Why this page exists
On September 14, 2026, a citizen named Angel — the founder of this site — drove to Lincoln and did his own civic duty: three minutes of public comment to the Commission that regulates medical cannabis in a state where voters approved it in 2024. He'd never sat in that room before. Neither had this site's tracking of it.
What followed was a genuinely difficult exercise in reconstructing a paper trail that should already exist somewhere in one place, and doesn't. The Commission's own meeting-information page lists dates going back to June 2025 with no consistent way to see what happened at each one — some meetings have minutes attached, most don't, and some minutes that exist are still marked "draft, not approved" months later. That gap is the story as much as anything decided in any one meeting.
This page is the fix, built the slow way: every confirmed meeting date, what we have for it, what we don't, and what's still an open question — never smoothed over to look more finished than it is.
Every meeting on record, and what we actually have
Source for the date list itself: mcc.nebraska.gov/meeting-information, pulled 2026-09-15, rechecked 2026-10-18 (the Jun 09, 2025 row was added then). Status is ours, not theirs. SOURCE LINKED means we have the Commission's own link to the primary document or recording but haven't read/archived it yet — click through and check it yourself; that's the point.
| Date | Type | Status | What we have |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | |||
| Jun 09 | Inaugural Public Meeting | NOT YET PULLED | Now listed on the Commission's own meeting page (read 2026-10-18), 3:00–5:00 PM, with an agenda and minutes posted. We have not pulled either yet. Earlier versions of this page said the calendar did not list this meeting; it does now. |
| Jun 26 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Full minutes archived. References an earlier June 9, 2025 meeting. The Commission's calendar now lists it (see the Jun 09 row above). |
| Aug 04 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Chair Oldenburg absent from her own meeting. First budget figures on record ($60K to MCC, $30K to LCC). A commissioner raised the dual-seat conflict-of-interest question himself. Confirms June 9, 2025 meeting was real (billed separately by two newspapers). |
| Sep 02 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Official minutes archived (pasted verbatim, 2026-09-17); no recording exists for this meeting. Emergency regulations adopted with the cultivator license cap raised from two to four, plus federal background checks. Cultivator applications opened Sept 4–23, 2025. Closed session on “imminent litigation,” 2:23–3:43 p.m. Last meeting with all five original commissioners. |
| Sep 08 | Emergency Public Meeting | NOT YET PULLED | It was a real, separate meeting: the Sept 30, 2025 minutes approve “the minutes from the September 8th emergency meeting” in their own vote, after approving Sept 2’s. The Commission’s event page for Sept 8 links the Sept 2 PDF instead. These minutes are still not in hand, and why the meeting was called is still unknown. |
| Sep 30 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Official minutes and the Zoom transcript archived (pasted verbatim, 2026-09-17). The minutes state that Kim Lowe and Bruce Bailey resigned from the Liquor Control Commission on Sept 29, 2025, which by statute ended their seats here. No official document gives a reason. A public commenter alleged they were asked to resign; that is his claim, not confirmed. |
| Oct 07 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Official minutes archived (pasted verbatim, 2026-09-17). First roll call with three commissioners (Oldenburg, Mueting, Coffey). As of Sept 17, 2026 the Commission’s own copy of these minutes would not load (“Something went wrong”). A recording exists. |
| Nov 03 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Official minutes archived (pasted verbatim, 2026-09-15). Approves the Sept 30 and Oct 7 minutes. Header says 1:00–3:30 p.m., but item 1 says the meeting was called to order at 2:01 p.m.; not explained. Public comment included allegations about the Attorney General and about Bailey’s departure, recorded as testimony, not confirmed. |
| Dec 02 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Official minutes archived (pasted verbatim, 2026-09-15). Settles the date: the Jan 5 minutes’ “December 3, 2025” was an error. Robert Synhorst and James Elworth, appointed to the Liquor Control Commission on Nov 17, 2025, sit here, making five members. Cultivator denials for Lumen River LLC and Monarch Edge LLC confirmed from this meeting’s own record. |
