 everybody good morning we'd like to call to order the board a special meeting the board of supervisors for February 5th if we could have a roll call please Supervisor Leopold here Coonerty here Caput here McPherson here chair friend here and if you just join us in a brief moment of silence in the Pledge of Allegiance so just to give you a sense of how the special meeting will run today we will accept oral communications these are on for items that are not on today's agenda the only item we have on today's agenda but within the purview the board of supervisors here in a second also I want you to know that the board will take a break at 1045 even if we're in the middle of things going on just for about 10 minutes just to make sure that we can all ensure that we're hearing everything that everybody's saying and take a short break so if you're in line just keep that order but at 1045 we'll take a short break so we're going to start with oral communications for those of you that attended regular board meetings you know that this is an opportunity for you to address the board on items that are not on today's agenda or within the purview the board of supervisors if there's something you'd like to address that isn't cannabis related now would be an opportunity and if not we can get straight into the actual meeting in the staff report and give everybody an opportunity to be heard today so seeing no oral communications we'll open it up with a staff report good morning and welcome good morning robin bolster grant cannabis licensing manager the purpose of this morning's meeting is for your board to provide direction to staff regarding the revised draft cannabis licensing program and the disposition of the draft EIR before I begin the PowerPoint presentation that I have I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the team who worked so hard on the proposal before you today planning director Kathy Maloy-Prevacich assistant planning director Pia Levine former environmental coordinator and current code complaints manager Matt Johnston county council staff Jason Heath and Brooke Miller deputy CAO Melody Serino and a special shout-out to my staff Loretta Marino Mike Sapaner and Vassant Sharma while many many hours went into the proposed revisions to the cannabis program it is important to recognize that this remains to a large extent a work in progress it has been a learning experience for all of us and we know that more fine-tuning will be required as we move forward I believe our dispensary ordinance went through three or four revisions before we got it to where it is now so we recognize that this is an iterative process having said that we think that the new approach we are presenting to your board will be better for the environment better for neighborhoods and better for the cannabis industry the draft DIR process did exactly what it was supposed to do it provided us with a ton of information about how the existing and proposed cannabis businesses work and the potential impacts these businesses could have to our environment the environment contained the information contained in the draft environmental impact report along with the public comments we received have been incorporated into a set of new proposed regulations and best management practices our new approach would evaluate the environmental impacts of each project on a case-by-case basis this means that each individual license application will require its own separate CEQA analysis in lieu of EIR certification by your board the initial approach that we took undertaking a programmatic EIR covering regulations that encompass the entire county from rural mountains to commercial ag lands this was uncharted territory for us but it was a requirement in order to satisfy CEQA there were serious challenges to that approach not least of which was attempting to come up with a baseline to assess the extent of an existing industry that has been in the shadows for decades so while we grappled with getting our arms around this programmatic approach the state legislature provided us with another option they enacted a statutory exemption to the CEQA process eliminating the requirement for a broad programmatic approach instead allowing individual project specific environmental review this option became available during the summer but we were and are invested in continuing the EIR process including receiving public comments and crafting responses to those comments again the analysis that was done the mitigation measures recommended and the public comments were all incorporated into and inform the revised proposal allowing site specific CEQA analysis means that each environmental review will consider impacts that are specific to individual sites business models resource constraints and neighborhood context because we have incorporated the recommended mitigation measures into our ordinance and best management practices many projects will be able to be reviewed and approved much more quickly under this site by site approach the new approach means that each license will require discretionary use approval from the planning department the discretionary permit process ensures a greater degree of transparency and public input and takes into consideration issues such as neighborhood compatibility conditions can and will be attached to both the use approval process as well as the licensing review process to ensure that mitigations that came out of the EIR will be applied to each project the proposed ordinance revisions include amendments to the county code 7.128 which is the licensing program and 1310 our county zoning code this reflects both the operational aspect as well as the land use components of the licensing program the two ordinances will work in partnership with issues related to zoning and setbacks reviewed by planning and operational requirements like security and site safety under the control of the licensing office the mitigation measures and comments are reflected in the language of the ordinances themselves as well as the best management and operational practices plan or BMOP I'd love that a BMOP will be required with every license application and will address issues such as pesticide use grading restrictions water efficiency standards and so forth many of the mitigations included in the draft EIR rely on robust enforcement of cannabis regulations and a detailed enforcement plan will elaborate on the priorities the tools and the resources that will be brought to bear on folks who don't want to play by the rules so what's new the zoning restrictions in canopy limits are generally consistent with what has been included in the draft proposals that your board is familiar with the key changes to the ordinances include increased canopy limits for CA land an option for co-location that allows multiple licenses to occupy a single parcel and a master plan component that provides an opportunity for adjacent parcel owners to share infrastructure such as roads or even single family dwellings this will help to reduce the associated impacts of increased development these concepts are basic good land use policy using existing or shared infrastructure to the greatest degree possible minimizing new development development where feasible lastly our proposal limits the amount of activity on timber production zone property restricting cannabis operations to properties that already have established operations as of the close of our registration period in 2016 this represents a compromise that restricts development on TP but doesn't push out folks who have a history of growing responsibly on these sites as stated these changes came directly out of what we learned from the EIR and the public comments that followed the cannabis supply chain includes cultivation manufacturing distribution lab testing and retail dispensaries i love animation cultivation was the focus of the C4 discussions and the early iterations of the cannabis regulations again our approach retains the majority of parcel size and canopy limitations that have been presented to your board in the past with the exception of CA property we incorporated the concept of co-location presented in the EIR and provided incentives boosting the aggregate limits to one acre on parcels less than 20 acres and removing the cap entirely for parcels larger than 20 acres when the cultivation includes multiple licensees within existing structures the other major change i mentioned concerns TP zone properties in response to public comments voice and concern over cultivation on TP we proposed a restriction that allows cultivation only on those TP parcels already under cannabis cultivation with the provision that restricts expansion to a quarter acre for all cultivation related development this was a compromise between calls for excluding TP altogether and the reality that there are many good grows on TP that shouldn't necessarily be forced to relocate the revised use charts in 1310 reflect the level of review necessary for the associated discretionary use approval required from level three requiring no public notice to level five review requiring requiring full public hearings manufacturing is an aspect of the industry that needed to be addressed and a draft ordinance was included in the EIR review manufacturing operations consist of turning the cannabis plant into another product such as lotions edibles and the extraction of cannabinoids we modified the draft to include three license types class one covers infusions where raw plant materials used to make products like juices or cookies class two and class three cover extraction separating cannabinoids from plant material and are classified as either non-volatile or volatile depending on the method of extraction volatile extraction shown here may use hydrocarbons such as butane or propane to produce the cannabinoids these are closed loop systems which prevent hazardous materials from escaping into the atmosphere and are resistant to accidents such as explosions and other problems escaping their containment class two includes non-volatile extraction methods such as the co2 extraction unit seen here also closed loop other types of class two extraction include the use of chemical or mechanical methods such as evaporative ovens seen here alcohol distillation mechanical extraction such as a heat press or cold water extraction class one includes again infusion here this is the introduction of oils into vape pens or making cookies with the exception of ca c4 and m zone districts manufacturing is only allowed where license cultivation is located and no manufacturing operations are allowed in residences under our proposal when the state came out with their emergency regulations last fall it became apparent that distribution would be a critical component of the cannabis supply chain cultivators and manufacturers are not allowed to sell directly to retailers without a distributor to collect taxes for the state and to ensure products are adequately tested for quality control so we've introduced a new license category for distribution with two types class one for businesses that only distribute their own products and class two for businesses that transport other licensed products as with manufacturing license distribution may only occur where license cultivation and or manufacturing are located with the exception of ca m and c4 zone districts as stated previously all cannabis businesses require a discretionary permit in addition to a license we intend to process use permits concurrently with license applications as with all use approvals the level of review is determined by the zoning the type and scale of activity rural or urban settings and the location in or out of the coastal zone plus one mile buffer for instance new indoor cannabis cultivation on ca land requires either a level three or level five outside the coastal zone plus one and no new indoor cultivation is allowed within the coastal zone plus one mile the levels of review your board is familiar with additional regulations of note aside from the coastal restrictions are the requirement which we kept that a dwelling unit a company manufacturing or cultivation in a r a tp and su zone districts the master plan as discussed previously presents an opportunity to reduce environmental impacts by sharing infrastructure including the dwelling requirement this also came out of the de ir and reflects the desire to minimize new development in rural parts of the county that may be otherwise suitable for cannabis operations and again manufacturing must be ancillary to cultivation in a r a tp and su with restrictions on the number of employees and the ability to import raw material once again each discretionary application under this proposal would be subject to environmental review under sequa in many cases where there is no need for new development the mitigations incorporated into both proposed ordinances and best management and operational practices means that the review will result in either an initial study mitigated negative declaration or even a statutory exemption if development is truly minimal our team held public meetings last week to discuss the new proposal some of the concerns that were voiced included the short time period between the public release of this proposal on january 26th and today's special meeting we stressed that there will be several more opportunities for the public to weigh in before a final decision is made by your board we received several comments regarding nurseries with requests that we either change the definition of canopy to include nursery stock or create a separate nursery license as the state does our approach has always been to include all cannabis plants within the canopy limits essentially creating a box or multiple boxes within which the grower can choose the mix of plants desired this remains the most straightforward approach from an implementation and enforcement perspective i also want to point out that under the co-location option a large ca parcel has virtually no limit so that could accommodate nurseries we heard from some growers that the tp restriction is worded to narrowly and should be expanded to recognize previous non-cannabis commercial activity as well as cannabis cultivation while we are generally not opposed to this notion we would ask that any changes remain narrowly construed so as to maintain the intent of limiting development on tp parcels the five-acre r.a parcel size received criticism both for being overly restrictive and for allowing any commercial activity in residential rural neighborhoods along those lines we have heard from many growers and other industry folks that the county should adopt the state's cottage license type allowing smaller parcel sizes and cultivation in residential zone districts while this would enable more existing sites to potentially be licensed in place our proposal maintains the previous restrictions on residential grows without expansion reflecting the historical separation between commercial and residential uses comments regarding advertising restrictions were well founded and we agree the language should mirror the advertising provision in the dispensary ordinance we also received comments about generator use that may also require further review and analysis on our part there were comments stating that some commercial farmers use permanent generators to power their wells so there may be a basis for distinguishing between permanent and temporary generators pesticide and rodenticide use continue to be a concern and we do intend to address this issue through our bmop requirements while we are preempted from imposing an outright ban there are a number of other strategies that can be employed such as requiring the use of integrated pest management practices that make these chemicals unnecessary or even infeasible the use of rodenticide in particular could make a farm ineligible for marketing campaigns using the Santa Cruz brand this idea should be fleshed out further and we will reach out to industry representatives such as green trade to help in this effort we received criticism of the no duty to enforce provision contained within 7.128 this language provides our office with the discretion necessary for establishing enforcement priorities and is consistent with existing code enforcement ordinance