By Giana Magnoli
Noozhawk Managing Editor
The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors has approved a 25-acre cannabis cultivation project on West Highway 246 after denying an appeal filed by neighbors concerned about odor.
Planning and Development Director Lisa Plowman said the board already had approved two nearby cannabis projects after hearing appeals — the 50-acre West Coast Farms LLC project and the 22-acre Busy Bee Organics project.
The supervisors on Tuesday added a revised condition for the Castlerock Family Farms II LLC approval: The three harvests a year cannot last longer than one month each. The board voted 4-1 to deny the appeal and approve the project, with Supervisor Peter Adam dissenting.
Supervisor Joan Hartmann, whose district includes the Santa Ynez Valley and Santa Rita Hills, said the county seems to have no way to address the concentration of cannabis farms in the current ordinance.
“I cannot sit here in good conscience and not continue to raise that issue,” she said. “We keep saying we will deal with it, but we do not have the tools to deal with it.”
A map of approved and pending cannabis cultivation applications shows that many projects are concentrated in the Carpinteria Valley, along West Highway 246 between Lompoc and Buellton, and in Tepusquet Canyon east of Santa Maria.
While the board did change policy to require extra permit conditions for farms that exceed 51 percent of the parcel size, that does not address cumulative impacts, Hartmann said.
When the supervisors asked about nuisance enforcement for odor issues, Plowman said it hasn’t happened to date since authorities cannot figure out the source of the odor.
Residents frequently file odor complaints in the Carpinteria Valley, and the county learned “there is no way to know where the odor is coming from,” she said.
“We cannot track which grow is the offender,” Plowman said, so it would be difficult to enforce odor-related conditions on an individual farm within an area with multiple cultivators.
“Odor strikes me as a hard thing to measure,” county counsel Michael Ghizzoni said.
All three farms are west of the city of Buellton and within the county’s land use jurisdiction.
“The odor impacts of the existing cannabis facilities are undeniable (although identification of the ‘offending operation’ is difficult at best),” Buellton City Manager Scott Wolfe wrote in a comment letter to the Board of Supervisors. “Strong cannabis odors are frequently experienced in various parts of Buellton, with only a couple cultivation operations to the west of the city.
“With the impacts already being experienced, it is apparent that the only way to prevent additional impacts is to stop approving additional acreage of cannabis cultivation west of the city,” Wolfe wrote, before asking the Board of Supervisors to consider the cumulative odor impacts to city residents, and the impact on their quality of life, when they consider additional cannabis projects for the area.
Representatives for the Williams Ranch property owner and Castlerock Family Farms told the county that medical marijuana was grown on the land before 2016, and that no marijuana has been grown on the site since 2018.
The county staff report on the project stated that personnel from the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department went to the property in October 2018 to assess whether cultivation had expanded beyond the legal nonconforming area — basically checking whether there was more marijuana growing versus pre-2016, when it was reportedly being grown for the medical market.
“As a result, all cannabis was eradicated on the subject parcel,” according to county staff.
Castlerock Family Farms has 30 active provisional state licenses, including 27 for small outdoor cultivation, one for medium outdoor cultivation, one for nursery and one for processing operations, according to the state licensing database.
The Santa Barbara County Coalition for Responsible Cannabis appealed the Castlerock Family Farms project at 2200 Highway 246 shortly after it was approved by planning staff.
The Planning Commission heard the appeal and approved the project, so the group appealed it again to the Board of Supervisors.
The appeal alleged that the county’s programmatic environmental impact report (PEIR) doesn’t account for effects from an area with a cluster of farms, or the potential impact to nearby wine tasting rooms.
In response, county staff wrote, “The PEIR found that the potential concentration of cannabis activities near the proposed project site would not create new significant environmental effects or a substantial increase in the severity of significant effects.”
The PEIR said the county’s cannabis program would create unavoidable and significant effects to visual resources, agricultural resources, air quality including odor, noise, transportation and traffic.
However, “The Board of Supervisors adopted a Statement of Overriding Considerations concluding that the benefits of the program outweigh the unavoidable adverse environmental effects identified above,” planners wrote in the staff report for this project appeal.
The Santa Barbara County Civil Grand Jury released a report in July criticizing the Board of Supervisors for its cannabis program, especially for cultivation rules allowing alleged legal nonconforming growers to continue their operations, without complying with odor control and other county regulations, while their permit applications are processed.
Board members responded to the report during a Sept. 22 meeting, and rejected all but one of the grand jury’s recommendations.
Noozhawk managing editor Giana Magnoli can be reached at gmagnoli@noozhawk.com.
