All smoke shops will close under new Fresno ordinance. How many will come back?

Fresno’s retail landscape is about to undergo a major transformation thanks to new regulations passed by the city council and approved by mayor Jerry Dyer on Tuesday.

The Smoke Shop Text Amendment goes into effect June 5 and will shutter dozens of businesses across the city.

As a snapshot of the situation:

There are four smoke shops lined up within walking distance along Olive Avenue.

One has been established in the neighborhood for nearly 25 years.

The other three opened within the past three years and have seen a number of complaints from the community, according to council member Miguel Arias, whose District 3 includes Tower’s commercial corridor.

All of them could be gone within the next 180 days.

“Every smoke shop will be forced to apply for an extension or shut down,” says Arias, co-sponsor of the ordinance, which defines and strictly regulates smokes shops within Fresno’s city limits.

The extension gives businesses extra time to sell off remaining product and wind down operations or apply for a conditional use permit so they can remain open under the new regulations. If a shop applies for an extension and CUP at the same time (which is what the city is encouraging) it could, theoretically, see little interruption in business, Arias says.

Some businesses won’t get any grace period.

Those found to be engaging in illegal activities or operating outside of city code won’t be allowed to continue operations. “If you don’t have a business license,” Arias says, “we’re not going to let you continue to operate for the next 180 days.”

A lawsuit incoming

Push back from business owners came quickly.

Last week, leaders of the California Association of Smoke Shops voted unanimously to file a federal lawsuit to block enforcement of the ordinance, which the association’s lawyer called “ill-conceived.”

“The association and I are disheartened by the actions of the city council with regard both to the surreptitious process by which the four proponents and city staff advanced the ordinance and the contents of the ordinance,” Todd Wynkoop told The Bee via email.

Wynkoop wasn’t comfortable having any of the members speak with The Bee about the implications of the ordinance for fear of retribution. After the city council’s initial vote in March, code enforcement immediately “inspected the shop of every businessman who spoke against the ordinance,” Wynkoop says.

The consensus among members is that “the provisions of the ordinance that will take effect almost immediately are impossible to implement.”

The association was created to work with the city on code enforcement and other issues, which it says are important. But this ordinance is an overreach; one that violates “the due process and equal protection clauses of the United States and California Constitutions,” Wynkoop says, “by retroactively applying development code provisions as a weapon and by singling out smoke shops from other similarly situated businesses.”

The ordinance is also discriminatory in its application against the predominately religious and ethnic minority group of smoke shop owners, he says.

The California Smoke Shop Association currently has 28 dues-paying members, but represents “all licensed smoke shops in Fresno and Clovis,” according to Wynkoop.

It’s unclear to which license he’s referring.

Smoke shops, defined

Until now, smoke shops have been undefined in Fresno, operating essentially unregulated under a loophole in municipal code. This has allowed them to saturate neighborhoods and exist next to so-called sensitive areas like schools and parks.

The shops, often packed into corner strip-malls and highly advertised in neon and flashing lights, have proliferated since the pandemic, Arias says.

When he took office in 2019, there was one smoke shop in his District 3. There are now more than 40.

The city puts the total number of smoke shops at 140, but there are likely more. Some are hard to trace because they are operating without even a simple business license, the city says.

All of which matters because some of these shops have become hubs for illegal activities like gambling, prostitution and, particularly, marijuana sales. The city discovered this during a crackdown on black-market cannabis it started two years ago under a partnership with California’s Attorney General.

The new regulations lay out a definition for smoke shops based on types (and percentage) of merchandise on the shelves, similar to what’s done for grocery and liquor stores and cannabis dispensaries.

It then limits the number of such businesses to 49 — seven per council district.

Each will be required to have a conditional use permit and business tax license, which can be revoked for any number of reasons.

More than a dozen smoke shops have already closed since the city began enhanced enforcement in 2023.

Several others have re-branded themselves as selling clothing or other types of goods to get off of the city’s radar.

But the city is on the lookout for shops trying to circumvent the ordinance in that manner.

Inspections will continue to be done based on community complaints and in coordination with city code and law enforcement and the state’s attorney general office. And because it’s now explicitly spelled out what constitutes a smoke shop, the city has tools to close those stores once they are discovered.

“With this policy in place, we are empowering our city to take action against illegal operators who have been allowed to harm our communities for far too long,” council member Nelson Esparza said in a statement applauding implementation of the ordinance.

This story was originally published May 8, 2025 at 7:58 AM.