From a veranda overlooking Avalon harbor, real estate broker Mark Malan gazed at oceanfront cottages, a curved promenade and passing sailboats with brightly colored pennants.

To tourists, it was a place to bask in sun and surf just an hour from the California coast. But that’s not what the Long Beach businessman saw.

Malan aims to turn his real estate office here into the first medical marijuana dispensary on Santa Catalina Island, and he’s trying to make the idea attractive by promising to share a small portion of the revenue with local schools and city government.

“It’s going to create wheelbarrows of money,” Malan said, adjusting his broad-rimmed straw hat over a confident smile. But just how much of that windfall would go to schools is unknown.

A petition drive he led gathered enough signatures to put an initiative on the ballot that would repeal a current ban on medical marijuana dispensaries and allow at least two facilities in the 3-square-mile resort community with a population of roughly 3,800. [Read more at the Los Angeles Times]