San Francisco’s Municipal Railway, citing public complaints and uncertainty over future regulations, is proposing to ban both medical and recreational pot advertising on city buses, streetcars, cable cars and transit shelters.
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The Municipal Transportation Agency began allowing advertising of medical marijuana in 2014, years after it became legal in the state. And it now faces a potential wave of new advertising when sales of recreational pot become legal statewide Jan. 1.
But according to a staff report last week to the agency’s governing board, the agency “has received a number of complaints from customers and others about cannabis-related advertising.”
The proposed ban, which would be revisited in six months, is “intended to respond to those complaints, and to provide an opportunity for the regulatory environment to clarify,” the report said. The agency’s board could vote on the ban as soon as this week.
Transportation agency Director Ed Reiskin tells us that complaints are coming from parents and others upset about advertising marijuana when “there are kids on our buses.”
Another issue is the city’s still up-in-the-air regulations on the sale of recreational marijuana. The Board of Supervisors is
deadlocked over rules for licensing those businesses, but once that’s resolved, the license holders are likely to flood the zone with advertising.
“There are strong feelings on lots of sides, and a feeling that incumbent (medical marijuana clubs) have some benefits over others,” Reiskin said. “So it’s good to halt the advertising until that settles out.”
Transportation agency board member Art Torres, who supports the ban, also has concerns about Muni promoting marijuana.
“We have an opioid crisis in this country, and now we need to consider whether drugs should be advertised on public transit, which could lead to a lot of overdoses and abuses,” Torres said.
Marijuana wouldn’t be the first product to get the heave-ho from Muni. Over the years, the agency has banned alcohol, tobacco and gun ads, and it reserves the right to reject ads it finds overly political, violent, profane, misleading or “directly adverse” to Muni.
Three of the the city’s 46 licensed medical cannabis dispensary and delivery services — Eaze, Urban Pharm and the Green Cross — now advertise on Muni, contributing a slice of the $19.6 million that the transit system earns every year from advertising.
Reiskin, however, said he doesn’t foresee any real fiscal impact to Muni from a marijuana ban.
If marijuana businesses “don’t take the slot, someone else will,” he said.
Taxing: Despite sending the bill to an out-of-date address for years, San Francisco Treasurer-Tax Collector Jose Cisneros says in a new report that his office did everything by the book when it auctioned off the exclusive Presidio Terrace’s street and sidewalks for nonpayment of property taxes.
The homeowners who live in the gated enclave say they were denied due process when the street was auctioned out from under them two years ago — in large part because the city was sending the property tax bill to the address of a bookkeeper who had retired in the 1980s.
The homeowners contend that the city should have known it was the wrong address when the bills and auction notice were returned by certified mail as “undeliverable.”
Cisneros, however, said it was up to to the homeowners association to make sure the city had the right address.
“While it is regrettable that the address apparently had not been updated, the responsibility for doing so rests with the owner,” Cisneros said in a six-page letter to the Board of Supervisors. The board is set to consider revoking the auction sale this month.
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Cisneros also said state law makes it clear that property owners are responsible for paying their taxes, regardless of whether they receive a bill.
Tax collectors in San Mateo and Monterey counties told us that Cisneros is right.
“We do what we can to reach our taxpayers,” said San Mateo County Treasurer-Tax Collector Sandie Arnott, president of the statewide tax collectors association. “That being said, it is the responsibility of the property owner to keep our office updated on address changes.”
Monterey County Treasurer-Tax Collector Mary Zeeb, president-elect of the state association, told us that about half of the bills for delinquent properties auctioned off in her county are returned as undeliverable.
In San Francisco, Cisneros said, it’s worse. In 2015, the year the Presidio Terrace common areas were sold to a South Bay couple, 58 percent of auction notices came back as undeliverable.
Bottom line, according to Amanda Fried, spokeswoman for the treasurer-tax collector: While the Board of Supervisors has the authority to decide whether the homeowners were treated unjustly, state law makes it clear that a tax bill sent to an address that the homeowners association failed to update “is not a reason for the treasurer to undo the sale.”
credit:sfchronicle.com