Under pressure from growers, the county Board of Supervisors is tinkering with the acreage caps in its cannabis licensing ordinance, a move it says will encourage the construction of marijuana processing buildings in unincorporated areas and staunch the loss of tax revenue to other California counties.

On Feb. 15, the board voted 4-1 in concept, with Chair Joan Hartmann opposed, to remove buildings for the “drying, curing and trimming” of cannabis from the acreage caps for cultivation. These caps have been set at 186 acres and 1,575 acres for the Carpinteria Valley and rest of the county, respectively, since 2019.

Citing “very few existing or proposed processing facilities in the county,” the County Executive Officer told the board this month that the county faces “a substantial loss of tax revenue” because locally-grown marijuana is being trucked elsewhere for processing.

At today’s prices, growers say, unprocessed marijuana is fetching roughly $200 per pound, compared to $1,800 per pound of dry, trimmed and packaged marijuana.

The amendments now on the table, county officials said, would result in more processing buildings here, including stand-alone buildings on properties where no cannabis is under cultivation. Typically, they are about 25,000 square feet in size.

Additionally, county records show, removing acreage for processing from the caps would free up about 12 more acres for cultivation — 3 acres of outdoor “grows” in the North County and 9 acres in Carpinteria Valley greenhouses.

“The sooner we do this, the better,” Supervisor Steve Lavagnino, who represents the Santa Maria Valley, said at a Nov. 2 board hearing on the proposed amendments. “If we don’t fix processing, the rest of our cannabis program might as well be abandoned. We are losing an incredible amount of money. Growers are taking product to Salinas, Lancaster, Lake County, all over the state … We can’t continue this program forward, receiving pennies on the dollar.”

Supervisor Das Williams, who represents the Carpinteria Valley, said it was “dysfunctional” to be transporting cannabis out of the county for processing “when half the time it’s going to come back here. It seems hypocritical of us to add traffic trips on the road for no discernible reason … We should make this change with alacrity.”

A second reading and final board vote on the ordinance amendments has been set for Tuesday. Coincidentally, on the same date, the board will consider an appeal of cannabis processing building proposed by Graham Farrar, the owner of Glass House Farms, a hot spot for the “skunky” smell of pot.

Critics of the cannabis industry regard the acreage caps as the “third rail” of county cannabis policy, not to be tampered with.

The City of Carpinteria and members of grassroots advocacy groups — WE Watch in the Santa Ynez Valley; Citizens Planning Association in Santa Barbara, Concerned Carpinterians and the Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis — have implored the board not to adopt the amendments, which many residents view as a “backdoor” expansion of the acreage caps and a breach of the public trust.

The caps are already too high, these critics say; just get a whiff of the “skunky” smell of pot that still clings to city neighborhoods near the “grows.”

“The City of Carpinteria wishes to go on record as being strongly opposed to the contemplated change,” Nick Bobroff, principal planner, wrote to the board in February. There is no shortage of processing in the valley, he said. State and county records show that more than 20 processing buildings have recently been obtained zoning permits in the Carpinteria Valley or are operating with provisional state licenses.

Bobroff suggested that the board change the cannabis acreage caps for the North County, where only three out of 1,575 acres in the cap have been reserved for processing — and leave the 186-acre cap for the Carpinteria Valley alone.

But in the North County, residents wonder how many new processing buildings would be constructed under the proposed change.

“Is there going to be any limit on them?” asked Dave Clary, a resident of Tepusquet Canyon, a rural neighborhood southeast of Santa Maria. “It just kind of opens Pandora’s Box.”

State records show that growers in Santa Barbara County hold 29 active processing licenses, the third highest number after growers in Monterey and Humboldt counties, with 48 and 43 processing licenses, respectively.

Hartmann, who represents much of the wine country west of Buellton, voted against the proposed amendments this month.

“We could see cannabis coming up into new areas of the county where we haven’t already approved cultivation.” she said. “What can we prevent in terms of odor? For me, this is a no-go.”

Glass House Project Appeal Hearing 

During the past year, many growers dropped their plans for new processing buildings in the race to get their cultivation permits approved before the acreage caps were reached. The county requires the use of sealed buildings for cannabis processing, and the review of these projects is costly and time-consuming.

“We know from experience that permitting and licensing ‘processing’ in Santa Barbara County is extraordinarily difficult and expensive,” Farrar, a past president of CARP Growers, wrote to the board in support of the ordinance amendments. “Keeping processing in the county is imperative for the health of the local cannabis ecosystem …”

Farrar owns 11 acres of cannabis under cultivation at Glass House Farms in the Carpinteria Valley; he operates as G & K Farms, with eight greenhouses at 3561 Foothill Road, and as Mission Health Associates, with three greenhouses at 5601 Casitas Pass Road.

Farrar is currently processing cannabis in an old packing house on Casitas Pass, virtually a shed that was built decades ago for the cut flower industry. But it’s not big enough, Farrar said; he has to truck up to 30% of his crop to a cannabis manufacturing facility that he owns in the City of Lompoc, an hour’s drive away.

Now, Farrar is proposing to build a state-of-the-art 25,000-square-foot processing building at 3561 Foothill Road that can handle all of his cannabis. The project will be at the board on March 1 on appeal from the county Planning Commission’s approval last year.

County records show that Farrar’s properties at 5601 Casitas Pass Road and 3561 Foothill Road are first and second for the most cannabis odor complaints filed by residents of the valley since 2015, with 285 and 252 complaints, respectively. Last year, 100 members of Concerned Carpinterians signed a petition against Farrar’s processing project.

Farrar is proposing an airtight “building-within-a-building” for processing, equipped with an outdoor vapor-neutralizing system and 19 indoor carbon filters to “scrub” out the smell of cannabis.

“It’s better for us, better for odor and better for the county,” he said.

But Sarah Trigueiro, a resident of La Mirada Drive above Foothill, is not convinced.

She filed the appeal to the board, asking the county to address the foul smell of cannabis at Farrar’s greenhouses before allowing any expansion of his operations. The smell of pot, borne uphill into her neighborhood on the prevailing winds, has caused her to suffer “regular nausea and headaches,” Trigueiro said.

Valley residents, she said, have been “guinea pigs in a shameful experiment for far too long.”

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.