Robert Selna traded a career in print journalism for the life of a lawyer after witnessing the multi-faceted world of real estate development and zoning in action.
“At a certain point I started to cover land use and development in San Francisco and I learned a lot about how it works,” Selna says. “What you have in that situation is the cross section of government, community, environment and economics. It’s really where the rubber meets the road with local government.”
In 2015, Selna founded the cannabis industry group for Wendel, Rosen, Black & Dean after more and more industry operators approached the firm with questions about zoning and regulations. Wendel Rosen is a “medium-sized” full-service firm of 70 lawyers in the Bay Area that handles business-related legal work such as real estate transactions, business contracts and intellectual property, among others.
The firm was founded 1909 and has been assisting cannabis businesses across California since 2004, when the city of Oakland started accepting applications for medical dispensaries.
“We have a longstanding and positive presence as a participant in civic issues and affairs with City Hall and all its agencies,” Selna says.
Selna has been busy helping many of California’s licensed operators transition from nonprofit cultivations and dispensaries into for-profit corporations.
“It’s been across-the-board busy in all sorts of ways,” Selna says. “There has been an urgency to lock down leases and to have a piece of property an operator can put on an application at the local- and state-levels.”
With temporary licenses being issued by the state, Selna expects the surge in business from prospective licensees will continue well past 2018. For now, the majority of his time with the industry has been spent detangling the zoning ordinances that differ from municipality to municipality.
“It’s a patchwork of zoning regulations throughout the state and no two jurisdictions are the same,” he says. “It’s been picking up steam since 2015 as operators have been realizing that they are going to have to get local permits and a state license for every one of their operations.”
Selna says the first question entrepreneurs ask him is whether they can continue running their business where it currently resides and if they can continue the same operations. Typically, the second question is, “Then where can I do what I want to do?” Selna says.
Despite the many challenges they face, marijuana entrepreneurs in California are racing to make their mark in the fastest growing industry in North America.
“Competition has gotten increasingly fierce among applicants and operators,” Selna says. “There is more of a cutthroat element than there was in the gray market, where it was not the perceived scarcity of opportunities.”