language while some community members felt this provision suggests a lack of enforcement that is not at all the case this program cannot succeed without robust enforcement and we intend to present a detailed enforcement plan when we go before the planning commission with direction from your board we heard frustration from folks who are eager to read the eir comments and responses but explain that until we receive direction from your board we don't yet know what form publication of those comments will take finally the issue of fire remains a huge concern both in terms of citizens fears about fire and the restrictive nature of the fire association letter that accompanied the eir altering or interpreting fire code requirements lie outside the scope of the licensing program however we believe that the site specific environmental review and use permit process will result in assessment of each individual project and site rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach we understand that the regulatory framework proposed here is complex and we envision a pre application consultation process with applicants that will be part of our protocol to help folks navigate this dual processing scheme the cannabis licensing office will continue to work closely with the planning department and other agencies to ensure that the process is not unnecessarily burdensome it is in everyone's best interest that the program be transparent and accessible we believe that our proposal achieves that goal thank you thank you for that presentation are there any brief questions from board members before we open it up to the community for other comments just one quick question thank you very much for your report and uh you've been working on this for a long time and i want to thank you for all your work everybody uh that would caught me a little bit i didn't know too much about was 120,000 gallon water tank can you explain that uh you know how many acres and whatever um not well those are uh the the refire association came out as you may know with a letter that was attached to the eir and laid out very restrictive uh regulations where they deemed all cannabis operations as f1 uh hazardous occupancy and that came with the requirement for potentially up to 20 foot wide roads and 120,000 gallon water requirement to to satisfy the flow rate required for a hazardous structure uh again it's outside of our purview to comment on that but in my experience the reviews tend to be site specific and that was really a part of the eir process which by its nature presents the most conservative um analysis possible with with respect to environmental impact okay thank you suvaza leopold thank you chair thank you for the presentation and all the work that went into i appreciate all the public input that we've had so far and we will continue as our standard uh in developing these regulations i just had a couple questions um on the question of the definition of canopy um that we've had some changes to that um my understanding is that now we're in sync with the the uh state regulations is that accurate or are we pretty close or we're pretty close um to that uh with the exception of the nursery propagation stage we we just that's not a definition we're adopting along with the state as proposed and could you just explain why again robin said earlier that you know we're we're the canopy limit is sort of intended to be you know that the operation fit inside a box and so the box being decided by the c4 process and so the way staff interpreted the nursery definition is that it needs to be it needs to fit in that box and you need to make it work within that framework but that's just as proposed so we can discuss further of course okay i'm sure we're going to hear some comments about that so i look forward to that conversation the um just also to be clear in in ca zone land uh in uh where there might be multiple licenses there is no canopy limit uh uh for all those licenses each license might have a limit but there's no limit for the aggregate that's that's correct and again that was to incentivize co-location on larger ca parcels with existing uh structures so we're not talking about new development but if you have an existing underutilized greenhouse and you can fit in you know a hundred uh licensees um that may be completely appropriate and that again may be a way for a nursery to create their their business model as proposed however that is when you have a 20 acre or more site the no limit sure okay i appreciate that distinction the question of master plan operations is that also for those multiple licenses site or only co-location sites um they're distinct that there could be some overlap potentially but the master plan was really geared more toward um some of the rural areas where we are requiring um single family dwellings for instance uh an su site or an or an ag site where we didn't want say you have three parcels that are all touching each other everybody wants to have their own grow um without the master plan each parcel would potentially need to construct their own single family dwelling and their own road access their own well um under the master plan they could share um with an agreement that they all abide by great um the the question about tp zone lands um the uh the idea that the only cannabis uh cultivation or operations that have been going on since november 2016 i think it was but if there's been other commercial development um what's the distinction there i'm just i'm just trying to um figure out as a policy perspective why we would look at that differently right and and i agree cut down we don't want to cut down more tree that's and that's the intent right is to not uh incentivize any additional uh tree removal or disturbance uh to the extent possible so there really isn't a distinction i guess um i would just you know commercial activity could conceivably include timber um harvest and so we don't i think we want to be careful in how we describe the existing commercial activity um and it would need to be existing permitted commercial activity if it's other than cannabis but i think that that that's certainly satisfied the basic uh land use policy that you you know you use uh areas that have already been cleared and are no longer feasible for timber um maybe this might be a question for miss previsich about the probe the prohibition on the cultivation of genetically engineered crops now we're we've um this county has been a leader about this but um i've been told about all sorts of hybrids and everything like that is that will that be considered genetically engineered it's not a question for me i someone someone who knows more about actual cannabis products is gonna have well it's in the ordinance so i just i wanted i wanted to make sure that we the provision um refers to an existing ordinance uh in the health and safety uh code and my understanding i'm not a geneticist by any stretch but my understanding is that that is specific to like cell manipulation uh and not something like you know cloning or crossbreeding in sort of the traditional sense is that well i'm gonna use one of my lifelines and ask our council um about that no i think that's a good distinction and i you know that a hybridization would probably be referred to more as like a pluot or something like that or some kind of a fruit variety that's um you know i'm i agree with what robin said uh very good lawyer a very good lawyer thanks i might have more questions but i appreciate the work that went into this i know it was hard supervisor community yeah this is just a process question just because i see a lot of anxious faces so just walk people through again sort of what the what the process will be going forwards that people can understand how this plays out so um and and there are some elements that haven't been fully flesh but the we envision that folks will come to the licensing office first and we before that so before that we're gonna make oh this process so uh so we're gonna make uh added direction today right then over the planning commission then i'll come back to the to the board twice correct um then it'll be implemented and then people will come to the licensing office for direction yeah and and we will provide them basically with all the the the pathway that they need so the elements that they will need to submit to planning and the elements that they need to submit to satisfy the licensing requirement we will shepherd them through and and point them in the right direction and then each depending depending again on what's being done and where it's being done there'll be a level of environmental review there'll be uh there could be a public hearing uh on a per parcel basis absolutely going forward supervisor mccursley yeah i i showed some of the uh questions of supervisor supervisor leopold too about um the the definition of a canopy um and nursery is defined i'd like to i am going to give my opinion before we hear a lot of comments about i'd like to see this is defined by the existing cdfa definition i think that'd make it cleaner so to speak i also share the concern about i think we should have some discretion on the development of the tp property the timber production so we could allow cultivation where there's been no new development or tree clearing that's a concern that i would like to have addressed and there was one about the the resident on site had to be the property owner i think maybe we could have that be an employee identified employee who's part of the business there was one other could you explain why the home occupation that was in the draft eir is not recommended and also why the specialty college state license isn't recommended those are two questions i had from the get-go the reason why the eir explored the home occupation was as as one of the alternatives so we wanted to make sure that if we were going to use this eir that the the broadest possible array of cannabis activities that the board might consider adopting was addressed by the eir so we wouldn't have to recirculate it if you added anything so it was addressed as under one of the alternatives but we in this proposal that we're bringing to you today we were consistent with more consistent with your initial proposal which was essentially to not allow cannabis activities in single-family residential in residential character type of areas with the exception of r a and then some of the you know sometimes you have a tp or su site that has a house on it but but not r a and r r and r b and all those things so it's in the ir but it's not in this current proposal because of the board's initial position okay just in general i'd like to say congratulations and condolences on what you've had to had to go through and thank the people in the audience that are going to be speaking to us today to help us form what we're we're going to allow in the near future especially in light of what the state has done and some changes and that's made us adjust and i i think that i think it should be clearly explained that the effort for the environmental impact report that that effort hasn't been wasted we certainly have made use of a lot of information that was generated from that document so i i do appreciate the work that went into that and it's going to be part of what we approve in the in the long run so thank you very much indeed all right thank you we're going to open it up for the community we want to make sure that everybody is heard today so please do line up we'll limit the comments to two minutes we will take a brief break at 1045 but come back to make sure that everybody is heard just when you step up to state your name and feel free to go ahead and start up good morning and welcome good morning thank you my name is jesson hains i think uh i have apprehensive about the rust process from just exempting the eir and so i'd like that to be delayed so that we could we have an opportunity to see the alternative to delay and you know there's going to be parts of the eir that we're not going to follow if i'm understanding that so i think we need more information on that and time to look at that information right so one of our other concerns is is the the about the black market just how is that going to be fully fully taken care of because if you put all these regulations there's going to be a certain population that don't want to follow the regulations and that's going to be our neighbors and what happens then right so i i want the decision to be delayed so that we can look at both sides because we heard some new information today and then there's supposed to be some type of decision right away we just want more time to it that's all i have thank you thank you my name is poly sorals and i'm from 700 haines ranch road up in carletus and i'm fifth generation on this parcel and the influx of the and the influx of the out-of-state entities in our areas causing causing a drastic environmental damage to the properties and during the last three plus years the cannabis growers in the mountain regions it just seems like the quality of life for the people who've lived in these mountains has changed and the the new owners of who are being cannabis growers have a hostile attitude towards the residents here and want us just to kind of fade away and be quiet and this is not a subject of if cannabis is right or wrong this is it's here but we need to coexist together and the environmental impact has to be looked at further the black market it needs to be stopped completely or these codes are of limited value and the huge environmental damages will continue during the crackdown and cleanup of the mess there needs to be inquire a requirement that the property owners are held accountable and legally and monetarily so that it's a greater problem for them to be illegal and the fines collected from enforcement would be huge it would adequately cover the cost of the environmental cleanup 250 to 300 million dollars being made here already where is this money going and where can it be promoted and and sent to you to be able to help with these issues we need to stop the belief that these proposed ordinance ordinances will mitigate environmental safety issues please please wait a little bit longer let's hear everybody's comments let's listen to the comments that people submitted based on the EIR and just wait a lot longer to get more community people to come out and and let you know how they feel about being up in the mountains thank you thank you morning good morning i'm wall pains i've commented on this quite a bit the county argues that substituting the CEQA statutory exemption sp 94 rather than completing certification the EIR allows the cannabis regulations to be adopted and implemented quickly without spending the time necessary to defend a certified EIR this is exactly what i'm arguing against the county needs to defend all the EIR requirements and then i think the county's required to follow them not discretionary slow this process down a line to allow time to adequately implement all environmental issues through an EIR process and give detail analysis especially of the mitigation the enforcement the emphasis on speed and belief that these codes will greatly reduce the illegal black market can be shown to be in doubt delay your decisions on this complex issue until fully meeting the concerns of the EIR history has shown little regard for following any rules and regulations by the majority of people involved in the cannabis industry the amount of money involved in this industry is hard to quantify the draft EIR stated the value of the cannabis crop already quote 250 to 300 million dollars and probably much more the county's most valuable crop is strawberries which is only 219 million to give you an example of the difference between how much money is in this business just a political power of the growers at an issue which needs to be addressed as it could as it could result in invalid reasoning and implementing these codes there's too much money to enforce it on a parcel by parcel basis it suspiciously looked like it's already been wielded the power because a lot of these regulations are not following we don't even know the the comments on the EIR we need an environmental impact report to be finished and certified thank you good morning if we could just try and keep the