OCEANSIDE — A cannabis distribution company received permission late last month to share a building with an existing cannabis business in the Oceanside Gateway Business Park.
Herb Girl plans to operate in the northern portion of an existing building located at 1629 Ord Way off Oceanside Boulevard. The company will share the space with Left Coast, a cannabis manufacturing and distribution facility operating in the southern portion of the building.
The Oceanside City Council first approved Left Coast’s operations in 2020. Father-daughter business partners Mark and Linzie Campbell, owners of Herb Girl, have owned their portion of the building since 2009.
To operate a cannabis facility in Oceanside, a business must obtain a local license, a regulated use permit and a state license. Cannabis falls under the city’s regulated uses, which means companies, including tattoo shops, liquor stores, smoke shops and others, must earn a conditional use permit (CUP) from the city to begin operations.
As a regulated use, the city code requires buffer zones between them and other regulated uses, residential districts, churches, schools and other sensitive sites. If a proposed business does not meet those distance requirements, it must submit location waivers along with its CUP application and justify why it should be granted permission to operate.
In the case of Herb Girl, the business already misses the location requirements, given that it would only be separated by a wall from another regulated cannabis business. Herb Girl is also 350 feet from a church, 550 feet from a massage parlor (also a regulated use) and 150 feet from a residential district.
Despite Herb Girl’s proximity to these other regulated and sensitive uses, staff concurred that the site wouldn’t cause any negative impacts to the public.
“That residential district is across the Sprinter tracks, and the next closest residence by foot is outside the 1,000-foot buffer,” said City Planner Dane Thompson.
Regarding the church across the street, the business is prohibited from operating on Sundays during heavy church hours.
Staff also didn’t see a problem with two different cannabis facilities operating within the same building because none of Oceanside’s cannabis businesses are allowed to be open to the public – not even storefronts, yet.
Herb Girl won’t have any signage to promote the business, making it even harder to recognize it as a cannabis business.
“The use will not decrease the general welfare of people in the vicinity,” Thompson said.
According to owner Linzie Campbell, Herb Girl will fill a void of wholesale cannabis products in the San Diego region.
“San Diego has a big bottleneck for wholesale cannabis,” she said. “We would like to offer those products to smaller businesses and more local retail stores that don’t have good opportunities to purchase from larger scale suppliers.”
Herb Girl would only deliver to other licensed cannabis businesses.
Day-to-day operations will include receiving and storing products, packaging and labeling, laboratory testing, quality assurance related to the distributor’s responsibilities and transportation of goods, among other business operations.
“At Herb Girl, our mission is to offer safe, tested and regulated cannabis products from a licensed and compliant source,” Campbell said.
The city’s Planning Commission unanimously approved Herb Girl’s conditional-use permit application in a 7-0 vote on Oct. 24. The City Council will make the final decision at a later date.
