Commercial cannabis shakeout starts Thursday
Calaveras County registration deadline looms
After 4 p.m. Thursday, there will be two kinds of cannabis cultivators in Calaveras County: Those registered with the county government and those operating outside the law.
That clear line will be the result of an urgency ordinance county supervisors approved in May. The ordinance gives growers until the close of business Thursday to get to the counter in the Calaveras County Planning Department to register and pay hefty fees.
It ends decades in which medical marijuana growers existed in a gray area – tolerated but neither regulated nor fully integrated into the legal economy. Those in the industry also expect it to begin a shakeout in which smaller, weaker, less sophisticated operations will be gradually squeezed out by a combination of regulation and economics. The only question, they say, is whether that takes months or years.
Those growers who don’t register with the county will be unable to get state permits. By 2018, that means they won’t have access to a system under which bar-coded, tested cannabis products will be tracked from field to store by state regulators.
At one second past 4 p.m., those who are not registered will be illegal and subject to enforcement and crop eradication. On Monday morning, a Planning Department staff member said that 250 commercial farms had registered so far. One industry insider estimates that as many as 500 will line up to register before the deadline. Even so, estimates are that roughly as many other farms won’t register by the deadline.
That means those unregistered farms will be at risk to be among the first to vanish in an industry shakeout that is just the latest twist for the industry since medical marijuana was made legal in California in 1996.
Anticipating the last-minute rush, staff members say they may move the counter for receiving registrations from the small Planning Department headquarters to the old courthouse, several yards away at the county government campus on Mountain Ranch Road in San Andreas.
A Planning Department spokeswoman told the Board of Supervisors that the final acceptance process will include collecting as much paperwork as possible – even from those in line – in the last few minutes before 4 p.m. in Thursday.
“Planning closes their door at 4 p.m. and we’ll be there to make sure everything goes smoothly,” said Sheriff Rick DeBasilio at Tuesday’s board of supervisors’ meeting. “But make no mistake, we will keep order.”
After the deadline, registered commercial growers will have the protection of legitimacy that comes from the $5,000 fee each has paid to the Planning Department, and the potential obligation – if a tax measure approved by the Board of Supervisors last week passes in November – to support the county general fund each year with an estimated $6 million in taxes on their crops.
The remaining legitimate farmers can begin the process of building a viable cannabis agriculture industry in Calaveras County. According to Calaveras Cannabis Alliance Executive Director Caslin Tomaszewski, 31, of Mountain Ranch, those who are in business three years from now will be careful business executives who are keenly serious about cutting-edge agriculture and profitable production.
“The mom-and-pop operators will mostly be gone,” he said on Friday.
Fellow CCA director Mark Bolger, 28, also of Mountain Ranch, is a cannabis farmer who meets Tomaszewski’s definition of the future: he knows his industry, knows where his farm’s production and potential profit lies at any moment and is committed to agriculture based on advanced science.
“There will be a number of people who can’t weather the storm of (the Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act of 2015) and regulation,” he said. “I really wish everyone could keep going, but there will be folks who have to shut down.”
The state regulations that formally establish the medical cannabis industry in California go into effect in 2018 and those who are not registered with local jurisdictions cannot take part.
Bolger said challenges face Calaveras County cannabis farmers over the next three years, not the least of which is the pending November vote on a state initiative that could legalize recreational cannabis.
“Here in Calaveras County we have a boutique industry, and our product is most similar to, say, cherries or avocados,” he said. “No matter what happens statewide, I think we’ll be positioned to build our businesses.”
“I think in the next three years we’re going to find that cannabis farming is no different than any other kind of ag,” he said. He said the cost of getting product to market includes approximately 50 percent or more in production costs, 20 percent brokerage fees and other cost such as transportation.
He agreed that careful transportation is critical: “If a transporter is pulled over for a traffic issue on the way to LA, and there’s 50 pounds of cannabis in the vehicle, you can expect that product will be impounded.”
“Generally, it is obvious that there is a good margin to be made, but we don’t have the windfall profits that some suggest,” he said. “There’s a gap being closed. Every year, we’re becoming more and more sophisticated and that requires knowledge and investment.”