reaction to a minimum just to make sure everybody gets a chance to speak go ahead good morning hey good morning my name is Darren I was born and raised in Santa Cruz County we have a 37 acre organic farm in Coralitas a couple comments on the proposed codes just the first one is robin mentioned oh first let me thank them and also commend them for everything they've done you guys made a great selection on your staff a couple comments regarding the canopy limit as you guys already mentioned propagation is very important to minimize impact and organic farming and I think it's important that we dovetail the state's determination of a nursery so juvenile and teenage plants don't be included in that and then also with the generators permanent natural gas powered generators they're attached to utility should be recognized as different than importable gas or diesel power generator that could potentially cause you know environmental damage I guess the thing I'd most push for is that the staff has discretion to you know make sure that everything's compliant and looks good and in accordance with regular organic standard practices thanks thank you good morning welcome back hi you guys already know me I'm still Eric Hoffman and as you know I served on c4 for district 3 I'm here today as a as the chairman of the committee for environmental Santa Cruz see our group volunteers to volunteers from our group of volunteers promote the creation of cannabis policies that do not cause harm socially environmentally or economically there are 58 counties in california all of them have to deal with cannabis we would be smart to look at what they are doing what we did is undertook analyzing all the different counties and we found some interesting information 42 counties prohibit commercial cultivation entirely only 11 counties allow it most of these have achieved a better balance between the needs of legal cannabis of the legal cannabis community the environment residential areas and public safety has has um then our our ordinance I think we're unique and that we have a more diffused system that spreads throughout the whole entire county and impacts more people who want nothing to do with cannabis I I think there are very I think I'm sorry I think I think at the very least the ordinance should identify identify and focus on the following areas identify rural neighborhoods give them the same protection of suburban neighborhoods if you look at the example of san matel county to have done this very well by using g gsi technology be a leader in restricting the use of anticoagulant rodenticides especially in the wildlife rich forest lands we are a little disappointed when we weren't invited to be part of the new ordinance writing team we've done a lot of work in this area thank you okay that's it all right thank you morning good morning I'm tom hern I'm here representing the rural bunny dune association I'd like to start by thanking the planning department for preserving the ban on commercial cannabis cultivation on the smaller parcels in the coastal zone plus one mile we believe this measure will go a long way toward preserving our phenomenal biodiversity that is known in the scientific circles around the world the idea of allowing this area to be inundated by activities associated with poisoning wildlife and introducing pesticides to the environment is repentant our reading on the newly proposed regulations reveals what appears to be a retreat to what the county did several years ago in 2014 within a governor Gavin Newsom reported in his pathways report to counties and municipality municipalities throughout California that the single out Santa Cruz county is an example of a combination of permissive rules with weak regulatory system that was basically a failure in the latest version of 7.128 we see this weakness reappear by grandfather and then growers on the timber preserves who were part of the green rush cited by Gavin Newsom in 2014 instead of using the 2013 pre-green rush date for grandfathering which has already been approved by the supervisors the latest version of 7.128 rewards people who were lured to this county on the premise that they could cash in on the cannabis cultivation grounds well that was made possible by a permissive regulatory environment it looks like we're going back to that same regiment again in reviewing the new proposed regulations we see no substantial evidence any of the critical science based suggestions that were made in response to the draft environmental impact report have been incorporated it appears that the cannabis growers issues have been addressed without including suggestions or inclusions from us and many others who spent a lot of time trying to protect the environment and rule residential neighborhoods would like to improve the way we do business on these topics as we believe it's important to all of our citizens and thank you thank you good morning welcome good morning my name is Craig Reinerman i'm a professor emeritus of sociology and legal studies at UCSC where i taught a course on drug issues for many years and i've done a lot of my own research and scholarly publishing on this set of issues i was a member of the blue ribbon commission on cannabis legalization in california convened by lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom i appreciate all the thoughtful work that's going into this draft ordinance by county supervisors and staff and others has many useful provisions that are the result of good intentions all around but i remember the old saying about the materials used to pave the road to hell and so i worry about the cumulative effect of all these regulations like you i've heard about the problems caused by a few growers and i wouldn't want those problems in my neighborhood either but i worry about the unintended consequences that public policy based on worst case scenarios huge and you know that's usually not good public policy and i worry that all the restrictions on parcels in the coastal zone canopy sizes fences setbacks inspections and so on will amount to a de facto not in my backyard sort of huge capital costs for small growers small producers i worry that the more permissive approach recommended in the eir the draft eir is being supplanted by more and more regulations restrictions that will prove impossible to meet for many of the small producers who have served the consumers medical marijuana patients in particular so well for so many years so in short it seems to me that a lot of the problems that you're trying to address are the product of black market in prohibition and you don't want to have so many restrictions that you recreate that black market thank you thank you we could just keep the reactions to a minimum to make sure this flows well good morning welcome hi my name is tim tauncing i've lived in the santa cruz mountains for 35 years i wanted to speak out to the supervisors to not allow commercial cultivation in santa cruz county except for in ca or agricultural areas probably in the power valley due to fire danger i noticed when i walked in here you have a picture where the agenda is and that's of the loma fire which was started by a greenhouse with faulty wiring for a dope grow after reading the regulations that you have there's a not going to bite by sequa not no eir i think this is going to be the biggest land use change in santa cruz county and for there not to be an eir or sequa is unimaginable conversion from forestland to commercial commercial agriculture also a diversion of surface water which will cause the extinction of co salmon and steelhead there's seems to be no regulation to road insides which have secondary kills which many animals are suffering from there doesn't seem to be any fire safety regulations or guidelines there's no fire sprinkler systems for greenhouses no access for cal fire no mandatory water storage no mention of pressurized water systems for sprinklers i think you should maintain the f1 guidelines cal fire also something that's very disturbing is there's no duty to enforce which my experience with the planning department seems right up their alley i really feel by living in the mountains that i'm being used as a guinea pig so the tax money come in from a few dope growers and my main concern of course is fire i mean here we are in february and it's as dry as almost as dry as august and it looks like next summer it's going to be extremely dry and if there's a fire god forbid in the santa cruz mountains there's going to be a lot of houses that are going to be destroyed and a lot of people are going to lose their lives thank you again thank you good morning good morning my name is judie i'm a member of the board of directors of the los cumbres conservation corporation which is a residential community of 120 homes the board is concerned about the potential changes to the cannabis cultivation ordinance we have seen three fires in the past five years coming from an area known as lost valley which is an area known to the local police known for lawlessness and illegal drug activity and most notably the recent bear fire that was caused by a person that was attracted to this lawlessness lawlessness of that area basically in summary our community community wants residential neighborhoods protected from odors fences generator noise and criminal activities unlicensed guns and security lights we want homes and forests protected from fires caused by faulty wiring and flammable chemicals we want wildlife protected from road insides petasites and sensitive habitats protected from erosion and sedimentation effluence and drinking water protected from depletion and contamination and forests and other wildlife habitat protected from conversion to cannabis cultivation and we and we want protective regulations so that no longer that no longer attract growers from around the world thank you thank you morning hey i'm steve wiser with santa cruse can of firearms we are currently a greenhouse grow in ca also last week we became what i believe is the first if not one of the first state license grows we've worked really really really hard to do things the right way i just wanted to mention that the state guidelines for canopy and the county guidelines for canopy are different the difference is the county regulation says that any cannabis plant can only be up to all your total the plants can be up 22 000 square feet the state regulation says that your mature plants can be up to 22 000 square feet for us as a cultivator doing things the right way that's about the difference is about two-thirds of our production cutting two-thirds of our production and that's just math if that ordinance goes in as it is it will essentially close our business thank you thanks thank you morning welcome good morning i'm tiamia stillsenthaler of lompico and i'm here because i would appreciate at the tax money that's being raised proposal is put towards more environmental and safety regulation of illegal growing as you know we've got double the force of people that want to come out and have no intentions of following any regulations this has been a huge issue in our neighborhood and it's leading to several safety challenges and environmental damages there's also serious environmental and safety issues with your draft ordinance that should be addressed the first of course is fire every applicant should have to meet with cal fire and the local and or the local fire department to assure that we don't have more loma fire type of situations there is going to be rampant pesticide and fertilizer use allowed in areas that traditionally have not been agricultural so you're going to have fertilizer runoff in areas where you did not see this before and we have virtually no recourse in that tree removal we've got illegal growers coming in removing trees with no no regulation whatsoever and this is leading to mudslides one of which on our road the county had to come and clean up at the cost of several thousand dollars people are damning up the creeks and it's overflowing when it actually rains so there's going to be cost to the county if we if you don't start dealing with the illegal growers as well and legal growths i don't know what the no duty to enforce is about but as you know if you're going to have an ordinance you need to enforce that um and the county should be responding to our comments that we made on the eir and i'm a i'm not understanding how you're going to get applicants to follow sequa i would like i would like to see that and writing what that's going to look like because as you know the county is subject to following sequa like every other in municipality and county within the state thank you good morning welcome good morning uh kevin college uh i'm gonna have to rush here uh 10 days ago i read that the county was dumping its 450 thousand dollar eir uh this was a break the eir was junk it failed to address cumulative impacts which is at the core of the california environmental quality act and uh as another example it faked the water demand assessment and didn't even venture a guess about the impact on county water resources now we have two new ordinances springing forth the levels of review and public notice they're i find them insulting the z is the planning committee the planning director we need access to level level six and level seven approval these ordinances fail to describe at least of all to protect rural neighborhoods r a land especially and homeowners like myself are being sacrificed to a convenient error people in town get sitting in front of their tv and smoke pot but for me this is a 27 hundred foot commercial greenhouse on demolished forest a hundred feet from my house this is a big deal for us the board set off pop pod speculation in 2014 with an unnecessary ordinance and now this largely in uh illegal industry which is occupying the mountains where i live mr cap it it's not all being shoved into your end of the county please understand that we're subject to it there are 58 counties in california as mr as eric mentioned only 12 of permitted cultivation in santa claire it's illegal and moderates limited to ag and industrial only i appreciate supervisor friend's uh position on this it was fundamental this would have solved the whole issue samiteo has defined neighborhoods and mapped them in gis and throwing a thousand foot buffer around them thank you and the no duty to enforce clause is a ringer it's like saying you can write a law and ignore it thank you good morning welcome back your front page picture front page sure good morning welcome i'm bob strickland i live in bonny dune i sent you all a copy of the samiteo plan and um i'm here to say that commercial businesses don't belong in um residential areas um that applies to commercial of any type of particular to the cannabis industry when asked the other day about the looking at the adjacent counties the response was we were really too rushed we didn't have time to look at these counties i took a look at samiteo county in santa claire right now santa claire is on a moratorium know how no way until they get a chance to sort it out samiteo is being more progressive they're saying cannabis can be allowed in commercial and ag they are then going down the path or drawing circles around all the neighborhoods putting a thousand foot buffer is a it doesn't belong inside those circles um in case you don't get a chance to bring here's a path here's a page of dearborn park all you can see is trees here's a usgs topo map where you can see little boxes which represent the houses i'd like to put these into the packet please and they show that samiteo approach is to protect the neighborhoods in addition if we are going to allow grows in residential neighborhoods the um the fact that most of them seem to be level three maybe a level five that means that the neighbors aren't going to know what's happening until the project is nearly complete and i feel fairly comfortable that the planning department doors they're going to need a hui norton revolving door because we're not going to be happy when we see these pictures you had the beautiful pictures of the nice grow sites that does not look like a residential front yard view to me they wouldn't happen in west lakes thank you okay good morning my name is bill comfort bill can you please pull the microphone