With three members of the Board of Supervisors comfortably ensconced in the pockets of the burgeoning local cannabis industry (shout out Das, Steve and Gregg!), it's big news when anything slows down county government's Ganja Express.
But that's what happened this week, when a sustained journalistic effort by the Montecito Journal succeeded in getting county planners to back down from convening a key meeting about a disputed, proposed retail license in Carpinteria on Yom Kippur, one of the holiest of Jewish holidays.
Nick Masuda, managing editor of the Journal, joins Newsmakers' all-star panel of top local journalists to provide the journalistic play-by-play of how the deal went down, after county officials at first offered the middle finger to land use attorney Jana Zimmer. A sole practitioner who's representing a neighboring business that objects to the license, Zimmer under the original meeting schedule, which the county at first insisted could not be changed, would have had to choose between representing her client or observing the Day of Atonement.
Breaking down the rest of the week's top local news stories, Noozhawk's Jade Martinez-Pogue surveys the pandemic landscape, with deaths from the Delta variant rising here and across the country; the Indy's Ryan P. Cruz talks about his reporting on people using Ivermectin, an animal dewormer to treat themselves for Covid, and political reporter Josh Molina leads the discussion of the big courthouse rally for Larry Elder, the Republican front-runner in the attempted recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom, while the whole gang weighs in on the latest on the city election.
If it's Friday, it's Newsmakers TV -- all here, right now.
Check out the show via YouTube below or by clicking through this link, and the audio version is here.
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