Loss of coffee bar puts LGBTQ 12-step venue under siege

A club originally established as a safe place for LGBTQ addicts and alcoholics to seek recovery at a time when they weren’t always welcome at “straight” meetings in San Diego is facing its most existential threat ever.

Now, staying put in the building where untold numbers of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender San Diegans have gone for help in changing, in fact for help saving, their lives for more than half of the club’s three-plus decades in existence is in doubt thanks to a series of events that may have started when a medical marijuana dispensary moved in above the club more than a year ago.

“We’ve been here a long time, and we’d like to stay here,” says club board member Robert Tice.

“Live and Let Live Alano Club” is the name on the window, but the brightly colored vinyl lettering could be removed if operators of the multi-room venue for 12-step recovery meetings in University Heights can’t cough up the thousands of dollars they say are needed to bring their coffee bar up-to-code after an anonymous tipster brought the hand of health code-enforcement officers down on their meeting place.

“The irony is we’ve had the Health Department here doing inspections several times, and we’ve passed them for years,” says John F., president of the club’s board of directors. Adhering to “… anonymity in radio, press or films,” a tradition in the 12-step recovery program to which he belongs, John asked San Diego LGBT Weekly to use only the first letter of his last name in this article.

“Robert [Hanna], the building owner’s son was here sizing up water damage after the rains, and while he was over by the coffee bar, he asked if we have a permit to sell coffee after 24 years of selling coffee to our members.”

Rainwater had poured through a wall near the coffee bar from the suite of offices above the club, John says. The landlord had sent his son to oversee repairs.

“About a month later, the county Health Department came in and walked right over to that same wall and looked at the coffee bar and said, ‘you need a permit.’”

Coincidentally, a short-lived medical marijuana dispensary that briefly occupied office space above the club was forced by the city attorney to move out last year because of permit problems of its own.

However, some thought the Alano Club had pressured the cannabis dispensary out of the facility, causing the building owner to continue seeking new tenants for the offices above the club to this day.

Not so, says John.

“We’ve always had a good relationship with the landlord, Albert Hanna,” he says. “In fact, a few years ago when a different medical marijuana place wanted to rent from him, Al asked us if we would be OK with that. ‘We said it might not be a good fit,’ and Al was very kind and respectful and [he] didn’t have them move in that time.”

The Alano Club members who thought a medicinal-hemp dispensary making a home above them was a recipe for disaster felt they’d dodged a bullet a few years ago. Yet not all club members and 12-step meeting-goers at the club believe the two operations would, by definition, be mutually exclusive.

Neither do all recovering addicts who go to LLLAC believe an Alano club and a pot shop should automatically be thought of as being irreconcilable sharers of a commercial building.

Dallin Young, founder and executive director of the San Diego-based Association of Cannabis Professionals, couldn’t agree more.

“That would be like saying, you can’t have a McDonald’s in the same strip mall as a Weight Watchers clinic,” Young said. “There’s a lot of misunderstanding and prejudice about cannabis.”

In fact, he says, some in the medical profession subscribe to growing evidence that, in some cases, pot might occasionally be helpful in improving addicts’ chances of overcoming their other chemical-dependency problems.

“I can’t comment on that specific situation, but I know about the conflict with the Alano Club and the collective that was operating there,” he said. “Our association wants to help communities avoid conflicts and nurture understanding between the various constituencies. There’s a lot to talk about and always a lot of ways to avoid problems and to cooperate.”

Cannabis shop to no cannabis shop, the Live and Let Live Alano Club’s board hopes to stay right where they’ve been for more than two decades. That’s not just because the location is convenient, nor simply because members and meeting attendees like their current digs. They say they’d like to stay because they actually like the landlord. It’s his son with whom they’ve been having trouble, say board members.

“Albert Hanna has been a good landlord, and I’m sure we’ll work this out,” said John F. “The son just seems to want us out – period.”

John says he and most of his colleagues on the organization’s board of directors so appreciate the fact that Hanna has always been a “courteous, responsive and respectful landlord” – and that even though Hanna eventually leased to a pot shop, several years earlier he chose not to based on feedback from them.

“We just all need to come to the table and figure out what to do,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out why all of a sudden we have a requirement for a permit and have to come up with $30,000 by ourselves for improvements to get that permit, which includes installing five sinks that the county wants us to have in order to sell coffee and other items, the way we always have. That’s part of how we generate revenue to pay the rent and keep the lights on.”

The sinks the county wants the club to install are more than just the rectangular, aluminum basins some might envision when they think of commercial sinks, says board member, Robert Tice.

“We’re talking about five commercial sinks with air-gap drains, floor sinks and the special plumbing and installation,” he says. “That’s why we have a GoFundMe page. If we raise enough, we might find another solution because there’s no guarantee that even after we install all of this new hardware, that when our lease is up, they’ll renew it.”

According to John F., original drawings and permits for the club, which he says the landlord would have seen 24 years ago, included a coffee bar.

But that may not be so clear. Also unclear is whether the board’s confidence that Albert Hanna will continue to be an easygoing, easy-to-work-with landlord for the club. In fact, based on a very brief phone interview with Hanna, the property owner’s view of his clean-and-sober tenants at Monroe and Park has soured.

“Thank you for opening my eyes,” Hanna told this reporter. “I thought all this time they were operating legally. Now you’re telling me they were doing something illegal this entire time. Thank you. I will be calling my lawyer.”

Asked if it might have just been better to live with the medical pot dispensary when it was located above the Alano Club, John F. says that although his group complained about it to the Hannas, the club was not responsible for the legal problems that ultimately caused the pot shop to shutter.

“My predecessor told Robert Hanna, ‘hey there’s pot smoke and pot buyers, and an improperly operating marijuana operation above us.’”

John says he was surprised to hear how the younger Hanna allegedly replied to the Alano Club board member who had complained about the pot shop.

“He said, ‘I’ll rent to whoever I want to rent to,’” John says.

Alano Club manager, Rodney Morris, haggled with a construction project manager just before our interview at the meeting facility. He pointed out that the parking lot and building facade are currently the site a major construction job.

“They’re putting a cell-phone tower on the roof now,” he says. “It’s like a war zone out here with the scaffolding and the water these construction guys are using, which is on our meter.”

Morris acknowledges, however, that the building owner has a right to make money from his investment … that, in fact, is no doubt why he bought the building in the first place.

“Still, this mess is … it’s a mess,” he said. “You know when somebody just wants you gone.”

(A version of this story first appeared in the San Diego Reader)