions after the presentation, but there was nothing in the interview regarding the ranking process or the scoring system.

There was nothing where they were asking what your impact was or anything like that, so it was a little weird when we went through the process, Mabutas said. We kind of figured out during this process that, you know what? I think we weren’t going to get it just because the way it was starting to look like.

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