| 2026 | |||
| Jan 05 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Written minutes for items 1–4 and 9–10 (verbatim). Items 5–8 are filled in from the meeting’s own transcript, since the copy of the minutes obtained skips them. These minutes call the previous meeting “December 3, 2025”; the Dec 2 minutes show the real date. |
| Feb 02 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Official minutes archived (pasted verbatim, 2026-09-17). Chair Monica Oldenburg resigned effective that day; Commissioner Mueting presides at every meeting after. Blue Embers Ventures LLC denied (scored below 70). Meadowlark Medicinals approved, pending Blue Embers’ reconsideration window. An Assistant Attorney General briefed the Commission on the Open Meetings Act. |
| Mar 16 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Full current roster's first archived meeting. LB 1235 (fees) and LB 933 (practitioner protection) both tracked live. A speaker disclosed a suicide tied to lack of cannabis access. Two named minutes corrections made this meeting — see the archive's Correction Log. |
| Apr 13 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Real spoken-word transcript archived (Zoom auto-caption, machine-transcribed). Commission voted to retain private counsel over a perceived AG conflict; cultivator licensing closed at 4; new website live. Minutes (Adobe, was blank for us) · Zoom recording (passcode: M&0fEA6=) |
| May 11 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Official draft minutes (complete) plus the last 13 minutes of the Zoom transcript. The two don’t fully match: the recording has discussion of evaluator assignments, application timeframes and a technical consultant that the written minutes don’t list as items. The April 13 minutes were corrected (“Grimpe” to Sen. Merv Riepe), and minutes now use commissioners’ last names only. |
| Jun 22 | Public Meeting | NOT YET PULLED | — |
| Jul 20 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Official minutes (pasted verbatim, 2026-09-17) plus a partial Zoom transcript. Permanent regulations cleared AG Hilgers' review (June 30) and Gov. Pillen's approval (July 1) — this vote moved them into formal rulemaking, not into effect. Sherry Lawler testified about her daughter Brooke's 33-year seizure history and the lack of any legal pathway for in-facility cannabis administration. A citizen alleged staff told the Commission zero manufacturer applications had been received while two applicants stood in the room holding printed copies of theirs — the Commission's own minutes confirm two packets were handed to staff that day. |
| Aug 17 | Public Meeting | VERIFIED | Full minutes archived. Approval confirmed 2026-09-22: the September 14 transcript shows these minutes were formally approved as the first item of business that day — motion Coffey, second Elworth, roll call passed (Synhorst absent). |
| Sep 14 | Public Meeting | PARTIAL | Angel attended in person through item 8; official minutes and the Commission's own recording not yet posted (as of Sept 22, none exists on the Commission's site). A full Zoom auto-caption transcript of the entire meeting — Angel's own copy, not the Commission's public release — is in hand and cited throughout this page as of 2026-09-22. Field notes on file, marked firsthand, secondhand, and now transcript-confirmed. Update 2026-10-09: a draft of the minutes is now in hand; every page of it is marked “These minutes have not been approved by the commission.” Still looking for the approved minutes. When they post, every quote on this page is checked against them, and any correction goes here with a date. Checked 2026-10-09 against the draft: it confirms the Aug 17 minutes were approved (Mueting, Coffey, Elworth in favor; Synhorst absent), no closed session, and Sodeke as program manager. It records Leah Post describing a seizure at a prior meeting, but not the details this page takes from the transcript (the name, the rescue dose, the other two speakers). It gives no figure for the 3,517 days or the 49 advocates. The draft is a summary, not verbatim, so those stay sourced to the transcript only. Typo fixed: “Steinhorst” is Synhorst. |
| Oct 19 | Public Meeting | SCHEDULED | Not yet happened. |
| Nov 16 | Public Meeting | SCHEDULED | Not yet happened. |
| Dec 14 | Public Meeting | SCHEDULED | Not yet happened. |
What's confirmed so far
- Two years after Nebraska voters approved medical cannabis (2024), there is still no patient registry, and no published count of how many practitioners have written a recommendation.
