Melinda Burns
By Melinda Burns
Island Breeze Farms, a cannabis greenhouse operation that was sued by the county in 2021 for allegedly creating “a continuing public nuisance,” failing to make progress on a zoning permit application and engaging in “unfair competition,” was granted a permit this spring by the county planning department, confounding Carpinteria Valley residents who thought the project would be shut down.
“It’s a perfect example of a broken system,” said Jeremy Norris, who lives next door to Island Breeze, a “grow” on two acres at 3376 Foothill Rd. at the western end of the valley. The “skunky” stench of pot from the grow has caused him and his family to suffer headaches, not to mention rental income, Norris said, adding, “If they’re approved, they will devalue my property and make my financial life more difficult. There have been warm days when you feel sick breathing the air around you.”
Across the street, residents at the exclusive Polo Condos say they have protested for years — in emails, phone calls, odor complaints, letters and a meeting at the club with county officials, including Das Williams, their county supervisor — that the smell of pot wafts into their homes, particularly during summer and especially at morning and night, when the greenhouse roof vents are opened wider to allow heat to escape. The entrance gate to the condos is 50 feet from Island Breeze.
As recently as March 3, the following anonymous odor complaint was filed with the county with reference to 3376 Foothill: “Woke up in my bedroom this morning to the stench of pot, and my right nostril clogged. Every door & window closed in the house. It comes down our shower vents and chimney! After several minutes, I had a headache. This has got to stop.”
Now Norris and the Polo Condos board, representing more than 300 residents in 140 units at 3375 Foothill, next to the polo fields at the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club, have appealed to the county Planning Commission to deny the permit for Island Breeze that was approved by county Planning and Development staff on March 31. A hearing date is pending; it is likely to be this summer. The commission’s vote can be appealed to the county Board of Supervisors by either party.
The Polo Condos, located between the polo fields and tennis courts of the Santa Barbara Polo and Racquet Club, are diagonally across Foothill Road from the Island Breeze cannabis operation, shown at lower left. (Google Earth photo)
“Tired of appeals”
Island Breeze is just the latest of dozens of cannabis projects to confront an appeal — either by residents of the Carpinteria Valley, where the county has allowed flower greenhouses to convert massively to industrial-scale marijuana on the doorstep of densely populated neighborhoods; or by residents of the North County, where outdoor grows have proliferated. Although the stink in the valley is not as bad as it was several years ago, it still lingers in a number of hot spots, and Foothill Road is one of them.
The county usually approves cannabis permits on appeal. In drafting their cannabis ordinance of 2018, the supervisors sought to “develop a robust and economically viable legal cannabis industry,” overriding “significant and unavoidable” impacts from “objectionable odors.”
“We get so tired of appeals; they’re never successful,” said Jim Mannoia, president of the Polo Condos board. “But we think that this particular grower is not a good citizen. They’re a bad actor.”
Mark Brickley, the condo board secretary, added: “We’re hopeful that at some point, the county will say no.”
The Polo Condo residents, who include retirees and families with children, love their views of the ocean and the mountains, their front-seat views of polo matches and the feel of being out in the country and not hemmed in by urbanization, the board members said. But the smell of cannabis can be awful, they said; and, besides the residents, it affects hundreds of children who attend summer camps at the club.
Williams, who is chair of the Board of Supervisors and was a chief architect of the cannabis ordinance, said this week that the lawsuit against Island Breeze and Island View Ranch, the property owner, has not been withdrawn. A trial date that had been set for this month has been continued to October to allow more time for permit review and settlement negotiations.
“Lawsuits take time,” Williams said. “We remain in litigation against Island Breeze across from the polo fields because we believe they no longer qualify to grow under our rules. They retain the right to apply for a permit, but that doesn’t mean that the Board of Supervisors will grant it, and indeed I believe we should not generally hand a permit to someone who won’t comply with our orders.
“If they don’t get a permit, they will lose their state licenses and be shut down.”
At left, Jim Mannoia, the Polo Condo board president; center, Mark Brickley, secretary; and Robyn Geddes, vice president, have appealed to the county Planning Commission to deny a zoning permit for Island Breeze (Courtesy photo)
Mixed messages
The 10-acre property at 3376 Foothill includes Island Breeze, the cannabis operation; Island View Nursery, a business that sells landscaping plants and garden accessories, and a separate nursery business that sells plants wholesale.
The zoning permit for Island Breeze would allow cannabis cultivation in 13 greenhouses, each with five harvests per year; and two rooms for drying, trimming and packaging the harvested product. The permit would require the use of a “vapor phase” system of perforated pipes along the roof ridge lines of some greenhouses and around the perimeter of the others to set up a curtain of mist — a plant-based chemical vapor that is meant to “mask” the smell of cannabis.