A Planning Department spokeswoman said Monday that approximately 250 individual and group commercial applications were filed by the close of business on June 23. That is 50 more than predicted by Tomaszewski during deliberations by the Board of Supervisors in May, and halfway to a final registration number of more than 400 he predicted on Friday.
Commercial cannabis commerce could contribute between 15 and 30 percent of Calaveras County’s tax base within three years, said Tomaszewski.
So far, registration fees have brought the county $1,250,000 and Tomaszewski expects 300 to 500 growers will register by the deadline. The registration fees from 400 growers would mean a $2,000,000 addition to the county.
The Calaveras Cannabis Alliance presented five workshops on filing to register under the urgency ordinance. The last workshop was held June 22 at the San Andreas Town Hall. More than 30 people were on hand to hear Tomaszewski guide them through the process.
The registration funds are restricted to the cost of administering and enforcing the urgency ordinance and cannot be moved into the general fund. The money can be used to manage registrant information and support law enforcement and code compliance.
Additionally, the tax measure on the November ballot would levy commercial outdoor growers – the majority in Calaveras County – at the rate of $2 per square foot of canopy area. Income from the proposed tax would go into the general fund and could be spent at the pleasure of the Board of Supervisors.
Bolger estimated tax income between $5 million and $10 million earlier in the week, when the board passed the ballot measure. Bolger and Tomaszewski tapped their keyboards during a Friday interview and agreed that a base, and conservative, annual figure would be $6 million.
“I would not be surprised if we got 500 growers registered,” he said.
Tomaszewski said he hopes the tax income for the first year, maybe two, would be directed to the Sheriff’s Office for aggressive enforcement. “It is in our best interest to see the bad actors removed.”
“That’s why we support the urgency ordinance,” he said. “We know people are being compromised and we know the problems are real. If people who oppose us see what regulation is going to do for them, they would be for the ordinance.”
“That would be wonderful,” said DiBasilio about the potential tax income. “But the bottom line is that growers have to honest with reporting what they produce.”
He added that registered growers could also be additional eyes and ears in the field, reporting illegal grows the Sheriff’s Office.
http://www.calaverasenterprise.com/news/article_4e9f5092-3cbf-11e6-bfe2-7bb54e36c615.html
After devastating fire, county turns to marijuana for comeback
Calaveras adopts rules that allow commercial cannabis farms in region ravaged by Butte Fire
Worried by pot speculators buying scorched properties, officials set restrictions on new cultivation
Residents expected to vote in November on marijuana tax that could bring in millions in revenue
MOUNTAIN RANCH
Before the sky rained fire last September, Thomas Liberty figured he knew where he wanted to be for the rest of his life.
A former Air Force psychiatric technician and group home counselor for emotionally disturbed teens, Liberty lived with his wife, Lauren, a hospice care social worker, in a modest wood-frame house with a wrap-around porch and a small marijuana garden.
Liberty, 52, says the house itself wasn’t much to celebrate: three bedrooms, two baths and an outdated interior that looked like the backdrop to “bad 1970s porn.” But its Calaveras County setting was breathtaking, with his home looking out on an emerald-hued expanse of ponderosa pines and oaks.
Liberty, a local medical cannabis activist, had just expanded his personal cultivation from a handful of plants to 99 in hopes of supplementing his retirement income by selling marijuana to dispensaries in Calaveras and Santa Rosa. He never got the chance to harvest the crop.
The Butte fire, the seventh-worst in California history, devoured his house and garden. It turned Liberty’s property – “our little heaven on Earth” – into a charred wasteland of blackened trees stripped of foliage.
“It just hurts to see it,” he said, recently walking the ground where his house had stood.
Yet the devastating blaze that scorched 71,000 acres and destroyed 860 houses and other buildings helped give birth to something else: some of California’s most tolerant local rules for permitting cultivation of medical marijuana for commercial sale.
On May 10, the Calaveras County Board of Supervisors approved an urgency ordinance that allows commercial marijuana gardens of up to one-quarter acre on properties of at least 2 acres and permits pot farms of one-half acre on properties of 4 acres or more.