down oh yeah that's a short guy uh i believe staff is rushing too much to get cannabis regulations in place any regulations the eir whether it is finished or not has cost the tax payers as we have said before more than 450 000 not to mention the staff cost and commenter time the public who should have a voice in this process have not been allowed to see the comments on the eir i doubt that many of you have seen these comments the meeting is intended to obtain approval to eliminate the eir and because it is now learned that it isn't necessarily required in its place the staff is proposing regulations with the word discretion used many times the discretion proposed regulations affords the county is inconsistent with the damage potential of errors in their judgment it is ludicrous that the that a resident can incur larger penalties for building infractions than a grower for not following regulations considering the damage potential of the grower to the environmental resources and neighbors further changes in zoning use further changes in zoning use requested by the grower uh does not necessarily consistently notify neighbors and that is not right there is today's proposed action should be proposed postponed until the board of supervisors and the public has had at least 30 business days to read the comments and digest what the staff is recommending thank you thank you good morning welcome my name is phyllis trickland lived in uh san cruz county for four years i'm 37 up in a rural neighborhood first of all i want to recognize the commitment that all of the board members here have made in preserving residential nature of rural communities by including the protection for the coastal zone plus one mile and and at least in this present form rejecting the reduction in minimum parcel sizes and canopy limits in r.a. neighborhoods thank you however i'm outraged by proposed master plan operation as written it is potentially potential to create a compound of up to five adjacent five acre parcels with a single manufacturing operation to process up to 25 000 square feet of cannabis canopy per harvest all of this in the middle of a residential neighborhood with only one occupying resident and is that possible this scenario should be very worse if the if the minimum parcel sizes are changed this violates the premise of an r.a. residential neighborhood as residential concentrating manufacturing in neighborhoods also increases exposure to criminal activities given a high value and high concentrated products produced packaged and stored on site um on my first trip to dispensary this week i was impressed with the level of security and professionalism i also learned that a single enhanced chocolate bar costs 29 dollars making a shoebox worth over 1200 dollars i believe that most residents that assume that like dispensaries and you've got dispensaries right manufacturing will occur in a highly secure location zoned for commercial use i don't think the majority of voters that supported legalization of recreational cannabis for adults imagine that they might have a manufacturing facility next door thank you thank you thank you morning morning my name is jesse reverto and i just wanted to first say thank you to everybody to the board for having this meeting i'm sure this is the beginning of a very long conversation of a five-year conversation that we've been all working really hard to push through this and with everyone involved in the community so thank you to all the departments county council the staff the licensing office okay moving forward i wanted to make some suggestions and one is for manufacturers that are trying to operate or cannot operate in the mountains and i noticed that you had the c2 zoning in there in the 7.128 the c2 zoning is allowed in conjunction with a cultivation site in 13.10 it's allowed in conjunction with a dispensary i'm asking that possibly c2 could be allowed for manufacturing at the discretion of a licensing manager and the reason is it is already so difficult to find any proper locations and there are some c2 places that maybe this will work for it and if the licensing manager has that discretion it'll allow us to possibly operate secondly there is a line that says only trained on closed loop systems only trained officials could be in the room there's several instances where you have other people cleaning and different stations where they need to walk through other owners that want to view the machines working and i can think of you know many different instances where people might be walking through maybe just change that to allowing nobody to touch the machines unless they've been trained and then again canopy i agree with what they have to say it could cause problems on the state when you pay for a state license it's very expensive and if you're actually only growing 2,000 square feet producible the taxes are going to be enormous or it'll be it won't match thank you good morning thank you guys all for your help on this rob keener third generation cannabis grower and medicine maker from our region of santa Cruz which i love this place so much i have a lot of pride behind what we do when we make we are not a normal town of california i know we all look down the road this and that but we are a bubble that has been watched for years and years and years of making and creating amazing medicine and cannabis for the world we're going to be probably one of the next amsterdam's i met a gentleman here that was here for five days to consume cannabis from new york the day that caliungram had opened up kind peoples and had a great conversation with him which realized we have this big bubble of people are about to come and spend money in our town so i what was concerning to me was our canopy i'm getting cut back i'm going to see a out in watsville we're taking over an old dead flower farm cut flower business we're planning on giving all the staff there keep them on board we're switching flowers from roses to cannabis and provide jobs make more money for the for the town you know and if we're cutting our canopy in half we're just cutting our money in half which then is cutting jobs in half and they're trickles down the line then we're going to be also relying on monorail san jose surrounding areas to then now feed the the beast pretty much you know me and everyone that's going to be consuming here we'll eat up that canopy so quick in this region it'll be gone like that then now we're we're going to be having to have the neighbors come in spend or drop their medicine off here they take their money back to san jose monorail does nothing for our community so if we have some kind of a little bit and also i'm a creator of cannabis crossbreeder i use pollen and male female nothing genetic modification just let nature do its course because we're actually trying to pinpoint certain illnesses and sicknesses that certain varietals we're dealing with thousands and thousands of varietals it's not just like red wine red white and you know rosé or something we have thousands of combinations of all these things to then squish out certain things for really sick people thank you morning welcome hello uh only two minutes so just a general thank you to everyone for all your work that you've put into this um did want to uh respond to just a few concerns that i've heard about commercial operations in r asu and tp and just want to remind everyone that r a is actually called rural agriculture so it and clearly in the description agriculture is use for those type of parcels as well as su and tp also lists agriculture as a use and an experiment for people in bonnie dune aptos and such uh just for the fun of it if you go to gis and look for some large clearings you'll find multiple 20-acre 30-acre uh wineries that are on tpsu and r a land and then for the fun of it if you actually to scale put uh proposed cannabis canopy on there you'll find that most of them it's the cannabis area of even up to 10 000 square feet excuse me is just a sharpie dot in the middle of one of those wineries which is fully legitimate so just to put things in perspective i also want to uh say thank you for considering on tp parcels that uh existing legal development that has goes back even decades on certain parcels should be considered for cannabis cultivation there's some properties that are already set up for plug-and-play without any alteration to the environment whatsoever um that are are perfect for cannabis um we even had a pre-licensed inspection that uh stated that there was an already a cleared area from uh historic development um and just want to say this isn't just an economic issue this is a cultural issue here in santa cruz we have a bus stop celebrating an lsd party 50 years ago thank you so i hope we can continue in that line thank you thank you good morning welcome good morning um we could keep the reaction just down so we can everybody feels welcome speaking please go ahead thanks for having me my name's tommy uh ccr 733 i'm here to represent a commercial lag 10 acres plus um something that was mentioned at last meeting briefly was uh the definition of indoor i'm here to kind of just mention you know there is a very very big difference between indoor greenhouse and outdoor you know that being said i think it should be taken into account if there is a foundation if there's a slab if the walls of the structure are firm or hard that can be deemed indoor but just having power run to a greenhouse you got to look at agricultural practices and history that has never been deemed indoors so if you guys could relook at that and maybe just address the issues there because if you look at selenus you look at watsonville correlate is that's an agricultural community they've been doing this for generations and it's never been considered indoor power has been run to greenhouses for years so if you guys could just maybe take a look at that and then you know one more thing you know as far as enforcement on the black market i just want to mention you know dispensaries have no limit on season clone sales to the general public so before you enforce it make sure that the dispensaries aren't giving people too many plants so thank you morning good morning give thanks for everything you guys have done to get us this far and we look forward to working together to make this happen here in santa cruz county i speak for a lot of small farms in the santa cruz mountains my property has been inspected twice and we are in the process of getting our license but it's becoming very difficult for us to see a future in all the regulations that are being established right now the fire code has put us under an f1 and f1 is factory and industrial and we are not a factory and we are not industrial and we need to be declassified to a group u which is how all the nurseries in town can grow their roses and succulents with lighting and have plants growing so if we got declassified to a group u this would help us to do everything we need to do because right now they say we can dry in a steel crate which is pretty much fireproof other than the floor is wood so the if it did catch fire it would burn out on the floor it couldn't go anywhere but without the use of a dehumidifier and a fan in the drying room it would turn to mold and we would lose our whole crop that we work so hard every year because santa cruz county it's just we live by the ocean the fog comes in a lot of us lose our plants to mold before we even dry it but without the dehumidifier and the lights we can't dry it properly and have product to sell now also we can't even grow in the greenhouses or the hoop houses without lighting because cannabis flowers with 12 hours of light 12 hours of darkness so we need supplemental lighting nothing big no ballasts no thousand watts you know just 25 watt bulb on a construction extension cord 20 feet long 24 feet long they come in and they put a bulb every four feet and a fluorescent light bulb and we just need six of those to do 3000 3000 square feet of canopy in our hoop houses and altogether that power can run on one breaker 18 amps thank you thank you good morning welcome hello my name is sandra barron i live in the county just south just north of watsonville and um so it makes sense for the licensing officials to have some discretionary powers but this new ordinance has way too much and there's a lot of potential problems with that but one i would like to address is the inability to perceive or to quantify cumulative impacts when you're looking at each parcel as a separate unit and this manifests in a lot of ways obviously cumulative impacts to wildlife habitat and water has been brought up many times you remove wood rats from one parcel it's a lot different than removing them over the landscape which could have effect on elves in other wildlife and cumulative impacts to neighborhoods but um the ERR had a proposal that if you increase the number of licenses it would trigger further environmental review and there's nothing like that in this new ordinance and increasing the number of licenses is also a cumulative impact that you would never capture by this tactic of looking at one parcel at a time um as far as um illegal grows in the mountain and trying to bring more people into illegal grows i want to point out that if you did just grow on ag land you would collect taxes and still have plenty of money for enforcement for any black market grows that were in the mountains so that wouldn't help with that okay thank you thank you good morning welcome morning my name is robert kediama we are cutflower greenhouse growers in south county our family's been growing flowers for 70 years this year and we've been growing in south county for 50 years and i'll tell you that in the last 20 years probably 90 of the flower growers in the central coast have closed due to either economic or imported competition we our family would like to continue growing cut flowers we love santa cruz and we believe that there's an opportunity doing some leasing or work with cannabis that can help supplement our business so we can continue to grow cut flowers in this area um one proposal that's put into this uh current piece is this idea of co-location and we understand the um the idea behind the co-location and we're we're open to considering it but there was a piece in that i think that would be a deal killer for us anyway and that is the where it's written each lines each licensee must be held liable for the violations committed by any other licensee participating in the location agreement so i don't believe that we we do lease land to other growers or other tenants but we are not liable for things like whether they follow regulations whether they pay their taxes whether they treat their employees in fair manner we will take care of issues if they don't take care of pieces in the lease but i think you really should consider making landlords liable for tenants uh also there was a piece that was talking about odor mitigation and scrubbers in greenhouses which is very very difficult to implement very costly and really where we're located we believe unnecessary so thank you very much for everything and listening to us thank you very much thank you Robert good morning welcome morning my name is jean recliff i'm from felton and i came here primarily to discuss the process i've commented as a member of several bodies on the draft dir give a little bit background i'm a botanist and so don't worry about the gmo it's not the same as selective breeding but i worked in commercial agriculture for more than 10 years i taught in grave pest management i'm involved with local water i'm coming at this from a number of different directions but my primary one is i've served as a planning commissioner for 13 years and i understand the pressure that planning departments and staff are under when there's a huge economic driver and that's what we've got here it's a huge economic driver there's a potential for great revenues that would support enforcement i understand staff's comment about the the language but my concern is if the money would be directed appropriately and as far as the process of skirting the eir process i'm adamantly opposed to that and i'll tell you why we're discussing externalities these are people who have nothing to gain from the process we don't use marijuana