The Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis has taken a legal step challenging whether proper environmental analysis occurred for Santa Barbara County’s recently adopted regulations regarding agricultural hoop houses.
The group, represented by attorney Marc Chytilo, filed a petition for writ of mandate May 9 in Santa Barbara County Superior Court, and names Santa Barbara County and the Board of Supervisors as defendants.
In April, after years of discussions, the Board of Supervisors approved the Hoop Structure Ordinance Amendment to the county Land Use and Development Code to exempt most agricultural hoop structures from permit requirements.
Chytilo called the large unregulated hoop structures “a blight on Santa Barbara County’s pastoral open agricultural lands,” creating land-use incompatibilities and generating hundreds of tons of plastic waste annually.
“The ordinance opened a loophole for potentially significant expansions of cannabis grows in inappropriate areas under exempted hoops,” Chytilo said. “Rather than strengthen the ordinance to avoid these impacts throughout the community, the county swept the impacts under the rug, hoping no one would notice. The action was brought to address both the impacts of unregulated hoops and runaway cannabis cultivation in hoops.”
The lawsuit contends the county certified the EIR without recirculating the document despite “significant new information” that arose at the last minute.
That decision to not recirculate the draft environmental impact report, the legal petition says, violated the California Environmental Quality Act, which requires agencies to identify the significant environmental impacts for projects and avoid or mitigate those, if possible.
“As a direct consequence of these serial defects and improper actions, the public was materially prejudiced by their inability to review, comment, and participate in a matter of countywide significance,” the lawsuit claims.
Hoop houses, or plastic-covered crop protection structures, have popped up more frequently on the local landscape in recent years as temporary tools for growers.
When Fourth District Supervisor Peter Adam and his chief of staff, Bob Nelson, first brought the issue to the Board of Supervisors in October 2015, the focus centered on hoop houses used for growing berries. Since then, hoop houses have expanded to the cannabis industry, prompting increasing concerns.
Initially, the environmental documents claimed cannabis growing involving hoops would be regulated separately, the lawsuit contends. However, information presented during the Board of Supervisors meeting revealed that hoops could be added to already permitted cannabis operations without any additional permits.
The switch represented significant new information requiring additional environmental analysis, the lawsuit contends.
The lawsuit also notes changes allowing permit exemptions for average slopes of 25 percent instead of 30 percent, and questioned the recycling options for the large volume of plastic covering used to create the hoop structures.
Other significant impacts mentioned in the lawsuit include odor, glare, public safety and neighborhood incompatibility.
Some impacts would be unique or especially pronounced with the use of hoop structures for cannabis, instead of traditional crops such as berries, the lawsuit contends.
The draft environmental analysis is “fundamentally and basically inadequate,” the lawsuit contends, making it “essentially meaningless with significant changes being adopted in the Final EIR.”
“These changes and new information were major, not minor, resulted in failure to evaluate critical issues, and did not constitute a simple clarification but wholesale and substantial changes,” the lawsuit says. “The failure to circulate an adequate EIR with a stable project description and robust impact analysis also precluded an adequate alternatives analysis and the ability of the public to comment upon this analysis and offer additional alternatives.”
County Counsel Michael Ghizzoni said Monday afternoon that the county had not been served with a copy of the litigation.
The civil action represents one side of the issue, and Santa Barbara County is expected to file a response to the petition for writ of mandate in the coming weeks after being served with the lawsuit.
The coalition has asked the judge to order Santa Barbara County to set aside the approval of the hoop structure ordinance and decertify the EIR, along with an order prohibiting any actions related to the hoop regulations until the county complies with CEQA, attorney’s fees and lawsuit costs.
The case has been assigned to Santa Barbara Judge Thomas Anderle, but a court date is pending.
The Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis is made up of residents, vintners, avocado growers, small business owners, non-governmental organizations, and schools in all five supervisorial districts in the county, Chytilo said.
— Noozhawk North County editor Janene Scully can be reached at jscully@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.