The county, which had no previous regulations for marijuana growing, is expected to make the urgency ordinance permanent with additional details likely to be filled in and approved by supervisors in the coming year.
Among counties known for outdoor growing, the acreage allowed in Calaveras appears exceeded only by that in the legendary pot haven of Humboldt County. There, supervisors allowed new commercial marijuana farms of up to 10,000-square feet and voted to let existing outdoor growers cultivate up to a full acre – or 43,560 square feet.
The 4-1 vote in favor of the new Calaveras ordinance came after cannabis advocates presented board members with seemingly contradictory arguments about how the county should react to pot cultivation in the aftermath of the fire.
On one hand, they argued, a sanctioned local marijuana industry could provide an economic driver for Calaveras’ comeback. On the other, they warned, speculators with no local ties were snatching up fire-scorched properties on the cheap for pot farms and the county needed to stop it.
So supervisors set out to do both by creating a program to register established local medical marijuana growers and stop the land rush by outsiders.
Property owners who had existing marijuana gardens before May 10 have until June 30 to sign up for the county program, under which they will pay annual program fees of $5,000 each. Liberty, who lives in temporary housing in the county, says several applicants have been fire victims. Some grew marijuana beforehand. Others put plants in the ground afterward for extra income.
“It’s a very weird part of the recovery,” said Liberty, who applied for two cultivation permits, one for his existing property and a second for another site. “We had a lot of people lose their homes and possessions, and they either had insufficient insurance or no insurance at all. And many people saw this as a way of coming back.”
Money from an anticipated 200 registered commercial marijuana farms is expected to fund $1 million in oversight costs for a cannabis-inspection program to ensure compliance with planting restrictions, proper water use and respect for the environment. Staff to be hired will include two sheriff’s deputies and a sergeant, a compliance attorney, code enforcement officers, an agricultural biologist and an environmental health technician.
In addition, Calaveras County voters are expected to vote on a marijuana tax in November that would impose a $2-per-square-foot annual levy on outdoor commercial gardens – the vast majority of the county’s cultivation – and a $5-per-square-foot fee on indoor grows.
The measure could bring in $4 million in new tax revenue to the county of 45,000 residents if the new rules resulted in 200 commercial pot farms averaging 10,000 square feet – or just under a quarter-acre – of plants. For now, the growing permits apply only to medical marijuana and not to recreational use, which could be approved by California voters in November.
The Calaveras regulations were made possible by state medical marijuana legislation signed signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last year. The state rules provided a framework allowing cities and counties to set local taxes and permitting standards for marijuana cultivation or pot business or choose to ban such operations.
Calaveras Supervisor Chris Wright, whose district included much of the Butte Fire damage area as well as numerous marijuana farms, said the state rules “signaled the evolution of a very slow march to legalization” as well as potential benefits for an economically challenged county.
The Butte Fire had followed generations of economic decline in the once bustling gold mining county. The county’s legendary Sheep Ranch mine closed in 1942. Sawmills shuttered throughout the 1970s. A major employer, the Calaveras Cement Co. closed in 1983. That left ranching and Gold Country tourism as the prime local industries – other than unregulated pot gardens.
“It created an opportunity for this new industry to come out of the shadows, and that creates opportunities for rural counties,” Wright said of California’s new medical marijuana regulations. “We don’t have a lot of industry. We don’t have a lot of economic growth. In my view, this can be a sustainable economy.”
The county’s endorsement of marijuana commerce came over the objections of the district attorney and the sheriff. They had called for an outright ban on marijuana cultivation, saying they feared the county was already overrun with pot farms, including criminal networks operating on remote wooded properties. They said things were getting worse after the fire.
In October, two brothers, Leon Grammer, 38, and Jeremiah Barrett, 30, were arrested on charges of shooting and killing three men who were apparently trying to steal marijuana from a local pot farm.
Last month, narcotics officers raided a vast garden planted by growers who had trespassed onto private land, illegally siphoning water from a pond and planting 10,000 marijuana seedlings. On June 1, deputies cut down 3,500 plants on another illegal trespass grow. No suspects were arrested in either case.