- Fees cannot legally be collected until pending regulations are adopted and become effective — confirmed directly from the Commission's own August 17 minutes.
- KRL Med LLC was approved and Silver Ghost Solutions LLC was denied for cultivator licenses at the January 5, 2026 meeting — both named directly in the minutes.
- Commissioner Bud Synhorst cast the lone dissenting vote against extending the manufacturer application deadline (Aug 17, 2026), on the record stating he "wanted to continue moving the manufacturer application process forward."
- A proposed Director position carries an anticipated salary of $100,000 — disclosed in an August 17, 2026 budget discussion. (Distinct from two other, unrelated $100,000 figures elsewhere on this site — see the source archive for the disambiguation.)
- The Commission's total 2025 operating allocation started at $60,000, with a separate $30,000 to the Liquor Control Commission for administrative support — disclosed at the August 4, 2025 meeting, the earliest budget figure on record.
- A commissioner raised the dual-seat conflict of interest himself, on the record, August 4, 2025: Commissioner Coffey asked whether it was a conflict for Medical Cannabis Commissioners who also sit on the Liquor Control Commission to negotiate an agreement between the two bodies. The Commission's own legal counsel called it "awkward" but left it to Commissioners' discretion.
- Two bills are being tracked live by the Commission itself: LB 1235 (authorizes fee collection — passed and signed 2026-04-07, per this site's own prior research) and LB 933 (protects practitioners from punishment for recommending or discussing cannabis — status of Commission support unclear as of the March 16, 2026 meeting; one speaker later claimed it was gutted, unverified).
- A citizen testified that 524 days had passed since Nebraska voters approved medical cannabis (April 13, 2026 meeting), and that the Commission had awarded only four cultivator licenses in the prior six months.
- The Commission voted to retain private legal counsel independent of the Attorney General's office, April 13, 2026, citing "appearances of impropriety and the appearances of conflict" — explicitly not a criticism of the AG office's work, but a structural response to AG Hilgers' public opposition to cannabis rescheduling.
- Cultivator licensing is now closed at four total licenses: KRL Med, MahāMotā (held by an individual named Patrick Thomas), Midwest Cultivators Group, and Meadowlark Medicinals LLC.
- No executive session was held after the September 14, 2026 meeting — confirmed twice, independently: Jessica Sodeke's 2026-09-17 email to this site, and the meeting's own transcript ("we have no need to go into a closed executive session").
- A citizen testified, September 14, 2026, that 3,517 days had passed since she first went to the Legislature to advocate for her son, and named 49 fellow advocates who died during that wait. Her own figures, stated as testimony — not independently verified by this site.
Open questions — not resolved, not hidden
Dec 2 vs Dec 3, 2025
The January 5, 2026 minutes approve minutes "from December 3, 2025" in one place, then refer to "the December 2nd, 2025, meeting" in another, describing the same cultivator decisions. The Commission's own public calendar lists only a December 2, 2025 meeting — no December 3. Most likely a typo in the January minutes, not two meetings, but unconfirmed until the December 2 minutes themselves are in hand.
The June 9, 2025 meeting
The June 26, 2025 minutes reference approving minutes from a June 9, 2025 meeting. When we first pulled the Commission's calendar (2026-09-15) it did not list one. As read on 2026-10-18, the Commission's page lists it as the Inaugural Public Meeting, 3:00–5:00 PM, with an agenda and minutes posted. We have not read those minutes yet, so what happened at it is still open.
