The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors this week expanded the burgeoning cannabis industry in the North County and Carpinteria Valley, removing processing buildings from the acreage caps on cultivation — a change that some residents viewed as a broken promise.
The change was included in a final 4-1 vote on Tuesday, with board chair Joan Hartmann opposed, on several amendments to the county’s cannabis business license.
Presently, cannabis cultivation is capped at 1,575 acres outdoors in the North County and 186 acres in greenhouses in the Carpinteria Valley.
Removing processing from the caps — in all, about 3 acres in the North County and 9 acres in the valley — would encourage the construction of cannabis processing buildings, including “stand-alone” buildings on properties with no cultivation, bringing in more tax revenue to the county, according to board members. It would also free up about 12 more acres for cultivation under the caps.
The change in the caps was requested by cannabis growers, many of whom said they had dropped their plans for processing in the race to obtain zoning permits before the acreage limits were reached. Growers who missed qualifying for the 1,575-acre cultivation cap also said they would welcome the chance to develop stand-alone processing buildings.
But the City of Carpinteria and several citizens groups opposed the amendment.
On Tuesday, Nancy Emerson, a member of WE Watch, a Santa Ynez Valley conservationist group, said the push for more processing buildings should have been accompanied by a thorough review of the potential impacts. Residents had been assured that the board would not change the caps, she said, yet “most of you intend to break that promise.”
“There is no regulation of the total number allowed of these processing facilities, their size, location or odor control,” Emerson said. “ … What worries us is that you are leaping into these changes with no careful considerations of the consequences for residents and existing agriculture.”
To allay residents’ concerns, the board promised next summer to consider requiring conditional use permits, more restrictive zoning permits, primarily for North County cannabis operations.
“If we don’t start to open the door to processing, we won’t get there,” said Supervisor Gregg Hart, who represents the Goleta Valley. “I don’t think we’re going to find ourselves with a rush of applications. Things will line up.”
But Hartmann was not convinced, having repeatedly failed in the past to persuade her colleagues to require conditional use permits for commercial cannabis. On Tuesday, she said she feared the measure still might not win majority board support. During the last fall harvest, the city of Buellton, which is downwind from several farms, was plagued for months by the stench of pot.
“We already know from bitter experience that it’s very difficult to know where the odor is coming from,” Hartmann said.
Supervisors Approve Processing Project in Carpinteria Valley
Also on Tuesday, the board unanimously approved a 25,000-square-foot processing building at Glass House Farms, a greenhouse cannabis operation owned by Graham Farrar at 3561 Foothill Road in the Carpinteria Valley. The board said it would be a model for future buildings for drying, trimming and curing marijuana, the smelliest stage of cannabis production.
Farrar’s processing building would be equipped with 19 carbon filters to “scrub” out the “skunky” smell of cannabis. The building would maintain negative pressure; that is, whenever a door is opened, the air will flow in so that odors can’t flow out.
“This is a historic day,” said Hart, who represents the Goleta Valley. He praised Farrar’s plan as “a significant achievement, something to celebrate.”
“The bar is moving and is getting higher,” Hart said. “ … This project will improve the environment in the neighborhood and make things better.”
Farrar told the board that the project would allow him to move his processing out of an old flower pack house at 5601 Casitas Pass Road, a second property where he is growing cannabis in greenhouses. He said he would no longer have to truck a third of his plants to Lompoc — an hour away — for processing.
“It is unlike anything else we’ve seen in Carpinteria,” Farrar said of his project. “Most of the existing processing facilities are old legacy packing houses that have been retrofitted. This is an air-tight, sealed building-within-a-building. The entire design is for odor abatement. The odors can never build up. This is really what processing should look like.”
But 100 members of Concerned Carpinterians, a citizen group that has long sought stiffer regulations for the cannabis industry, signed a petition against the project last year. Since 2019, Farrar’s open-vented greenhouses on Foothill — 8 acres of cannabis cultivation — have generated more than 250 complaints to the county regarding the “skunky” smell of pot.
Farrar’s project was before the board on appeal from the county Planning Commission’s approval last year. Sarah Trigueiro, the La Mirada Drive resident who filed the appeal, urged the board not to approve an expansion of what she said was “an existing nuisance with a poor operator track record.”
Trigueiro said that residents of La Mirada Drive, where she lives, and residents at the Polo condos and along Padaro Lane and Foothill “are regularly subjected to noxious cannabis fumes that put our health at risk. … The county has not protected us.”
In response, Supervisor Das Williams, who represents the Carpinteria Valley and was a chief architect of the county’s permissive cannabis ordinance, sought to correct what he called “a false narrative about what is happening in our town.” Concerned Carpinterians has long advocated for cannabis operations to be conducted in sealed buildings with strict odor controls, and Farrar’s proposed building-within-a-building — an airtight structure equipped with filters designed to “scrub” out the smell of marijuana during drying, trimming and curing operations — would do just that, Williams said.
“What’s very strange is that there’s no joy even in victory, right?” he said.
The county, Williams said, “has acted time and time again to incrementally improve the situation,” banning outdoor cultivation in the valley, shutting down “bad actors” and suing a grower near Farrar’s Foothill operation. Williams noted, too, that CARP Growers, an industry group that Farrar belongs to, has pledged to install “best available control technologies” to reduce the smell of pot in their open-vented greenhouses.
“For most Carpinterians, this problem has gotten vastly better, largely due to the efforts both of growers, and of staff, and folks who are concerned about marijuana and are willing to make odor complaints,” Williams said.
Jeff Wilson, assistant director of county Planning & Development, told the board that the county has not been able to pinpoint Farrar’s operations as the source of residents’ odor complaints because, with other cannabis greenhouses operating close by, there’s no way to determine who’s responsible. As a result, Wilson said, there are no odor violations at Farrar’s operations on Foothill.
Hartmann, who represents much of the wine country west of Buellton, called this dilemma a “Catch-22.” The county, she said, “instituted regulations on odor beyond our ability to enforce.” Normally, Hartmann said, applicants with zoning violations cannot be approved for another permit until they address those violations. In Farrar’s case, she said, “because we can’t show where the odor is coming from, we find ourselves in this difficult position.”
While she would support Farrar’s high-tech processing building, Hartmann said, the smell of cannabis that is causing people to suffer headaches and other health problems in both the North County and Carpinteria Valley cannot be ignored.
“There are people who are very sensitive to the odor of cannabis,” she said. “We’re up here dismissing them, and that is something I can’t let go unremarked.”
In an interview, Trigueiro said she plans to appeal the board’s decision on Glass Farms to the California Coastal Commission this month.
“Das Williams,” she said, “seems to have made a strategic choice not to believe his constituents, while voting for more cannabis processing and density that will worsen our quality of life.”
— Melinda Burns is an investigative journalist with 40 years of experience covering immigration, water, science and the environment. As a community service, she offers her reports to multiple local publications, at the same time, for free.