State and county records show that Island View Ranch LLC is registered to Robyn Whatley Miller of Thousand Oaks and Lois Von Morganroth of Ventura. Whatley Miller, who signed the permit, did not respond this week to a request for comment on the lawsuit or the appeal by the Polo Condos, and Von Morganroth said through a representative that she had no comment.
Back in 2021, the county sued Island View Ranch and Island Breeze, alleging that the cannabis operation “has not diligently pursued the required permits as its application has been pending with the County for over two years” and “has operated a commercial cannabis business at the Property without the required land use entitlement or business license.”
The operation “constitutes a continuing public nuisance” and has committed “acts of unfair competition,” the county alleged. By failing to comply with “regulatory safety measures,” it said, Island Breeze and Island View Ranch were profiting “to the detriment of lawful cannabis businesses operating in the county.”
Gary Bright, a Carpinteria attorney for Island View Ranch and Island Breeze, filed a response to the lawsuit in 2021, stating that the defendants “neither directly or indirectly performed any acts which would constitute a violation of any laws or regulations” and had not engaged in practices “likely to mislead an ordinary consumer or constitute unfair competition.” No “applicable laws or regulations define the alleged conduct of the Defendants as constituting a nuisance …” Bright stated, adding that the county’s arguments were “uncertain, ambiguous and unintelligible.”
Bright did not respond to calls for comment this week.
The entrance to the Polo Condos is 50 feet from Island Breeze, a “grow” with 13 greenhouses, the white structures across the road. In 2021, the county sued Island Breeze, alleging that it was creating “a continuous public nuisance.” A trial in the case has been postponed until October. (Courtesy photo)
The affidavit
Recreational marijuana was approved by California voters in 2016. Today, Santa Barbara and Humboldt counties routinely exchange the No. 1 ranking for the largest number of active cultivation licenses in the state; each has roughly 20 percent of the total.
In this county, as long as the growers signed an affidavit declaring that they had been cultivating medicinal marijuana before Jan. 19, 2016, the Board of Supervisors allowed them to continue operations and even expand them exponentially under “legal, non-conforming” status — so long as they applied for permits. The county largely took these affidavits at face value.
The board of the Polo Club Condos has pushed hard for such an investigation with no success. Two years ago, the board obtained a copy of the cannabis lease for Island Breeze. It was for one greenhouse, and it went into effect on Jan. 1, 2016, meaning the grower would have had just 18 days to get a medical marijuana operation up and running before the cutoff date for legal, non-conforming status. County records show that the grower signed an affidavit in February 2018 stating that he had been growing medical marijuana before Jan. 19, 2016.
The condo board hired a lawyer to take statements from several residents in the neighborhood who said they had not observed or smelled cannabis on the property before the cutoff date. One of them was Norris, who said he walked the property as a prospective buyer in January 2016 and saw no marijuana there. It wasn’t until October 2017 that he smelled the stench of pot from Island Breeze next door, Norris said.
In 2021 and again this January, the condo board sent the information it had gathered to the county Sheriff’s Department, District Attorney, Planning and Development and Board of Supervisors, requesting an investigation of Island Breeze’s affidavit. Both times, the condo board said, there was no response.
“We feel that there’s pretty solid evidence that no marijuana was being grown before the cutoff deadline, and that the affidavit was false,” Mark Brickley, the board secretary, said. “What this leads us to is a narrative that the operators of this site have not been forthright.”
In an interview, Williams objected to the condo board’s assertions that the county had been unresponsive.
“The whole reason we did a case is because the neighbors raised the issue of the affidavits,” he said, referring to Island Breeze. “We think it’s really important for the rules to be enforced. We gathered affidavits from the neighbors about what they saw in activity there.”
(Mannoia said he didn’t know of anyone at the condos who had given a declaration for the lawsuit. The suit does reference “several complaints in the past two years concerning cannabis odor from the property and about the extent of a cannabis grow.”)
Before 2021, Williams said, there was a point when Island Breeze appeared to have suspended operations and “I hoped it was the last we’d see of them.” When operations started up again, he said, the county filed suit.
Residents at the exclusive Polo Condos have protested for years that the “skunky” smell of pot from Island Breeze wafts into their homes morning and night, especially in summer. (Courtesy photo)
Subduing the smell
This May 2, county officials conducted their first odor inspection at Island Breeze; a report will be available in the coming weeks. Only five of the greenhouses were in active cultivation during the inspection, officials said. According to the condo board, that could explain why the smell has been much less noticeable during the past two months, although in cold weather, residents tend to keep their windows closed.