The seizure story — RESOLVED 2026-09-22, by transcript, not minutes
Angel heard secondhand, in the room on 2026-09-14, that a person had a seizure during a hearing. The September 14 transcript confirms it: it happened at the August 17, 2026 meeting, to a person named Brooke, and was described directly to the Commission by three separate speakers on Sept 14 — Leah Post (primary account: Brooke's mother administered "a rescue dose of medical cannabis," which stopped it; no one on the Commission stopped the meeting or asked if she was okay), Georgianna Schroeder-Stanley (independently corroborates, having asked the mother afterward), and Shannon Coryell (referenced it directly to the Commission). Not an isolated incident: at the July 20, 2026 meeting, a month before the Aug 17 seizure, Sherry Lawler had already testified about her daughter Brooke's 33-year seizure history and the lack of any legal pathway for a caregiver or facility staff to administer cannabis in a residential/day-service setting — the Aug 17 incident is one data point in a decades-long, already-on-the-record policy gap, not a one-off. Still open: it is not in the Aug 17 minutes themselves (testimony about it came at the next meeting), and no recording of the Aug 17 meeting has been obtained to check independently.
Who put a commissioner there
A citizen in the room asked, in effect, who put Commissioner Jim Elworth on this Commission and why. Checked: no campaign contribution from him to either Gov. Pillen or Sen. Ricketts turned up in any year of Nebraska's own campaign-finance filings. State law requires the three Liquor Control/Cannabis commissioners to come from three different congressional districts — Elworth's Nebraska City seat fills the 3rd District slot, a seat that had to be filled by someone regardless of who picked him.
A missing beginning
The Commission's own Zoom recording of the April 13, 2026 meeting starts at 00:07:44 — not at 00:00:00. Confirmed directly, not assumed: nothing exists in the file before that point. That means the call to order, roll call, and the opening of public comment — including the identity of the first speaker that day — are not captured in this recording at all. Cause unknown; not asserting one. A recording of a public meeting, subject to Nebraska's Open Meetings Act, missing its own start is a real transparency finding in its own right.
The decision-makers, on their own record
Not a verdict on either man. Their own words, dated and sourced, next to what they actually did — the same discipline as every claim on this page.
Attorney General Mike Hilgers
"I think the people did not vote for recreational marijuana. And that's what it is. That's what I think."Press conference, May 2025 — KOLN/1011 Now, Nov 4, 2025
"Is there a peer-reviewed study that you're aware of that actually supports the medicinal use of smoking marijuana? I'm not aware of one."Public remarks, 2025 — said directly against what multiple patients (Lia Post, Angelica Marsaglia) have testified to this Commission helps them
"Any medical cannabis regulations that allow access to marijuana untethered to a plausibly medical purpose without adequate patient protections are 'medical' in name only and may slip into a preempted recreational marijuana scheme."Marijuana Moment
What he did anyway: signed off on the Commission's regulations despite this stated personal opposition — his own office's framing was that the law required his approval regardless of his views. That's on the record too, not left out because it complicates the picture.
Governor Jim Pillen
No comparably direct quote found, checked specifically for this page. What's on record from him reads procedural: "I have appointed two experienced, well-qualified individuals to the Medical Cannabis Commission, who will ensure this new industry is strongly regulated to the letter of the law the people of Nebraska enacted." Separately, both appointees he named — Dr. Monica Oldenburg and Lorelle Mueting — had records opposing advocate-backed cannabis bills before he appointed them to the body that now regulates it. That's a documented pattern in who he chose, not a quote from him — the two are kept distinct here on purpose, and one is not evidence of the other.
What's next
This page grows the same way it started: real documents, added as they're found, dated and sourced, gaps left visible instead of quietly filled in. If you have a document that belongs here — a set of minutes, an agenda, a recording — the Commission's own contact is mcc.contact@nebraska.gov, and this site's own intake is open too.
Eighteen meetings held since June 2025 (through September 14, 2026), three more already on the calendar. As of September 26, 2026, this page has real, sourced material for fifteen of the eighteen: fourteen complete, plus September 14 in part. Three are still missing: the minutes of the September 8, 2025 emergency meeting, anything at all for June 22, 2026, and the June 9, 2025 inaugural meeting, which the Commission's page now lists with an agenda and minutes we have not pulled yet. That gap is not a failure of this page — it's the actual, current state of public transparency for a program Nebraska voters approved two years ago. #PROOF — trust, but verify.