Bad news, stoners. Weed in California is illegal! According to California’s Second Appellate District Court decision in JCCrandall LLC v. County of Santa Barbara, “We regret to inform that cannabis is illegal in California because federal law says so.” Ruh roh!
Before you get too freaked out, potheads, local authorities don’t seem to care … well, except for North County 1st District Supervisor John Peschong who questioned its legality during a recent board meeting discussing cannabis in the county.
If it isn’t, what are you guys even doing? Because the SLO County Board of Supervisors continues to make pot plans. In a 3-2 vote, the board directed staff to figure out how to revise the coastal zone land use ordinance to allow brick-and-mortar dispensaries in coastal cities. Gotta get that sweet reefer tax money, baby!
But what about the inland areas and all those uptight conservatives? They need to rip fat bong loads more than anybody, amirite?
In Nipomo, 4th District Supervisor Jimmy Paulding questioned whether it was legal to make land use changes for coastal areas only, which led Deputy County Counsel Brian Stack to note that the county likes its land use ordinances to be consistent across the county.
“You’d have to justify why you were picking, say, the coastal zone over the inland zone,” County Counsel Rita Neal elaborated. “Certainly, you could say, ‘We’re going to try it.'”
Let’s face it. Many of the county’s more conservative communities don’t want pot shops, period, and certainly don’t want them in their towns, so the supervisors and staff will probably need to tie themselves into legal knots to approve cannabis dispensaries in some areas and not in others.
This would be an easily solved problem if the federal government would pull its head out of its ass and retract its racist, misguided policy that keeps cannabis illegal. By the way, cannabis use recently eclipsed alcohol in the number of daily users—17.7 million daily or near daily pot users versus 14.7 million daily or near daily drinkers. Yet the Devil’s Lettuce remains a Schedule I drug alongside heroin, LSD, ecstasy, and peyote. Shit, cocaine is only Schedule II!
Prohibition never works, and despite the appellate court’s recent ruling, the Cheshire Cannabis Cat is out of the bag in California and the 23 other states where it’s recreationally legal. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
What happens when property rights collide with bureaucracy? You get a two-year legal nightmare and a “compromise” that like most compromises leaves a bitter taste. Future Arroyo Grande resident Michael Harris is the unhappy recipient of this Kafkaesque travail. The former Cal Poly student whose grandparents lived in Nipomo decided to relocate from Sacramento to the Central Coast, and he found his dream property—55 acres of oak-dappled bliss—in Arroyo Grande at the intersection of Noyes Road and Equestrian Way.
Because there are no city services connected to the property, he’s now spent nearly 24 months petitioning the city for permission to dig a well.
Seems simple enough, right? Not so fast, drill-baby-drill. The city decided to reject Harris’ application, and in a Feb. 27, 2024, staff report, city staff determined that it was both “feasible and practical” for Harris to connect to the city’s water supply. Not so fast, petty bureaucrats. Harris said it’s anything but “feasible and practical,” and he argued it would set him back about $300K to trench a connection, plus there are a bunch of protected oak trees and resistant sandstone in the way, not to mention the 30-degree slope.
“Staff does not believe practicality and feasibility criteria should be based upon the private property owner’s costs associated with installing domestic water service, nor should it be based solely on the topography of the site,” the staff report stated.
Staff seems kind of dickish, if you ask me.
Harris hired an arborist to prove trees and wildlife would be impacted if he were forced to connect to the city water supply, not to mention the resulting erosion. He went before the city again to appeal his application, and in the May 28 meeting, the Arroyo Grande City Council approved the well application with 15 additional conditions.
The decision was a real “good news bad news” affair because he could dig his well, but the conditions were beyond burdensome, so Harris did what every proud city-hall fighter would do. He lawyered up. His attorney, Paul Beard II of Pierson Ferdinand LLP, fired off a letter to Arroyo Grande City Attorney Isaac Rosen to not only cry foul on the 15 conditions but also to argue that nearly half of them were “unlawful.”
Harris might be forgiven for thinking this was more than bureaucratic overreach.
“I definitely think there is individual discrimination going on for sure,” Harris told New Times earlier this year. “I think that’s without question; I mean, there’s plenty of proof.”
Basically, the proof is that other well applications to the city didn’t result in approvals littered with all the conditions demanded of Harris. In more “good and bad” news, the city has since revised Harris’ permit by consolidating or removing some of the conditions, and city council approved the well. Let’s hope Harris’ well water tastes sweeter than the process to access it. Δ
The Shredder reminds you to hydrate. Tell it it’s all wet at shredder@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Dec 5-15, 2024.