The permit for Island Breeze would require the installation of a Byers Scientific vapor-phase, or misting system, to mask or neutralize the smell of cannabis. That’s the most widely-used odor control system across 35 operations and 155 acres of cannabis in the valley. But over the years, many residents have complained that the perfume-y smell of the chemical mist bothers them just as much as the smell of cannabis.
Responding to the complaints, a few growers are now using or have pledged to transition in coming years to carbon filters, or “scrubbers,” to replace their misting systems. The scrubbers are installed inside the greenhouses to eliminate the smell of cannabis before it can escape through the roof vents.
Last year, Coastal Blooms Inc., a group of cannabis operators in the valley, conducted an odor study at a greenhouse that they equipped with state-of-the-art Envinity scrubbers from the Netherlands. It showed that, on average, the scrubbers could eliminate 84 percent of the cannabis smell inside a greenhouse. Yet the county has not required the use of these or any other scrubbers, industry-wide.
County records show that Island Breeze has been using a Byers vapor phase system since at least 2021. Before the county filed its lawsuit that year, an attorney for Byers informed the officials that Island Breeze was using the system only a few hours every day, or not at all, and was diluting the neutralizing chemicals with water.
“We want to make it clear that Byers Scientific will accept no responsibility for any odor-related issues with this facility,” said Michael D. Head in a June 16, 2021 email to Planning and Development.
After the lawsuit was filed, Head noted, Island Breeze began running its vapor system full-time.
Condo board members say that as part of their permit appeal, they will bring up the cluster of cannabis operations at the western end of the valley and the expansion of Island Breeze from one greenhouse in 2017 to 13 greenhouses today.
Just 700 feet to the southeast of the Polo Condos is Vista Verde Farms, a 13-acre grow that was approved for a permit at 3450 Via Real but is not yet up and running. Vista Verde has been required to install scrubbers but is allowed to fall back on a misting system, if necessary.
“It’s going to be hard for any odor technology to defeat the amount of cannabis being grown in the western end of the valley,” Brickley said.
Two years ago, a Santa Barbara County Superior Court judge ruled that the county’s policies, ordinances and environmental review allowed for clusters of cannabis grows and the expansion of medicinal grows.
“It’s very frustrating,” Mannoia said. “The legalization of marijuana is the law; we understand that. But when it begins to cause problems, it’s very difficult to retain a sense of the good faith of those who represent us. Every time we do what we’re told to do, it seems to come to naught.”
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 report to multiple publications in Santa Barbara County, at the same time, for free.
Constantly shocked by how much Das and Lavagnino bungled this whole cannabis deal for our county. Total idiots.
The bungling occurred on January 19, 2016, when the Board overruled the recommendation by the Planning Commission to ban all cannabis operations countywide. Instead, the Board voted 4-1 that day to allow existing operators to be “legal, nonconforming uses” without any requirements or restrictions. That vote, establishing the most permissive cannabis ordinance in the State, happened nearly a full year before Das was sworn in as a Board Member. BTW, no other county or city, to my knowledge, acted to make those grows legal like the Board did in January 2016.
Mr “Bozan” must forget those meetings in 2017 wherein he eschewed the Planning Commissio recommendations for a process for the Board to determine legal noncompliance of old medicinal growers, opting instead for a self-determined affidavit process so his pals in the “industry” who decidedly were not actual cooperatives in 2016 could stack state licenses once they became available in 2018. Thus putting the genuine medicinal growers out of business
Dennis “Bozan” continues to shift the blame while getting his pockets lined by the cannabis industry.
You should recall that I recommended to the Board on October 17, 2017 that determinations of legal, non-conforming claims by cultivators be added to the County’s land use codes. That recommendation was not approved. On November 14, 2017, I provided the Board and public two options for how to transition existing legal non-conforming operators to State temporary licenses. One option included an affidavit and the other option was to wait until the County adopted its own regulations. In my verbal testimony that day, i was very clear that the affidavits and county letters based on those affidavits may have been insufficient to satisfy the State agency for issuance of a temporary cannabis license.
Someone please think of those poor polo players. Buy a house next to agriculture zone then act surprised
I’m constantly shocked by the author’s inability to get basic facts correct in her stories about cannabis.
In today’s author error file:
– Nothing in the cannabis land use or business license or cannabis tax ordinances say anything about the purpose being to, “develop a robust and economically viable legal cannabis industry” as erroneously quoted in Paragraph 7.
– Affidavits were not available until December 2017 and so the author errs when she states, “County records show that the grower signed an affidavit in February 2016.” In fact, this operation signed its affidavit in September 2018. This is knowable with a simple PRA.