we're not making money from it we don't sell support to anybody so it's really frustrating that we are going to be affected particularly in the mountains but other places potentially as well i speak as somebody who has a huge air quality problem and there's rules against it and we can't get enforcement where i live so i know these things happen not because anybody wants to but because there isn't political will behind it but i do want to address but our previous speaker said i think that's an excellent point when i was working in commercial ag in southern california during the recession marijuana production was one of the things that we had addressed to make it through the recession fortunately we recovered prior to that but commercial agriculture is an appropriate place for this you have skilled people you have regulations in place i endorse that strongly i think this is an industry that could do a lot of good for the county if done appropriately please don't skirt the eir requirements thank you thank you good morning hi good morning i want to say thanks for you guys all being here and putting this thing together this is great one thing that hasn't been really addressed is the 20-foot wide fire access route i think this is it's important but also in many properties up in the hills aptos correlate us in santa cruz mountains almost all driveway easement roads are made that were made 30 plus years ago that are only 12 to 15 feet wide now if you think about this you're gonna all of a sudden have this beautiful property that you can establish a gross side on that will be perfect for everything with a well and everything's fine no tree cutting but now you're gonna go back and you're gonna have to cut trees to widen the road build bridges it's going to end up costing tens of thousands of dollars i have three properties right now that will be more than perfect to grow on i don't have to cut any trees there's huge clear clearing's already set up for it but now there's hill sides on one side and a cliff on the other that as of now a fire truck can drive up to the residents right now and be perfectly fine now i'm very very much fire protection is huge for me i think all greenhouses should have fire protection i've had fires in my time growing as of right now and have costed me a lot of money so i'm not looking past that at all i just want you guys to maybe look at this and really take each property as a potential good place to grow and not have to go above and beyond the all the fire restrictions thank you thank you good morning i'm nancy macy and i appreciate the opportunity to speak in this public body i'm representing the valley women's club environmental committee for the san lorenzo valley and i first want to mention that the valley women's club voted unanimously the board voted unanimously uh to support the coalition for environmental santa Cruz we feel that their evaluations their study their research has been extremely well done and we hope that you will take the time personally as our supervisors to look over that information and we are also wanted to reiterate all those environmental concerns especially the rodenticides the herbicides and pesticides let's make this all organic and what grows are allowed we want to urge restrictions in r.a. and and t.p. i totally agree with the gentleman who talked about the massive acreage of wineries and the environmental destruction that they have actually caused over time if you were driving up bear creek road and david bruce was first constructed and for over five years after that the road was covered with mud constantly so um you know we really are worried about erosion control i would like you to personally read the comments put in by the san lorenzo valley water district their comments are extremely valuable um on the de ir and we'll be very helpful in guiding your uh thoughts about the concerns about water in the san lorenzo valley and in all of the mountain areas the last thing i want to point out is that most developments in the san lorenzo valley are held to a water consumption level that will not deplete the aquifer and if you look at the cumulative impact of all these wells that's going to be a big problem thank you for the opportunity to speak thank you good morning welcome back good morning valery corral with wamm and i want to thank you for your years of endurance um this has been this has been a long haul some of you have been here almost as long as i haven't watched some of you grow up and some of you grow old with me um i think our our first public meeting was held at scap when john was a director this santa cruz age project um i want to address a few things one is that um the issues of small farming and rural farming is profound and if we had only had this much opportunity to input around not only wineries and but all of agriculture it'd be quite remarkable and i think this is a phenomenal opportunity for us to really see an outcome that we can govern um again back to compassionate access so even if a lack of personal experience um lay at the core of the state's legislative failure to include a mechanism for compassionate access each of us citizens are commit communities the state as a whole and every corporate structure have a social responsibility and to ignore this has profound human consequence santa cruz has been at the vanguard of the medical marijuana movement and continuing to build on the foresight that sustained a generation and led to the recognition of civil liberty for patients and eventually legalization of cannabis has brought with it an opportunity for increased tax revenue we have supported and encouraged an environment that nurtured the compassionate access model while and while governments cannot legislate compassion surely efforts to sustain the momentum that has distinguished santa cruz is fueling an even greater potential for our community and to promote replicable compassionate model the answer may be some kind of tax credit small business benefit enticement program reallocation of funds but there has to be something that you can do to help otherwise we cannot do it we cannot serve people and i must tell you that that's happening now people cannot access expensive cannabis thanks so much good morning welcome hi my name is juji and i have been an herbal medicine maker for 30 years i'm very late to the cannabis using that i started about 10 years ago because i was had a lot of cancer patients and they were saying you know there really is a use for cannabis it's not just about getting stoned and it was really schooled and it actually helped to cure my migraines so i know that this is a real thing i didn't travel for six years it works and i've been helping tons of people with ms and serious diseases um and dr deborah malko is no longer in this community but helped me get started along with her and i work closely with doctors and want to continue but i also noticed that i didn't see anything in the regulations on online sales so that's something i don't do but i am interested in just as a manufacturer and a distributor i would like to see that that gets included i know that there was a comment last week that distribution and manufacturing were just kind of stuck in there and you can see it on the application that it just says for cultivation so i crossed it out and just wrote manufacturing and went for distribution so i can get my approval i'm so excited that you are allowing for shared and co-location for manufacturing distribution in a community kitchen because we have very limited areas where we can do manufacturing and that's how it would would be best to be done there's areas in watsonville and there's commercial kitchens there and just like we have incubator kitchens i would like to see that happen in santa cruz more so that it's um co-located but we cannot be responsible for any other licensees we are only responsible for ourselves legally it doesn't make sense for me to be responsible for somebody else who is also using the space if my area is partitioned off for storage the other thing is in terms of figuring out health and safety for online sales there's a way to make it so that everybody has to be 21 to even enter the site thank you okay thank you very much good morning welcome back good morning thank you thank you to all of you for all your hard work i'm so excited we're moving forward although i don't know that i want to go at warp speed my name is brenda chadwick i've been an advocate for the smaller cannabis growers in the county including myself since the first c4 meeting i attended and i probably attended 95 percent of those during those meetings a lot of focus was on the larger on larger businesses i kept trying to bring up small growers and growers that grows that happen in your in residences and i was so excited to learn that the county had a home occupation ordinance where people can carry on commercial activities in their home as long as it doesn't as long as it's not larger than 200 square feet or 20 percent of your total space i have a very small garden in my home it's 100 square feet in order to mesh with what the personal medical garden was but that small garden pays for half of my costs and if we can have the only thing that i can't do is sell it i can grow it i can use it but i can't sell it because of the new regulations so i'm hoping that we can look at that a little further my house was part of the eir they came and visited it's safe i i'm sure very few of my neighbors have any clue that i do anything in my house other than go in and out of the gate there's a lot of people out there like me and i hope you consider that thank you thank you good morning welcome pat mello first let me thank you for all the work it's been a long process and i think there's a lot of good stuff in this draft i also think that there's a lot of agreement in the room nobody wants any sort of the negative effects negative environmental impacts negative negative effects or negative neighborhood effects and personal effects that unregulated cannabis is cost in some instances and we've taken a long time and i'll make this point over and over is that it we are so afraid of what unregulated cannabis was that we are terrified to put in the solution to that unregulated system which is regulation um i'm really happy about bits of this ordinance that include people i'm very distraught about the pieces that of this industry the people that aren't included for two reasons first you know as we see with brenda you know before us is that people are losing their livelihoods you know and these are not wealthy people from out of town these are community members you know i was here when the wrigglies plant closed and everyone was saying oh death of the working class this is much much bigger than corporate chewing gum and it's going to have huge effects mostly towards the least able in this industry to go forward so it's unfortunate you've started with you know accommodating the largest and still need to accommodate the smallest i would like to have it go in the other direction but par for the course one point that i'd really like to make about the environment is that all of these you know associated problems with pesticide use in particular rodenticides the only place you won't be able to use rodenticides legally in this county is when we start licensing cannabis grows if i had enough money i could buy a house in the mountains and pour rodenticide in every corner thank you we could if we could just keep the reactions to a minimum please thank you good morning welcome good morning i just want to thank the board of supervisors for their hard work and for the opportunity to participate in local democracy like this my name is an calisthenic cannabis attorney and just one quick first point before i don't dive into my second the ordinance is provision 7.128.1708 which is a prohibition on some kind of communication regarding a fairly wide variety of pieces of information including pricing details graphics this the way that it's written right now doesn't really provide the public and cannabis operators with a means of understanding what it prohibits i could well this is weird i'm sorry i hope i get some extra time here all right anyways i'll just say it really loud because we want to be we want you to be here okay yeah so anyways um right now they could if read a certain way because it doesn't adequately define what notice is it talks about advertisement and notice it could actually tie the hands of people like distributors and cultivators communicating for example in an email about the price or the kind of stream that they're growing but what i really want to talk about is this county's legacy in compassion just a week ago the state lost the life of Dennis Perron he's the person behind the Compassionate Use Act and really the hero that ensured that so many people across the state were able to get medicine and this county as has been pointed out has a significant legacy in that um right now because you haven't finished your ordinance process you have a unique opportunity to address donated medicine and ensuring that it isn't subject to local tax this county is going to make a lot of money on cannabis but eliminating a local tax for donated medicine something that we've been doing for decades now is a way that will ensure that that legacy continues and we don't have to wait for sick people to start dying or to start becoming sicker because they don't have access to medicine this is going to get solved on the state level but i'm asking Santa Cruz right now to lead on this legacy front California growers association is behind it Oakland's behind it a lot of other places are behind it please make sure the patients can get their medicine thank you thank you okay good morning welcome back morning Trevor Luxon lifetime Santa Cruz resident also an attorney um the county and the ordinance I think could benefit in a lot of ways by bringing it a little bit closer into line with the state uh the state laws in particular the county ordinance doesn't have any regulations for green houses um or excuse me mixed like green houses that's you know a specific category within the state law it you know it was in there for a reason and so we can see that's going to become a very popular type of cultivation in Santa Cruz so you know to kind of gloss that over I think is a mistake I also think uh there's no specific regulations in county ordinance regarding nurseries you know nurseries they have an very very different business model workflow and impact to traditional cultivation and I think that it's important to you know to recognize that and address that also I think just in general bringing the definitions of all the terminology and as close to the state as possible you know it's just going to minimize confusion it's going to make it a lot easier for a lot of people um so I guess my comment would just be as close to the state law as possible is is going to be what's best um also just a big thanks to the board and especially the staff they've really been through a lot to get us to this point um it's been tough I know so uh man that's it thank you okay good morning I would like to start by thanking you all for the efforts here around cannabis it's a different day as we move forward I'd also like to address the Compassionate Use Act of 1996 and the 20 plus years of cannabis cultivation in Santa Cruz that's been allowed that hasn't been a huge impact on our community outside of the taxes imposed and these new regulations making it more and more difficult for folks to access medical cannabis safe clean medical cannabis that said I think everything you're doing is encouraging a promising black market for folks that will continue to endanger our community cut down trees use poisons and grow unregulated cannabis I highly encourage you to make this EIR public as well spend time on it I think it hit home a lot of the points you've been hearing for the past two years I wanted to come up here and just say nothing with my time because that's how I feel it's been for the past two years nothing has been heard in terms of how do we resolve these issues it's a complicated dance I spoke with Cal Fire outside for five plus minutes the F1 occupancy as opposed to you is extremely confusing at the end of the day there is no simple