“We go out and start searching the area by air (for hidden marijuana farms) and, when we fly over, they leave. They know the jig is up,” said Calaveras Sheriff Rick Dibasilio. “By the time we get to the property, they’re gone.”
Arguing against commercial growing, Dibasilio warned supervisors about negative environmental impacts and his fears of residents encountering armed growers protecting pot farms.
But cannabis farmer Caz Tomaszewski, a 31-year-old former collegiate rower at the University of Puget Sound, argued that a cultivation ban would do nothing to drive out unwanted criminal growers.
Tomaszewski is the executive director of the Calaveras Cannabis Alliance, a group he says advocates for the “social and economic benefits” of a locally regulated marijuana trade. He said the new commercial cultivation rules will provide a valuable tool for law enforcement “because they’re going to have a very clear idea who is in the (regulated) system and who isn’t.”
“And the amount of tax income that could be generated from this is pretty substantial,” he added.
While Calaveras adopted pot-friendly regulations, approaches to governing marijuana cultivation vary widely across California.
Near Sacramento, supervisors in Nevada County recently banned all outdoor and commercial marijuana cultivation, only to have local voters overwhelmingly reject a June ballot measure that supported the ban. Community meetings are underway to draft new rules.
The city of Sacramento is readying a plan to permit limited indoor commercial cultivation, while revenue-starved communities in the Southern California desert are racing to approve millions of square feet of marijuana warehouses. But a vast majority of California cities and counties are resisting such operations, including counties of Sacramento, Placer and Yuba – which have banned outdoor or commercial marijuana operations.
But now in Calaveras, the once-resistant sheriff is dispatching deputies with county officials to informally visit marijuana farms to let growers know about the permitting deadline, new rules and future compliance inspections.
“They are just ‘knock and talks’ to let people know we’re going to be out there checking,” Dibasilio said. “We’re trying to work with these folks.”
Once the program is in effect, sheriff’s officers and officials from multiple county agencies will conduct inspections to ensure gardens comply with square footage limits, have legally obtained water sources and aren’t fouling the environment with sediments, fertilizers, pesticides or other contaminants. The county can impose $1,000-a-day administrative fines until corrections are made.
Among those eager to work with the program is Mark Bolger, 28, who grew up in an agricultural community near Stockton and went on to become a medical marijuana grower in Calaveras.
Well before supervisors took up the issue, Bolger had invited state water board officers and county land use and environmental officials to visit his terraced, one-half acre marijuana garden.
It sits on a sprawling property with a processing room and electric-powered trimming machines that harvest hundreds of pounds of marijuana each fall. Wearing leather boots, jeans, a plaid shirt and a ranch cap over short-trimmed hair, Bolger walks his cannabis garden with the authority of a professional farmer.
Bolger says he files state and federal tax withholding statements for his three workers (though the employee forms don’t state the nature of the business.) He says he is excited to start paying taxes and fees to Calaveras County – in his case, more than $45,000 annually, including cultivation taxes and program costs.
“Taxes equal job security with this industry,” Bolger said. “This is helping support our community.”
With his long, scraggly gray hair, Liberty looks more the part of the old-fashioned hippie pot grower, even though he worked decades in a traditional career. Influenced by his wife’s work with hospice patients, he later became involved with a local collective that raised marijuana for terminally and seriously ill residents.
Now a commercial grower, Liberty sees marijuana as perhaps his only hope for rebuilding after the ravaging Butte Fire.
The family’s insurance policy didn’t cover the replacement costs for Liberty’s home. He also couldn’t emotionally fathom returning there to live, he said. He and Lauren plan to sell the property, the place where they thought they would live out their retirement.
They invested the insurance settlement on an undeveloped property that wasn’t scorched by fire, choosing a larger hilltop setting – this one expansive enough to allow the maximum half-acre marijuana garden under county rules.
There, they hope to generate enough income from a newly planted marijuana farm – plus the current plants on their original property – to be able to build a house at the second site.
“The role that cannabis is playing in the recovery can’t be understated,” he said.
