Pot negotiations continuing Monday
Negotiations on changes to the marijuana law are expected to continue Monday.
Now more than a full week beyond its deadline, the conference committee hashing out changes to the legal marijuana law is expected to resume its negotiations Monday afternoon.
The six lawmakers charged with reconciling divergent House and Senate proposals for altering the marijuana legalization law approved in November by nearly 1.8 million voters are due to meet at 2 p.m. in Room 348, lead Senate conferee Sen. Patricia Jehlen's office said.
The conference committee last met late Friday afternoon, Jehlen's office said, after a roughly 48-hour hiatus amid growing concern that the budget and marijuana negotiations had become intertwined. The group did not meet over the weekend.
The conference committee missed its June 30 deadline to get a bill overhauling the 2016 marijuana legalization ballot law on the governor's desk. The House and Senate remain divided, according to people close to the process, on the rate of taxation for marijuana sales and local control over the siting of retail marijuana stores - issues that are both addressed in the existing voter law.
"We still have work to do. There are a couple of major sticking points and then there are a lot of small points I think we can knock out of the way pretty quickly," lead House conferee Rep. Ronald Mariano said on Friday. He added, "Hopefully we're going to continue to meet and resolve this."
The deadline that passed on June 30 was put in place in order to make sure that the new regulatory body, which will be known as the Cannabis Control Commission, had a year to get up and running and begin licensing retail pot stores by July 2018.
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