solution to this although from what I understand the EIR made it clear that all inclusiveness is a best solution to protect our lovely community and county I see nothing from measure K and L's taxes going to our community or educating anyone around these dangers of illegal cannabis cultivation that said it seems to focus is profiteering off of cannabis which is not what got it here today it was compassionate use medical use I encourage everyone in this community to come together write a ballot initiative and quit bullshitting good morning welcome my name is Angela Evans and I'm a cannabis business owner I love this community and I love you all you all for being here and sitting through listening to everybody I just want something to be heard from my side which I started from a lot is being in this industry has made me want to be more organic and more biodiversive and create an environment that is good and hearing all these people who say that they are living next to people who are not doing that that's based out of an education and I think that a lot of the things that are done here are created something that's good for a corporation it's not good for people who are going to be compassionate to people it's not going to be people or not going to be cared about money as the bottom line and a lot of the people here who are worried about like things are going on are people who are worried about people who are making money as the bottom line so if we can make something that's more family and maybe something that is going to be good for the growers who are creating an environment that's going to make it more biodiverse that's going to make it better than it was before there should be some sort of benefit to it, that it shouldn't just be taxes that we're always trying to like get above and shouldn't be like the people who are really trying to get this compassion and like what it was historically brought here for into it shouldn't, it just seems like it's diluted in a way like only people with lots of money can make it and those who are trying to make the environment better are sort of just being like brushed aside. So I just don't want that to happen and I would like you to hear that from me. So thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome back. Good morning, Mary Jo Walker. I just wanted to clarify something a previous speaker said in that RA stands for residential agriculture, not rural agriculture is defined in the general plan in the county code as residential property. One of your goals was to protect neighborhoods and communities, these ordinances do not protect rural neighborhoods, you're kidding yourself if you think they do. Other residential neighborhoods have been protected but rural mountain neighborhoods are sacrifice zones as far as I can see. Perhaps it's to satisfy the cannabis industry or for tax revenues, perhaps drafters of the ordinances don't live in these rural neighborhoods, perhaps to share the pain between the North County and the South County. If you really wanted to protect rural communities you could limit cannabis to ag and industrial like Monterey County has or you could limit residential ag or SU in our county or you could draw a thousand foot buffer around the residential parcels like San Mateo County. Monterey and San Mateo have a commitment to protect all of their neighborhoods, not empty platitudes. There may be some concern in South County to share the marijuana burden with North County, I understand that, but we in the mountains have always carried more than our share and always will because the illegal growers can live there. Regarding the level of approval, level six or seven should be required for all discretionary cannabis land use permits that requires a public notice and a planning commission or a board hearing and this is the only transparent way to approve permits. Slow down the process, a 10 day review period which you gave us implies that you don't really care about our input. I have other concerns but I've run out of time. We homeowners have been described as alarmists. Well I am alarmed that a neighbor with five acres can build a 2,700 square foot greenhouse twice the size of my house, 100 feet from my house. I'm alarmed and you would be too. I know every one of you would be too. I think it's shameful and I'm furious that my county would sell me down the river and thousands of other citizens like me. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. Chairman Friend, fellow board members, Bob Berlage, I'm here representing Big Creek Lumber Company and we've submitted numerous documents over time that I'm sure you've reviewed. Our primary position is that we're opposed to cannabis cultivation on TP-zoned lands. As far as I could tell, the agencies that are entrusted with protecting public trust resources in all their correspondence to you have also said that they're opposed to cannabis cultivation on TP. What's really interesting is that individuals and organizations who've come before this board for the last 30 years over the issue are timber harvesting with very divergent opinions and frankly, sometimes at one another's throats also are in complete agreement that it shouldn't occur on TP-z. TP-z is where your enforcement problems are going to be the most difficult and also the, unfortunately, the potential for environmental harm. Document that I submitted to you, if there is going to be cannabis cultivation on TP-z by state law, it will require a conversion permit that has to be done through the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The activities on that conversion by state law cannot inhibit the growing and harvesting of timber, so I'm sure your attorneys will review that as you move forward. This letter, which is from the State Board of Forestry and every county received it in the summer of 2017, points out from the Board of Forestry to every county that you need to appoint an authorized designee to review those conversions. I didn't see that in this ordinance, but I think it's imperative that you put that language in the ordinance because if you don't have an appointed designee, you're not going to have a say as to what goes on in those conversions. So that's critically important. Appreciate your time. Thank you. You have a tough job. Thank you. Good morning, welcome. Gentlemen, ladies, thank you. I think y'all know who I am, Brad Barkin. Green rush is over, everybody. For 20 years, we operated as a safe medicine providing community. Price per pound is now about 500 bucks for outdoor. After $150 trim, $250 food and care, maybe you make about $100 a pound. After 56% total tax out the door, the retail price has doubled. Light tap, poop houses, crushed the price of outdoor. We've already made the distribution for sale and taxation rate have an incredible effect on legal prices. My legal sales are over. My tax, local shops, I can't get into the local shops so my local sales tax days are over until I spend the money on pre-inspection and I hope I have the money to do any changes required. 19 years in the SLV, I bought my land without the desire to grow cannabis just to live there. As a regular cannabis patient, since Prop 215, I began to grow medicine. I have never moved dirt, cut a tree, or diverted water. I live off the grid on solar power, with generator backup, also the way I power my well. I grow completely organically, no pesticides, no poison. I have some gopher chops. My neighbors are aware, nobody objects. I live in TPC on three 10 acre parcels. I own the 48 acres next to me. I did not make enough money to even continue this year with this distribution point in place. I'm using less than 1% of my land. Legalization only put this into the hands of the people with a lot of financial backing who can fight with all your rules and regs and pay your taxes and still make money. The dispensary I just sold can't find enough legal product right now. Their shelves are empty. I now own a local music club with alcohol sales. I don't drink alcohol. I don't like alcohol. It's part of my legal business as a businessman. I had no choice. If you want tax revenue, understand the general economics. Toxation and regulation is killing everyone in this room. Keep it reasonable for the average person to achieve. I'm ready to quit this business. After 40 years of trying to provide safe access, I won't log my land for money. I want to grow cannabis on it. Big Creek doesn't like it because less people will cut redwoods. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning and welcome. And just a reminder, we will take a break soon. Short break, but we will come back to make sure everybody gets hurt. Good morning and welcome. Good morning. My name is Arlene Loving. And thank you for taking so much time to review this. I can see there's so much to consider. I have been lucky to benefit from, after being medically separated from my job at UCSC, having affordable medicine. And I am so grateful to live in this county that really does have compassion in government, not just love for money. And I know that there's no problem too big or too small that love can't solve. And my last name is Loving. And I intend to be part of the solution to continue to help as a volunteer member for WAM. And I hope that you'll use them as a model. They've been successfully growing on a shoestring and providing medicine to both people who can afford to donate like me when I started. And those who now, like myself, have had the cost of living in Santa Cruz Eclipse, our income. So I believe there's a way to both keep homeowners safe and the community safe from a black market that you don't wanna encourage. And also to use this wonderful collective that is known internationally as a gold standard for how to operate a growing collective. So Valerie Corral and her former husband, Michael Corral, who I think is still somewhat local, would be two good resources along with organic farmers, organic farmers like the gentleman who spoke. It's possible to have safe growing. WAM's never had a fire in over 20 years of operation. And we've grown in the mountains, in areas where people have homes nearby. So there are ways to be safe. Thank you for considering all of us. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome. How's it going? David Berti, I live in Santa Cruz County. And I wanted to thank you for your support, even considering this kind of legislation. Time will look back. This is a watershed moment across the US, California. We're on the right side of history. Let's stay on the right side of history. 15 years from now, this is gonna look like the winery. There's gonna be a tasting room. You're gonna be able to go to a bed and breakfast for cannabis. I mean, really, if you look forward to where we are, you know, we're definitely heading in one direction. And let's keep the momentum going. And thank you for the EIR. I like a lot of things in it. And vote yes. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning and welcome. We'll make you the last speaker before we take our short break. Hi, my name is Karina and I'm in District 5. I'm supportive of the EIR. And I think you guys should go ahead with it, not delay. There's investments that have been made. People have to get paid back. And just, I think it's the best thing that ever happened to this county. And I'm for it. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so the board will just take a 10 minute break. Please do maintain your place in line. I apologize though there had to be a cut off and it was you. But we'll be back in 10 minutes. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. If we could re-line up, I know that, yes. We appreciate everybody understanding. Hopefully you had an opportunity to stretch your legs. We're gonna re-provide the opportunity for public comment right now. So if everybody could just finish their conversations, that'd be great. Just wanted. Thank you for your patience. I apologize about that. Good morning and welcome back. That's fine. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Jenna Shankman. I'm with the Coalition Community Prevention Partners. So we specifically focus on prevention for substance use disorder of youth. So we look at access, availability and promotion that kind of things that we know have increased use among youth with alcohol and tobacco and cannabis. First off, I just really would like to appreciate all the staff time that has gone into this very complicated issue. I know that there's a lot of factors that you've been considering and I feel like there's been a lot of dialogue and an effort to include and recognize a lot of those things. And I wanna say as a youth, substance use prevention coalition, we were particularly appreciative and noticed all the care that went into making sure that cannabis at all stages is secure and not visible in the public in order to prevent diversion and promotion to youth, which is something really always, taking a careful look at. So another part of that, which is part of the ordinance but we just wanna stress again is keeping those setbacks from youth sensitive areas, which really helps also with limiting youth access and preventing saturation in the community. We have a number of little sort of tweaks that we thought could make things stronger, but one of the ones that I wanted to specifically highlight is putting something specifically about what a definition of youth appeal would be into manufacturing around edibles and packaging. I know that that is mentioned on the state level, but it just says youth appeal. And we've kind of found without being able to say, what is youth appeal that could get tricky? So like Colorado just specifically banned edibles in the shape of humans, animals and fruit. So thinking about looking at that specifically as well for us and also just noticing too that there was a ban of using substances like alcohol narcotics and cannabis on all different levels of the industry, except for cultivation. So I just thought that was a gap. So thank you. Thank you. Good morning, welcome. Good morning, thank you. My name is Robin Brune. I'm a member of the Valley Women's Club Environmental Committee and I'm very concerned about the decision to abandon the EIR process. I understand some, I went to the Felton meeting and I understand there's some issues whether you're required to do the EIR process or an argument that you don't based on Prop 64. But I think that it's over a third of the speakers today have raised environmental concerns and the established case law on the EIR process basically says that there's a low threshold to trigger an EIR rather than a negative declaration of substantial evidence supports a fair argument that significant impacts may occur. And this is Friends of B Street v. City of Hayward in 1980 case. So there's a lot of case law that basically says it's important to address environmental concerns of a community. So whether or not you can abandon the EIR I don't think it's a wise decision to do that. There's a lot of comments in the draft and I'm very concerned about that. I think that this process is being rushed. We've had a gold rush in California. We're having a green rush. We really don't want a government rush on these issues. This has been a very truncated process between the decision to abandon the EIR and go forward with this alternative process. There's been very, you know, I think I went to the meeting and felt in last week and already we're here. So I think that more time is warranted. The most concern is that the cumulative, the case by case approach does not affect the cumulative effects of the growing and the licensing process. Your discretionary review process lacks transparency and accountability, bumping it up to levels six and seven would give some of that transparency and accountability, but I think there also needs to be very clear published criteria for evaluation for this process and not just criteria, but a hierarchy of values within that criteria. Thank you. Good morning. Jim Coffes from Ben Lomond. I moved to Santa Cruz in 1969. I've lived in the San Lorenzo Valley for over 30 years and I'm also a member of the Valley Women's Club Environmental Committee and the Valley Women's Club I served on the board for four years. I'm gonna quickly go through some things that I don't think have been