Peter Hecht: 916-326-5539, @phecht_sacbee
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/california-weed/article85908447.html#storylink=cpy
Calaveras County registration deadline looms
After 4 p.m. Thursday, there will be two kinds of cannabis cultivators in Calaveras County: Those registered with the county government and those operating outside the law.
That clear line will be the result of an urgency ordinance county supervisors approved in May. The ordinance gives growers until the close of business Thursday to get to the counter in the Calaveras County Planning Department to register and pay hefty fees.
It ends decades in which medical marijuana growers existed in a gray area – tolerated but neither regulated nor fully integrated into the legal economy. Those in the industry also expect it to begin a shakeout in which smaller, weaker, less sophisticated operations will be gradually squeezed out by a combination of regulation and economics. The only question, they say, is whether that takes months or years.
Those growers who don’t register with the county will be unable to get state permits. By 2018, that means they won’t have access to a system under which bar-coded, tested cannabis products will be tracked from field to store by state regulators.
At one second past 4 p.m., those who are not registered will be illegal and subject to enforcement and crop eradication. On Monday morning, a Planning Department staff member said that 250 commercial farms had registered so far. One industry insider estimates that as many as 500 will line up to register before the deadline. Even so, estimates are that roughly as many other farms won’t register by the deadline.
That means those unregistered farms will be at risk to be among the first to vanish in an industry shakeout that is just the latest twist for the industry since medical marijuana was made legal in California in 1996.
Anticipating the last-minute rush, staff members say they may move the counter for receiving registrations from the small Planning Department headquarters to the old courthouse, several yards away at the county government campus on Mountain Ranch Road in San Andreas.
A Planning Department spokeswoman told the Board of Supervisors that the final acceptance process will include collecting as much paperwork as possible – even from those in line – in the last few minutes before 4 p.m. in Thursday.
“Planning closes their door at 4 p.m. and we’ll be there to make sure everything goes smoothly,” said Sheriff Rick DeBasilio at Tuesday’s board of supervisors’ meeting. “But make no mistake, we will keep order.”
After the deadline, registered commercial growers will have the protection of legitimacy that comes from the $5,000 fee each has paid to the Planning Department, and the potential obligation – if a tax measure approved by the Board of Supervisors last week passes in November – to support the county general fund each year with an estimated $6 million in taxes on their crops.
The remaining legitimate farmers can begin the process of building a viable cannabis agriculture industry in Calaveras County. According to Calaveras Cannabis Alliance Executive Director Caslin Tomaszewski, 31, of Mountain Ranch, those who are in business three years from now will be careful business executives who are keenly serious about cutting-edge agriculture and profitable production.
“The mom-and-pop operators will mostly be gone,” he said on Friday.
Fellow CCA director Mark Bolger, 28, also of Mountain Ranch, is a cannabis farmer who meets Tomaszewski’s definition of the future: he knows his industry, knows where his farm’s production and potential profit lies at any moment and is committed to agriculture based on advanced science.
“There will be a number of people who can’t weather the storm of (the Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act of 2015) and regulation,” he said. “I really wish everyone could keep going, but there will be folks who have to shut down.”
The state regulations that formally establish the medical cannabis industry in California go into effect in 2018 and those who are not registered with local jurisdictions cannot take part.
Bolger said challenges face Calaveras County cannabis farmers over the next three years, not the least of which is the pending November vote on a state initiative that could legalize recreational cannabis.
“Here in Calaveras County we have a boutique industry, and our product is most similar to, say, cherries or avocados,” he said. “No matter what happens statewide, I think we’ll be positioned to build our businesses.”
“I think in the next three years we’re going to find that cannabis farming is no different than any other kind of ag,” he said. He said the cost of getting product to market includes approximately 50 percent or more in production costs, 20 percent brokerage fees and other cost such as transportation.
He agreed that careful transportation is critical: “If a transporter is pulled over for a traffic issue on the way to LA, and there’s 50 pounds of cannabis in the vehicle, you can expect that product will be impounded.”
“Generally, it is obvious that there is a good margin to be made, but we don’t have the windfall profits that some suggest,” he said. “There’s a gap being closed. Every year, we’re becoming more and more sophisticated and that requires knowledge and investment.”
