The cannabis industry wants to copy the wine industry’s model of on-site consumption and events. Currently, the Board of Supervisors are considering removing the current cannabis tourism prohibition. Yet, the cumulative impacts of this type of hospitality and events have not been studied. Hospitality activities at hundreds event centers rob neighbors of the peaceful enjoyment…
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Rarely has the Santa Barbara Grand Jury issued so scathing a report as the one released this summer about the open embrace given to the cannabis industry by elected officials throughout Santa Barbara county government. In biting detail, the report castigated the board of supervisors — two in particular — for allowing cannabis industry lobbyists…
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What happened at Supervisor Rabbitt’s town hall on 1/11/21 is rare. It happened because the Bloomfield neighborhood went to great lengths to create a petition with hundreds of signatures, analyzed the issues in the ministerial application and had a supervisor interested enough to hear what the neighborhood had to say. A ministerial cannabis application doesn’t…
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See related story here: Supervisor Gore – Recuse Yourself – SOS Neighborhoods SOSN: As if we didn’t have enough problems, they want to bring in cannabis tourists to their grows in our neighborhoods. Busses in your neighborhoods anyone?A once-controversial 37-acre ranch on the outskirts of Petaluma has kicked off 2021 on a high note. The…
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Despite the pandemic, citizens deserve open, transparent government. The Santa Rosa City Council in December voted to approve a transparent – government proposal that has labored through subcommittee and council consideration for six years (Press Democrat, December 12, 2020). The impetus was mass public demonstrations against the shooting of teenager Andy Lopez by a Sonoma…
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April 2018 Cannabis Study Session – Board of Supervisors expressed lots of concern about protecting our rural neighborhoods from pot grows. They sound like a group of neighborhood advocates. Whatever happened after that was a shocking transformation. Below clip summarizes their comments from that hearing most interesting to us: The 2 min version: Full meeting:…
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Just to be clear, the marijuana advocacy site, The Emerald Report, https://www.emeraldreport.com/ was started by the Press Democrat newspaper. Darius Anderson, an owner of the Press Democrat and the Sonoma paper, represents the pot industry (registered lobbyist for CannaCraft) and may very well be personally invested in some of the very grows ruining your neighborhood. His brother…
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“In June of 2015, BioScience published a research paper on the sustainability of cannabis. Naturally, one of the areas of analysis was water consumption. They found that an estimated 22 liters of water or more are consumed per plant per day during the June-to-October growing season. Applying this number to documented planting densities for greenhouses…
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Grape growers worry that pot won’t pair well with the terroir they have spent a century and a half cultivating. “The report cites marijuana’s water demand — it estimates an acre of cannabis uses 1.1 million gallons per year, compared to 65,000-162,000 gallons per acre of wine grapes — and warns that a proposed 500-foot…
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In 2016, we stood here in these chambers and gave our testimony about one of the most unexpected and difficult times we have endured in our life – living next to a commercial cannabis cultivation operation. During that time, we shared our concerns about ground and well water contamination; the depreciation and undesirability of our…
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