Santa Barbara County dodged a bullet by telling the Natural Healing Center (NHC) to bugger off when it came to setting up an Orcutt cannabis shop.
NHC’s former big cheese Helios Dayspring finally and officially pleaded guilty to charges of bribery and tax evasion on Oct. 14. And a week prior, the city of San Luis Obispo decided to pull NHC’s permit to open a dispensary in the city.
The decision to terminate, according to the city, is because NHC’s former CEO and majority owner is a liar-liar pants-on-fire who misrepresented himself when filing for the permit.
“An applicant submitted false or misleading information about criminal misconduct to city officials in the business’s permit application,” according to the city’s news release. “Effective immediately, the business will not be permitted to operate in San Luis Obispo.”
“No fair,” cried NHC’s new CEO Valnette Garcia. “Dayspring is no longer associated with the company!”
But that’s not necessarily true, is it? Even though he pleaded guilty to bribing former SLO County 3rd District Supervisor Adam Hill with $32,000 and to evading taxes, for which he will pay $3.4 million to the IRS, NHC’s attorneys admitted that Dayspring still owns the property NHC is supposed to open its SLO dispensary on and plans to collect rent from the former company he founded.
Sounds mighty fishy if you ask me.
Oh, and the reason he’s “no longer with NHC” is because he transferred his ownership share to … wait for it … Valnette Garcia, his girlfriend!
NHC’s attorney, Randall Fox, appealed to the city to reconsider its decision: “The city’s stated factual determinations are erroneous. You have attempted to disqualify and terminate NHC’s permit based on the alleged conduct of one of its former members, who was neither the legal ‘applicant’ nor the permit holder. As the application form makes clear, NHC was the applicant, and is the operator permit holder.”
OK, but everyone involved knows Helios was at the helm of the company during the application process and probably still holds those slippery reins of power. That didn’t stop a bunch of NHC employees from showing up for a protest on the steps of SLO City Hall on Oct. 18 to plead for their jobs.
New CEO Garcia was there, as was the company’s government affairs liaison Joe Armendariz, former head of the anti-tax group the Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association. They talked about their new state-of-the-art but yet-to-open building, about their success in Grover Beach, about how unfair it is to their employees, yada-yada-yada.
Speaking of their employees, the SLO location never opened. How many people were working there?
While the protest was ongoing, City Manager Derek Johnson sent out an e-blast reiterating the city’s termination of the permit.
“Natural Healing Center would never have received the permit had we known then what we know now,” said Deputy City Manager Greg Hermann in the city’s press release.
OK, but why is San Luis Obispo the only city that’s done anything about all of this news swirling around about NHC and its “former” owner, and why did it take so long? Criminal misconduct outweighs tax revenue, right? Right.
The canary loves when liars get caught. Send allegations to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 28 – Nov 4, 2021.