A Planning Department spokeswoman said Monday that approximately 250 individual and group commercial applications were filed by the close of business on June 23. That is 50 more than predicted by Tomaszewski during deliberations by the Board of Supervisors in May, and halfway to a final registration number of more than 400 he predicted on Friday.
Commercial cannabis commerce could contribute between 15 and 30 percent of Calaveras County’s tax base within three years, said Tomaszewski.
So far, registration fees have brought the county $1,250,000 and Tomaszewski expects 300 to 500 growers will register by the deadline. The registration fees from 400 growers would mean a $2,000,000 addition to the county.
The Calaveras Cannabis Alliance presented five workshops on filing to register under the urgency ordinance. The last workshop was held June 22 at the San Andreas Town Hall. More than 30 people were on hand to hear Tomaszewski guide them through the process.
The registration funds are restricted to the cost of administering and enforcing the urgency ordinance and cannot be moved into the general fund. The money can be used to manage registrant information and support law enforcement and code compliance.
Additionally, the tax measure on the November ballot would levy commercial outdoor growers – the majority in Calaveras County – at the rate of $2 per square foot of canopy area. Income from the proposed tax would go into the general fund and could be spent at the pleasure of the Board of Supervisors.
Bolger estimated tax income between $5 million and $10 million earlier in the week, when the board passed the ballot measure. Bolger and Tomaszewski tapped their keyboards during a Friday interview and agreed that a base, and conservative, annual figure would be $6 million.
“I would not be surprised if we got 500 growers registered,” he said.
Tomaszewski said he hopes the tax income for the first year, maybe two, would be directed to the Sheriff’s Office for aggressive enforcement. “It is in our best interest to see the bad actors removed.”
“That’s why we support the urgency ordinance,” he said. “We know people are being compromised and we know the problems are real. If people who oppose us see what regulation is going to do for them, they would be for the ordinance.”
“That would be wonderful,” said DiBasilio about the potential tax income. “But the bottom line is that growers have to honest with reporting what they produce.”
He added that registered growers could also be additional eyes and ears in the field, reporting illegal grows the Sheriff’s Office.
http://www.calaverasenterprise.com/news/article_4e9f5092-3cbf-11e6-bfe2-7bb54e36c615.html
After devastating fire, county turns to marijuana for comeback
Calaveras adopts rules that allow commercial cannabis farms in region ravaged by Butte Fire
Worried by pot speculators buying scorched properties, officials set restrictions on new cultivation
Residents expected to vote in November on marijuana tax that could bring in millions in revenue
MOUNTAIN RANCH
Before the sky rained fire last September, Thomas Liberty figured he knew where he wanted to be for the rest of his life.
A former Air Force psychiatric technician and group home counselor for emotionally disturbed teens, Liberty lived with his wife, Lauren, a hospice care social worker, in a modest wood-frame house with a wrap-around porch and a small marijuana garden.
Liberty, 52, says the house itself wasn’t much to celebrate: three bedrooms, two baths and an outdated interior that looked like the backdrop to “bad 1970s porn.” But its Calaveras County setting was breathtaking, with his home looking out on an emerald-hued expanse of ponderosa pines and oaks.
Liberty, a local medical cannabis activist, had just expanded his personal cultivation from a handful of plants to 99 in hopes of supplementing his retirement income by selling marijuana to dispensaries in Calaveras and Santa Rosa. He never got the chance to harvest the crop.
The Butte fire, the seventh-worst in California history, devoured his house and garden. It turned Liberty’s property – “our little heaven on Earth” – into a charred wasteland of blackened trees stripped of foliage.
“It just hurts to see it,” he said, recently walking the ground where his house had stood.
Yet the devastating blaze that scorched 71,000 acres and destroyed 860 houses and other buildings helped give birth to something else: some of California’s most tolerant local rules for permitting cultivation of medical marijuana for commercial sale.
On May 10, the Calaveras County Board of Supervisors approved an urgency ordinance that allows commercial marijuana gardens of up to one-quarter acre on properties of at least 2 acres and permits pot farms of one-half acre on properties of 4 acres or more.