– The Board, on a motion by Supervisor Wolf and second by Supervisor Farr on January 19, 2016, established the most permissive legal allowance for cannabis operations in the State of California by allowing existing cannabis operations to be legal non-conforming without any accountability, registration or inspection.
I have been more than willing to sit for a full length interview with Ms. Burns or others that continue to mis-state recent history on cannabis in the county. It is becoming clear that their ongoing false assertions are designed to be purely political.
[Editor’s Note: This comment has been edited where defamatory statements have been removed].
Mr. Bozan,
You can nitpick on relatively meaningless and isolated errors, doing so definitely helps to distract from the fact that you’re getting fat and happy on the back of a corrupt policy which has completely failed at the expense of the general public.
DBozan, your slim is disgusting. What would it matter if the reporter was “paid by a very rich promoter”? Her history of reporting is one of detailed and careful analysis of the issues she has focused on, water use being a high priority. Stop the personal attacks and speak to the issues.
Dennis Bozanich hopping on this thread to trash a respected local journalist who has consistently put out factual articles informing the public on cannabis legislation is all you need to know about this guy and the greedy pot plans he helped form for our once illustrious ag county.
Just for the record, since this keeps coming up: I am not getting paid for my work. To strengthen local news and help my colleagues in the media who are stretched very thin, I distribute my stories to multiple publications for free. I reach more readers that way, too.
Alex, we all know that the people who have problems with those who get “fat and happy” don’t have much and this direct their jealousy towards those who do.
SBSTONER–nah, I love when people get fat and happy through honest hard work. Not such a fan of people who dick ride corruption all the way to the bank.
Sounds to me like you’re a two bit small change weed player who hasn’t made as much money slinging green as you thought you would.
Too bad for you, and your industry is only going to decline.
“meeting with their supervisor Das Williams”….there’s your problem…totally corrupt in every way.
HOW? How is Das corrupt? Gimme a break.
This is EdHat, wild and unsubstantiated accusations against elected officials is the norm.
Doobie Brothers strike again
Dennis Bozanich, commenting on this thread as dbozan, was the county’s deputy CEO and a key figure during the drafting of the cannabis ordinance in 2017. He now works as a paid consultant for the industry.
The statement about “a robust and economically viable legal cannabis industry” is No. 1 on the list of 10 project objectives in the EIR (environmental impact report) for the county’s cannabis land use ordinance and licensing program. Here’s the link: https://content.civicplus.com/api/assets/3881b527-0b0c-419e-b53c-c681ff400b4e
I have asked my editors to correct the date of the Island Breeze affidavit; I had a blurry copy and misread it. It was signed in 2018, not 2016.
— Melinda Burns
Ms Burns, not to worry…the lobbyist who has the gall to say this is your “one subject” clearly does not know you, or the decades of rich investigative history on topics ranging from water use, all facets of environment and most importantly your integrity. He is clearly one among the many who sadly have exploitSanta Barbara for his $$$ with no care to the wreckage he left behind. Those of us who have been around a while are grateful for your truth-telling
Good for you Burns. The creeps that run the cannabis industry now are just driven by greed and have no apparent compunction at lying or even perjuring themselves for profit. You keep fighting!
We know that Dennis, the former “Pot Czar” has always been in the pocket of the “very rich benefactors”, i.e., the pot growers. His literal “one subject”, for which he is getting paid and paid and paid, to shill for the industry, is profit over people.
Dennis, you have no credibility, you’re just showing up so you can bill your client.
Uh oh. The revenues are down for one year so the hawks will swoop in. “Remember I told you so that this industry was doomed!”
Big canna isn’t going anywhere and I for one would be happy if dislocated a lot of “good folks” of this area.
LOL, who hurt you bro, why you so big mad?
It’s funny, the complainants are all people who are either mad they didn’t/ couldn’t cash in when the industry was getting established or clearly just need to spend some money on a good home ventilation system.
Most of the opponents of cannabis in Santa Barbara would happily sell out the scent of their neighborhood if big money came knocking.
SBSTONER–
So if I open up a body shop next to your house, or a BBQ joint, or some other super smelly venture you think it’s YOUR responsibility to filter your air?
LOL!!!!
Alex at 0842 and anon at 1154 summed it up well for us. Mrs. Burns, thank you for what you do. Truly. Keep fighting the good fight.
And on another note… ED is taking too long to post this, So
Brad Paisley benefit concert tonight
Are any edhatters interested in a last-minute good time? I can’t give away tickets, so if you’re interested, email me @ clonekilr@gmail.com and have some free fun on us! You don’t even have to sit next to OGSB…