The Minnesota Office of Cannabis Management (“OCM”) has begun issuing final denials to the overwhelming majority of previously qualified social equity applicants (“SEA”s) ahead of its first statewide cannabis lottery on December 2 for 280 available “preapproval” cannabis licenses.

Per reporting from MJ Biz Daily, “The applicants who are barred from the lottery failed to complete the application process or acted improperly by submitting multiple applications or disguising the true investors in their companies, according to [OCM].” Obviously applying for more licenses than is allowed and/or concealing owners or financial interests are clear grounds for SEA application rejection. Other alleged “deficiencies” though may not be so cut and dry.

While state law does not permit appeals from denied applicants (which is not uncommon for states with cannabis licensing programs), impacted SEAs can still secure a review of their records submitted to the OCM within seven days of the rejection decision (by logging into their Accela Citizen Portal and pulling the internal record there).

The main issue emerging as a result of these rejections is the fact that the OCM did not consistently issue deficiency notices to rejected applicants if there was a material problem with their submitted applications (although as of October 16, the OCM had sent out deficiency notices to over 300 SEAs). In turn, there are instances here where SEAs were rejected for minor, seemingly non-material deficiencies in their applications (things like submitting incorrect corporate documentation that still contained the same information the OCM sought, or re-submitting documents upon request by the OCM only to be rejected for lack of the same document after-the-fact, or even blank denials altogether with no stated reason for rejection).

In an interview with the Brainerd Dispatch, Charlene Briner, the interim director of the OCM, cast these denied SEA applications into four categories:

• Failure to meet the basic qualifying standards under state law (i.e., social equity applicant owning at least 65% of the business among others)
• Failure to provide the requisite verification documents (i.e., legitimate business plans, source of funds, ID, etc.)
• Hidden or inconsistent ownership or true parties of interest
• Fraudsters (i.e., those trying to game the system by flooding it with multiple applications via proxy or otherwise by using the same address or phone number tied to the same person on multiple applications)

The first and second bullet points above are going to be the ripest ground for rejected SEAs to try to stop the OCM prior to the December 2 lottery, but that’s only if those rejected SEAs can very quickly obtain copies of their submitted documents (within 7 days of the rejection) and start the administrative litigation process and/or seek injunctive relief at the same time against the OCM.

What was once more than 1800 qualified social equity applicants for the lottery has been winnowed down to around 640. The OCM rejected applicants for a multitude of reasons, some of which are clearly legitimate and some of which appear to be questionably enforceable from the perspective of complying with Minnesota’s state constitution and its administrative procedure act.

If you’ve been impacted by an OCM rejection, you do not have much time to act ahead of the December 2 lottery. If you have questions about your potential civil or administrative claims against OCM due to a questionable SEA rejection, contact Jeffrey O’Brien, Hilary Bricken, or Nick Morgan.