The county, which had no previous regulations for marijuana growing, is expected to make the urgency ordinance permanent with additional details likely to be filled in and approved by supervisors in the coming year.
Among counties known for outdoor growing, the acreage allowed in Calaveras appears exceeded only by that in the legendary pot haven of Humboldt County. There, supervisors allowed new commercial marijuana farms of up to 10,000-square feet and voted to let existing outdoor growers cultivate up to a full acre – or 43,560 square feet.
The 4-1 vote in favor of the new Calaveras ordinance came after cannabis advocates presented board members with seemingly contradictory arguments about how the county should react to pot cultivation in the aftermath of the fire.
On one hand, they argued, a sanctioned local marijuana industry could provide an economic driver for Calaveras’ comeback. On the other, they warned, speculators with no local ties were snatching up fire-scorched properties on the cheap for pot farms and the county needed to stop it.
So supervisors set out to do both by creating a program to register established local medical marijuana growers and stop the land rush by outsiders.
Property owners who had existing marijuana gardens before May 10 have until June 30 to sign up for the county program, under which they will pay annual program fees of $5,000 each. Liberty, who lives in temporary housing in the county, says several applicants have been fire victims. Some grew marijuana beforehand. Others put plants in the ground afterward for extra income.
“It’s a very weird part of the recovery,” said Liberty, who applied for two cultivation permits, one for his existing property and a second for another site. “We had a lot of people lose their homes and possessions, and they either had insufficient insurance or no insurance at all. And many people saw this as a way of coming back.”
Money from an anticipated 200 registered commercial marijuana farms is expected to fund $1 million in oversight costs for a cannabis-inspection program to ensure compliance with planting restrictions, proper water use and respect for the environment. Staff to be hired will include two sheriff’s deputies and a sergeant, a compliance attorney, code enforcement officers, an agricultural biologist and an environmental health technician.
In addition, Calaveras County voters are expected to vote on a marijuana tax in November that would impose a $2-per-square-foot annual levy on outdoor commercial gardens – the vast majority of the county’s cultivation – and a $5-per-square-foot fee on indoor grows.
The measure could bring in $4 million in new tax revenue to the county of 45,000 residents if the new rules resulted in 200 commercial pot farms averaging 10,000 square feet – or just under a quarter-acre – of plants. For now, the growing permits apply only to medical marijuana and not to recreational use, which could be approved by California voters in November.
The Calaveras regulations were made possible by state medical marijuana legislation signed signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last year. The state rules provided a framework allowing cities and counties to set local taxes and permitting standards for marijuana cultivation or pot business or choose to ban such operations.
Calaveras Supervisor Chris Wright, whose district included much of the Butte Fire damage area as well as numerous marijuana farms, said the state rules “signaled the evolution of a very slow march to legalization” as well as potential benefits for an economically challenged county.
The Butte Fire had followed generations of economic decline in the once bustling gold mining county. The county’s legendary Sheep Ranch mine closed in 1942. Sawmills shuttered throughout the 1970s. A major employer, the Calaveras Cement Co. closed in 1983. That left ranching and Gold Country tourism as the prime local industries – other than unregulated pot gardens.
“It created an opportunity for this new industry to come out of the shadows, and that creates opportunities for rural counties,” Wright said of California’s new medical marijuana regulations. “We don’t have a lot of industry. We don’t have a lot of economic growth. In my view, this can be a sustainable economy.”
The county’s endorsement of marijuana commerce came over the objections of the district attorney and the sheriff. They had called for an outright ban on marijuana cultivation, saying they feared the county was already overrun with pot farms, including criminal networks operating on remote wooded properties. They said things were getting worse after the fire.
In October, two brothers, Leon Grammer, 38, and Jeremiah Barrett, 30, were arrested on charges of shooting and killing three men who were apparently trying to steal marijuana from a local pot farm.
Last month, narcotics officers raided a vast garden planted by growers who had trespassed onto private land, illegally siphoning water from a pond and planting 10,000 marijuana seedlings. On June 1, deputies cut down 3,500 plants on another illegal trespass grow. No suspects were arrested in either case.
