That didn’t take long.
In the second meeting of the year, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted 5-0 to require multi-technology carbon scrubbers at cannabis greenhouses.
“There’s going to be a lot of happy people in Carpinteria,” said First District Supervisor Roy Lee, who waived to the camera and said hi to his hometown. “The Carpinteria Valley was ground zero for the policies to allow cannabis. I am glad we are doing something about it. I am glad we are taking the first steps of many.”
The Board of Supervisors has wrestled with how to curb the odor from cannabis farms, which is an ongoing issue for the Carpinteria Valley and other areas with a concentration of growers. Residents for years have complained about the smell and criticized the county for not taking enforcement action against operators.
Tuesday’s vote was to direct staff to draft a policy, a dramatic shift made possible by the election of Roy Lee, who ran on a campaign of requiring carbon scrubbers. The former Carpinteria City Councilman had promised to take swift action. Board Chair Laura Capps and Fourth District Santa Barbara County Supervisor Bob Nelson also pushed for the reforms.
Capps pushed for a fast process to mandate scrubbers. The Santa Barbara County Planning Commission will review and make recommendations on the issue and it will come back to the board for a vote on March 25.
The operators, on their own dime, would hire an engineer to assess how many carbon scrubbers they need onsite for greenhouse cannabis farms, and create an odor abatement plan. The county would then review that number.
Under the new plan, an operator will have its business license revoked if they violate the policy.
Fourth District Supervisor Bob Nelson said he supports the change. Multi-technology carbon scrubbers are the “gold standard,” he said.
“Obviously with these types of things you are not going to make everybody happy, some people are going to be excited, some people are going to be opposed to what we are working on here,” Nelson said.
The crackdown on cannabis comes amid falling revenues and a decline in operators, some of whom have gone out of business. The county collected $835,000 in taxes from cannabis sales in the first quarter of the year. As of right now, staff estimate the revenues will come in about 13% below the $6.1 million budget projection.
David Van Wingerden, co-owner of Farmlane in Carpinteria, said he is a fan of carbon scrubbers. He has installed four of them. But he opposes multi-technology scrubbers.
“Our single-technology scrubbers work fantastically and since we installed them almost four years ago, we nor the county have received any odor complaints at our farm,” Van Wingerden said. “It would be an unnecessary financial burden for farms to have to change-out current, effective, simple scrubbers to multi-technology scrubbers, especially during these competitive times in the cannabis industry.”
He said it is inappropriate for the county to cast a blanket rule over all cannabis growers when some are working well.
Second District Supervisor Laura Capps said mandating carbon scrubbers will help everyone move forward after years of conflict.
“The whole intention of this is to have people have a better quality of life who live next to operations and decrease the acrimony, decrease the litigation, decrease the complaints, decrease the divisiveness within a community,” she said.
Capps said she can envision a time when the board is not spending hours and hours on cannabis.
“The time is right,” Capps said. “We know what works. The complaint system hasn’t worked. Folks are fed up and we do have an answer out there.”