“We go out and start searching the area by air (for hidden marijuana farms) and, when we fly over, they leave. They know the jig is up,” said Calaveras Sheriff Rick Dibasilio. “By the time we get to the property, they’re gone.”
Arguing against commercial growing, Dibasilio warned supervisors about negative environmental impacts and his fears of residents encountering armed growers protecting pot farms.
But cannabis farmer Caz Tomaszewski, a 31-year-old former collegiate rower at the University of Puget Sound, argued that a cultivation ban would do nothing to drive out unwanted criminal growers.
Tomaszewski is the executive director of the Calaveras Cannabis Alliance, a group he says advocates for the “social and economic benefits” of a locally regulated marijuana trade. He said the new commercial cultivation rules will provide a valuable tool for law enforcement “because they’re going to have a very clear idea who is in the (regulated) system and who isn’t.”
“And the amount of tax income that could be generated from this is pretty substantial,” he added.
While Calaveras adopted pot-friendly regulations, approaches to governing marijuana cultivation vary widely across California.
Near Sacramento, supervisors in Nevada County recently banned all outdoor and commercial marijuana cultivation, only to have local voters overwhelmingly reject a June ballot measure that supported the ban. Community meetings are underway to draft new rules.
The city of Sacramento is readying a plan to permit limited indoor commercial cultivation, while revenue-starved communities in the Southern California desert are racing to approve millions of square feet of marijuana warehouses. But a vast majority of California cities and counties are resisting such operations, including counties of Sacramento, Placer and Yuba – which have banned outdoor or commercial marijuana operations.
But now in Calaveras, the once-resistant sheriff is dispatching deputies with county officials to informally visit marijuana farms to let growers know about the permitting deadline, new rules and future compliance inspections.
“They are just ‘knock and talks’ to let people know we’re going to be out there checking,” Dibasilio said. “We’re trying to work with these folks.”
Once the program is in effect, sheriff’s officers and officials from multiple county agencies will conduct inspections to ensure gardens comply with square footage limits, have legally obtained water sources and aren’t fouling the environment with sediments, fertilizers, pesticides or other contaminants. The county can impose $1,000-a-day administrative fines until corrections are made.
Among those eager to work with the program is Mark Bolger, 28, who grew up in an agricultural community near Stockton and went on to become a medical marijuana grower in Calaveras.
Well before supervisors took up the issue, Bolger had invited state water board officers and county land use and environmental officials to visit his terraced, one-half acre marijuana garden.
It sits on a sprawling property with a processing room and electric-powered trimming machines that harvest hundreds of pounds of marijuana each fall. Wearing leather boots, jeans, a plaid shirt and a ranch cap over short-trimmed hair, Bolger walks his cannabis garden with the authority of a professional farmer.
Bolger says he files state and federal tax withholding statements for his three workers (though the employee forms don’t state the nature of the business.) He says he is excited to start paying taxes and fees to Calaveras County – in his case, more than $45,000 annually, including cultivation taxes and program costs.
“Taxes equal job security with this industry,” Bolger said. “This is helping support our community.”
With his long, scraggly gray hair, Liberty looks more the part of the old-fashioned hippie pot grower, even though he worked decades in a traditional career. Influenced by his wife’s work with hospice patients, he later became involved with a local collective that raised marijuana for terminally and seriously ill residents.
Now a commercial grower, Liberty sees marijuana as perhaps his only hope for rebuilding after the ravaging Butte Fire.
The family’s insurance policy didn’t cover the replacement costs for Liberty’s home. He also couldn’t emotionally fathom returning there to live, he said. He and Lauren plan to sell the property, the place where they thought they would live out their retirement.
They invested the insurance settlement on an undeveloped property that wasn’t scorched by fire, choosing a larger hilltop setting – this one expansive enough to allow the maximum half-acre marijuana garden under county rules.
There, they hope to generate enough income from a newly planted marijuana farm – plus the current plants on their original property – to be able to build a house at the second site.
“The role that cannabis is playing in the recovery can’t be understated,” he said.
Peter Hecht: 916-326-5539, @phecht_sacbee
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/california-weed/article85908447.html#storylink=cpy