addressed today. The focus of cannabis conversation in this county for the last four or five years has been around all the problems that could exist and they've ignored all the promise that is available. And I think that if we tried to change that lens a little bit it would allow us to come up with a better solution to the problems that we're trying to address. I mean, too often we're creating problems where they aren't and oftentimes that leads us down a road that has gotten a win. Secondly, I wanna talk about agricultural activity. Cannabis is a plant. Growing it is an agricultural activity. Everybody in the county is permitted to grow six cannabis plants of any size they want. And just like they can grow six or 60 tomato plants and they can take those tomato plants and they can sell them to their neighbors or they can make ketchup and sell that to their neighbors. There's a big difference between small scale, home based agriculture and commercial agriculture. Big time commercial agriculture and lumping it all together is a mistake. You can't look at one and see the other. There's a lot of opportunities in small scale agriculture that we should support. Thank you. Good morning and welcome. Good morning. Good morning. Hi, my name is Kathy Toner. I live in Bonnie Dune. I also wanna echo the thanks to all the board and to the staff and I know, and I'm really encouraged by Robin's comments that this is a work in progress. As you can see, there's a lot of advice, Robin, for how you can strengthen this. I've been to a lot of these meetings and I'm struck in this meeting by what I hear which I think is you're hearing from some new voices in the community. You're hearing from grassroots groups that I haven't heard in these meetings before and I think the community is really waking up to this process and what's at stake here. And so I really encourage you to hear those voices and I think for every one of those voices who are raising concerns about the EIR process, about growing in the mountains, about the fire safety, they represent dozens and scores of other people who couldn't be here. And what I'm hearing is a questioning of this diffused model that we've been worried about for a long time. Many of these issues around enforcement, around mitigation, around limiting negative impacts could be addressed by concentrating in those areas where this product is suitable to grow and manufacture. And in my view, that's not TP or TPC. I totally think it's too little, too late to try to grow in those areas. They're not suited to commercial cultivation of this product. For the watershed issues, for the rodenticide issues, the ones that you've heard about so much. And the November 2016 cutoff date is makes no sense at all in terms of the principles that have been guiding this. I concur that if we're going to take the neighborhood protection seriously, it needs to be defined. And we know that other counties have done that. The level of approval in the interests of public transparency and engagement and accountability, that must be strengthened to six or seven. I agree that whether if there's not a recrutable EIR done, then we do need a serious mechanism and I have not seen it yet for taking into account cumulative environmental impacts. And I just want to say. Thank you. Can I say one thing? Because I think one thing we can agree on. Thank you. One thing we can agree on is compassionate use. Thank you. Okay. Morning, welcome. Good morning. My name is Michael Mangarelli. I want to thank the supervisors for their time and consideration in this matter. Extra kudos to the staff for all the time and effort past, present and future on this matter. I also want to give kudos to the staff for their recommendation to amend the advertising restrictions in the draft ordinance to reflect or mirror the dispensary ordinance language which I think is a common sense change to that particular piece of language within the ordinance. And I just want to bring up something related to co-licensing and master plans which again I want to give kudos to the staff. I think those great additions to the draft ordinance but I can envision a scenario where adjacent C4 parcels, maybe a class two distributor sees an opportunity to partner with a class one manufacturer, put forth a master plan that shares some of the infrastructure costs. But there's a current at least one licensee resident requirement within the master plan language that I think in that type of a scenario would be impractical, if not impermissible. So perhaps that residence requirement could be tweaked to reflect that if it doesn't include cultivation or if the zoning doesn't allow for residents within that particular setup that it would be waived in that particular setup. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome. Good morning. My name's Heath Barron, lifelong resident. You're a district friend. I had the unfortunate pleasure of recording almost every C4 committee. I think it's committee, right? See a lot of the same faces. See a lot of new faces. Eric Olson in the house? No Eric Olson tonight. If this is a reflection of that process, I fully support an initiative because it just doesn't seem like it's gonna work for this county. That's my comments. Thanks. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome back. Hey, thank you very much. Joshua Rich been part of responsible cultivation. Santa Cruz been working with the county and lobbying and trying to have input with the C4 committee and individual meetings with all of you guys. I just wanted to kind of come up here to speak kind of on the state level and the fact is that we are under emergency regulations by the state right now and there's gonna be a lot of changes and shifts that happen. So the stuff that's happening in this room today is gonna radically change and with the flexibility of the board that should be able to happen. Also wanted to speak on the ERI on the state level that that's been done. So now Santa Cruz isn't subject to be under that. So a lot of people in the room with concerns should really look at the state ERI right now and the information that's in there also. And kind of lastly, it's not really maybe the perfect time but working a lot of different municipalities and watching how the taxes are literally taking businesses. So the balance of the proper tax is really crucial in this discussion, the further discussions we have but appreciate all your time and energy and it's been quite the issue for Santa Cruz. So thank you guys. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for waiting everybody. Good morning. Good morning still. My name is Richard Bartel. I live in Eptos. I submitted a fairly massive suggestions to the DEIR. Never heard back from anybody. I don't know whether it was read or not read or who read it or whether I was right or whether I was wrong. That's a process that has to change. Second of all, one of the things from the beginning that has been very confusing to me is we're spending a lot of time on effort on treating cannabis as special. I don't understand why it's special. What is the difference between growing cannabis and growing strawberries? I'm not sure that there is any but I do know I don't have strawberry farmers moving into next to me. I'm very concerned with what's going on today. The other concern that I really have and it's a big concern if we draft a separate ordinance. We have ordinances now that have fairly restrictive regulations on growing. I have not seen them enforced in my neighborhood. I'm part of Zach's district. I don't think anybody's supposed to be growing in his district. If you'd like a tour, I could probably arrange a tour. I think a lot of other people can. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Cynthia Gingrich and I live in Mr. McPherson's district up near Castle Rock State Park. I was one of the hundreds of people who were evacuated in October for the bear fire and so I don't wanna talk about that. I've only lived in the Santa Cruz mountains for 10 years so I feel like I don't have anything on everyone else. So I wanted to quote from a letter that was written to the environmental document review draft DIR from the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. During the past five years Cal Fire has responded to numerous fires in the Santa Cruz mountains with either the cause of the fire attributed to a cannabis grow operation or having to suppress a fire in around a cannabis grow operation. Both scenarios create conditions that significantly increase the complexity of our suppression activities and have posed significant safety issues and increased risks to our personnel working these fires. A majority of the issues discussed above are directly associated with cannabis growing operations in Timberland. It should be noted that if cannabis growing were to be prohibited on Timberland in Santa Cruz County, most of these issues and associated costs and risks could be avoided. Designating land that has historically been utilized for agriculture, specifically nurseries would be more appropriate in management than converting Timberland to cannabis cultivation. That was just two paragraphs from a three page letter. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Thanks again for waiting. Good morning. Thank you guys for all being here. Just speaking in part for the small time farmers in the Santa Cruz mountains. I think a large problem with the new ordinances is the F1 fire code, largely because we're not the same as a factory or an industrial setup. We have very small operations and in that code it's saying that we're not allowed to use electricity to supply any type of supplemental lighting. And I think if it was changed so that we could actually be approved by a professional electrician, then you would obviously see that there is no fire hazard because we're using only standard 20 amp breakers. There is no high power or three phase power needed. So I think that would come into a factory farm. Because of this, it would basically force us to transport all of our starter plants from another area to our farm once they're ready to be under the sun. But that is a large problem because of the size of the plants. So if we're not allowed to veg out our smaller plants with fluorescent lighting, then we're gonna be forced to bring them in from other places, which can bring a lot of problems with bugs, diseases and the added problems, complications. Thank you. Thank you. Morning. Good morning. I wasn't planning on speaking, but I'd like to thank all of you for being here. My name is Eddie Shevitz. I live up on Loma Prieta. I have a master's degree in horticulture. I was a vineyard and wine consultant for 35 years. I was also a licensed pest control advisor and pest control operator for 35 years. As a result of rear end collision, I went through a dozen years of surgeries. I got stuck on opiates. I grew my own cannabis. It let me get off opiates. My girlfriend contracted terminal cancer. I made her the Rick Simpson oil. She improved to the point that they took her off of hospice. I haven't cleared any trees on my property. I implement erosion control measures. I don't use any rodenticides. If I use any pesticides, they're organic and non-toxic. My neighbors were concerned when I set up my grow with visions of Tommy guns and Mexican cartels. Now they ask me about the medicine. And yet I find myself getting booted out because I'm on an RA parcel that's an acre and a half. I ask you to come up with rules that don't preclude people, that are cognizant of the environment, that are sensitive to their neighbors, and are dedicated to producing real medicines that save lives. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome. Are there any other speakers after this gentleman? Please, please line up. Now is your chance. Line them up. I also want to talk about the RA designation. It says here that the CA is a one acre minimum, but the RA is a five acre minimum. That's absurd and backwards. Most RA parcels are not, RA zoning is usually one acre minimum, two and a half acre minimum or five acre minimum. You need to pick the one acre or the two and a half acre. The five acre just puts too many people out of business. The industry has been grown by people with it's kind of been a cottage industry and boutique growers are what has provided the special stuff that Santa Cruz has. We don't want to have a monoculture like they're gonna do down in Salinas Valley and Monterey et cetera. That's not gonna be high value stuff. That's gonna be those $100 ton grapes. It's not gonna be like the high quality grapes. Now just near my parcel, probably within a mile or two of my parcel, there's three or four different people growing grapes. Two parcels up just put in about a half acre of grapes. There's three or four places where people are selling lettuce, tomatoes, whatever, little farm stands, where people pull in their driveway to their garage or their barn or whatever. So I don't, and I've grown tomatoes on my property for years and I have a small orchard. So while all of a sudden you decide to put in five acres and say that we can't grow weed, when people are selling tomatoes and lettuce and pomegranates and everything else, that just doesn't measure up. And basically, you know, we're your constituents. You're picking the pockets of your constituents if you stick with five acres. All right, good morning and welcome. Good morning, I'm Ellen Sweeney from Boulder Creek. Thank you all for all your work on this. I have a few concerns since I'm living in the mountains. A few gentlemen mentioned the size and I agree with that. It should just be really small grows that don't take out any trees, don't require grading or a bunch of new roads. And I'm concerned about the watershed. You know, we all need clean water and that's it. We're not getting water from the Delta or Hatch-Hatchy or Twin Tunnels or any of that. So we rely on the water from the river and all the creeks and I don't wanna see that get messed up. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning and welcome. Good morning and thank you for allowing us this opportunity to speak on this very important issue. My name is Rosemary McNear and as a realtor, one of the things that we will not only one but one of the many things is trying to get this understood to the people who own the property and to those who want to purchase property and to make sure that the ordinances have such clarity and transparency that it's not so difficult to understand. I did write a little note yesterday regarding the levels and to us who deal with the levels and the developers and so forth level one, two, three and three, four, five, six and all that stuff is common to us but not to the public. I think you should have a little matrix put on the top of the ordinance to show that level three is a visit and what's the other one, a visit and public hearing. No, the public hearing is in a level three, is it? No, that's a level five. So that's what I'm saying. Even in talking about it right now, my head is spinning just thinking about that. So we need those levels defined at the very beginning of the ordinance so people know. What do we have to do? Who's gonna come and visit us? What makes it absolutely positively right and just? So I like to see that kind of thing. The other thing is regarding the EIR. I was kind of confused too when I learned that the EIR that we had been working on has been used and there's been a tool for this process but at the end of the day, it talks about individuals having to possibly have discretionary EIR scenarios. I don't know what that means, how much that would cost or what that is so that leaves a little hole in the bucket kind of. Thank you. Thank you very much. We need more disclosure and understanding of this. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome. My name's Elliot Crowder. I live in the Selva Beach. I was here for a Wednesday meeting and they encouraged us to come to this. I was at another one about a month ago and I did point out that I have completed a six month study program in Menlo Park for the National Center for PTSD Substance and Anxiety Intervention Laboratories in Menlo Park paid for financed by the Veterans Administration overseen academically by the Stanford, whichever department that is in Stanford. They asked us to share our experiences. Though it says the PTSD Center, I am not a PTSD. I was recruited after an accident recovering in the Veterans Administration System and someone came over and said, we see by your files. And I said, okay, I'll do this. And this is just informational. I'll hand one of these papers to your secretary so they could, if they have any questions, they could possibly contact them. They're accumulating information and you might want to get some of it. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome. Good morning. Thank you. First of all, my name is Laflora Cunningham Walsh. I appreciate everyone's time taking here today. I would just like to say, first of all, that I'm kind of into policy and politics and I've watched most of you for a really long time. I have seen your impact on the town and the county that I live in. Some of it is really appreciated. I'm in District 5. I'd really like to thank Supervisor McPherson for what he said at the beginning of the meeting. I felt it was very reasonable and I just met a lot of the people's concerns in this room. I also am a second generation cannabis farmer in the cottage industry. A lot of what I'm hearing today and that I've seen over the process. There may be a rush and I hear some concerns about the rush but I would like to make sure that while we're moving ahead that we're not slowing down to crush the cottage industry. It's very important. These are the people who made it the reputation good for other people to want to come in here and use this area as somewhere they can see their business thriving. But let's make sure we're taking care of the people who laid the foundation of what makes such a wonderful community here. I guess that's about it. So thank you. Please consider your consideration. And I also see a lot of room for cooperation. It seems like there's some conflicting things in this room but I think that if we really take the lead again on the sort of community we'd like to be a lot of those issues could be addressed where the farmers in the Santa Cruz mountains can have their needs met while also not feeling like they're stepping on their neighbor's toes. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good morning, welcome. Thank you. We're making history. This is history. This has never been legal before. You guys are setting up arrangements for people to be able to grow. I've been a resident of Santa Cruz County for 50 years. It's a different county but I'm blessed to be able to live here. I think that you should all take note of the fact that you are making history. Part of history is the people that got us to this point. They weren't the large commercial growers. They were just a small people. If the rules could be implemented or changed slightly to allow the bedroom community or the small grower to have a spot, it's something that should really be considered. That's how we got here. That's how we are part of history. Thank you. Thank you, sir. What was your name? I just on the microphone just so I can get picked up. I'm sorry about that. Sorry about that. You know, we don't like to do that. Yeah, I understand. But remember, this is a new regulatory environment that you're asking to come into the light. Seems like a fair trade, right? My name's right in front of me. My name's Tom Adams. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. Good morning, Mr. Rice. Welcome back. Good morning. Nice to be here. Ben Rice. So just about everybody that's come to speak to you today could be considered to be a person with a bias. So all those voices from all these different parts of our community and with different interests. But there's one big voice here that has kind of come through some of those other voices and that's the environmental review paper that we paid almost a half million dollars for. And that, there's no bias there, right? These are people that are knowledgeable and spent a lot of time learning how to put something like this together. And what they concluded was the permissive approach is the smartest thing for our community. That means jobs, hundreds of jobs. And it means that we're gonna be able to spend, our law enforcement agencies are gonna be able to spend less resources running around the mountains, trying to go after people who are breaking the rules. If you will allow multiple permits on parcels, like we're talking about doing, of course, in the commercial ag, but also allow that in other areas, then those 600, 700 people that signed up and said, okay, we wanna be participants here and we're willing to give up where we are now, perhaps, but we would like to be included in this and they've spent that money and spent that capital telling you that they wanna be involved legally. Well, I guess my bias is let that happen. Allow multiple licenses. If people are even in ag or res ag, if it's a property that would handle more than one license and maybe more square footage than you've been talking about, allow it to happen. This is a tremendous team that you've put together here. Let them use their discretion to make those kinds of options. Let's make this work. It's working in Colorado now, it's working in Washington and now it's like old news. So let's make it that way here soon, thank you. Is there anybody else that'd like to address us? Seeing none, we'll close the public comment. We'll bring it back to the board. We'll just work our way down the line. I'll start with Supervisor Coonerty if you'd like to begin, please. Sure, first of all, thank you everyone for coming out today and for your thoughtful comments. As I've mentioned earlier, this is, people feel rushed or like we're rushing towards a decision, this is a beginning of a process where we're gonna give initial direction, then it's gonna go to the planning, then it's gonna come to us, then it's gonna be reheard by us and then each individual project, depending on the scope of that project, will be back in front of the planning department, the regulators, potentially the planning commission and then back and forth under the Board of Supervisors. So for some, it could be years away. For others, it could be months, but we still have a long way to go. With that, the real crux of the decision today is whether we sort of go forward with the EIR, as was mentioned, or to move forward with an ordinance and then do environmental review on each project going forward. From my perspective, from the matter, which side of the debate you're on, moving forward with individual review is a much better option. From my perspective, the EIR was deeply flawed and would have allowed quite permissive use without regard to neighborhood and then each project would have been be able to tear off that and from the neighborhood perspective, could have had much more detrimental impact on the number of grows. On the same hand, if we had stuck with the EIR, we would be involved, no doubt, in litigation for years, thus allowing the good actors not to be able to get a license and a continuation of the bad actors. So moving forward at this point seems like the best course and I have a series of directions that I'm gonna put into a motion. And I also, in the spirit of that we're still the beginning to the extent that my colleagues have other direction, whether I agree or disagree with those directions, I'd welcome those as friendly amendments so that we can send it all to the Planning Commission for them to review. And I really would encourage, no matter what your bias or approach is, that we really, at the Planning Commission and then back on the board, you really hone in on the specific language that you want addressed because it's overwhelming to try to figure out a problem of this complexity with general comments, but if you get into, when it goes to the Planning Commission and comes back before the board, your very specific changes, it makes it much easier to understand what to do. So I'm gonna read into the record and I'm sorry, I'm gonna hand this out to my colleagues. A motion to accept the staff report and send the draft ordinances to the Planning Commission with the following directions. And these are my directions and then again, my colleagues can add any direction they want. So with the exception of CA zone properties, the level of review and the use chart for 13.10 for any cannabis cultivation use start at at least a level four and this is in order to ensure noticing of neighbors for new cannabis use. Item number two, to address best management and operational practices plan and to strengthen the deterrence for the use of rodenticides and pesticides that we add a section A under 13.10.650B3 that says best management operational plan that states all non-retail commercial cannabis uses shall comply with the provisions of a best management and operational practices plan that include the following and then you add text of the plan after the following and then in 7.128 one A section 11 license required which states the requirement for a license shall be a best completed best management plan and operational practice plan and after that consistent with the provisions of 13.10.650B3A and so the idea and that this draft management plan be available for the planning commission hearings going forward. The idea being that we're actually gonna create from my point of view what will be the best most effective rodenticide and pest limits on rodenticide and pesticides under state law and that it actually be included in the ordinance and a condition of the license. Item number three that we reduce the amount of proposed tree clearing allowed on TP zone properties right now it's proposed at allowing a quarter acre. That's an unacceptable amount of tree clearing. I think that there should be a reduced and better way to do it. On item number four in 7.128.090A2B under required findings that we add that the environmental review is completed and determined that the issuance of the license would not have significant unminigated effect on water supply, biotic resources and other sensitive environmental resources. So that we make sure that we're not impacting really key environmental areas. Item number five the planning commission consider consistency between CDFA and county regulations for the definition of canopy nursery as well as reducing liability in instances of co-location. And then item number six allow manufacturing without a connection to a dispensary in C2 with the approval of the licensing manager. So I think I'll second that. Okay and so again this is beginning to work through it from my perspective. I really want to appreciate the staff and the community's effort at trying to craft this and trying to balance all the variety of needs. I think that we needed to increase the level of public noticing. We need to do our best to eliminate redenticides and pesticides. We need to reduce the amount of tree clearing on TP and that we need to make sure that we are not having any impacts on water supply, biotic resources or other sensitive environmental resources. And then I think we do need to align with especially on CA properties with state law and regulations in order to have a clear rules going forward. We have a motion and a second. Council did you have something before we continue our discussion here at the board? If it would be helpful to the board to see these changes these draft changes within the ordinance before it goes to the planning commission, we could take a lunch break. Staff could go back and insert these things into the ordinance so that we're clearly capturing what your intention is in the motion. There are two other things that I would like to note. It would be helpful to staff I think on your third recommendation the motion to get an amount for how much you would like that reduced so that we can actually recommend something concrete to the planning commission that will then be taken forward also on your fifth recommendation on consistency between the CDFA and county regulations. I think staff has heard the community's comments on that and could make some easy fixes so that we could have something concrete also to take the planning commission but we would want your board to look at that first and bless it before it goes forward. So that's my proposal. I mean I think, I mean I hear where you're going. My one concern is I don't know what my colleagues are going to recommend. I don't know if I'm gonna be in agreement with my colleagues and so working out those details today where I'd rather have the planning commission really work on and figure that out I think is a better, is a better approach. We'll get to you supervisor Cavick as we're working our way down is if the planning commission were to work out those details what would be the challenge or are you concerned that it would take an additional hearing at our board with these changes or what would be the concern? Yeah I'm concerned that if you have a direction that it's more efficient if you have an actual something in mind that you'd like the planning commission to consider and vet that you tell us what that is so that it doesn't go to the planning commission and the planning commission creates rules that then we come back to a board hearing and the board doesn't like what the planning commission did and changes it which would then require us to go back to the planning commission and have them review it again and leads to serial hearings that's the only thing I'm trying to address at this point. Well then I think that Supervisor Coonerty if you're amenable to it it would make sense that once we've added our information here that we would take our lunch break they would come back with a draft ordinance that we'd consider that information and then we could make the determination of what specifically needs to go to the planning commission. Yes, I mean to the extent we can figure out some of these details today. Okay, so I'll move on to Supervisor Leopold and we will get to you, Supervisor Caputus working our way down. Thank you, Chair. There's a couple things that I'll just say I appreciate the conversation that we've had here today. I think it's part of the long conversation that we've had with the community. This isn't something I just started in August with the EIR. This has been a conversation at this board for hours and hours. It involved a community committee to look at cultivation rules that probably met for over a hundred hours and involved lots of people. And if I understand correctly, the staff has read the comments every comment that has come in and has tried to analyze and evaluate that and make what they consider to be the best recommendations. So for those of you who feel rushed, I'll just say it's really not that rushed. And we're not done. Today isn't the last day. Today is just another day in this effort to come up with clear, concise and reasonable cultivation rules. So as you could see by the, the Planning Commission doesn't even come to the 27th. It won't come back to our board to some time in March. There's just a lot of, there's a lot of more stops on this track before we get to the end. As far as the EIR goes, I'm gonna support the staff recommendation because as we heard here today, there are people who think that the EIR we did is junk. There are people who found that it was really good. And we knew going into that process that we faced a big hurdle in coming up with a good environmental impact review because there was so much we didn't know about that in which we were reviewing. We tried hard to try to identify who was growing to try to figure out what kind of cultivation sites there were. But by its very nature, taking something which hasn't been in the light and then try to do an analysis of it, that you're gonna have a lot of holes in it. And so the fact, I think the state recognize this when they exempted this part of it from the CEQA process in terms of doing the environmental impact report. We still gleaned important pieces of information and we should take that which we feel most strongly about in order to make our recommendations. But it would just pay a huge target on something. As you can see, there isn't even agreement whether we looked at the right things. So I'm gonna support that. I do think that if we follow through on that action, we should make publicly available all the comments that are there so everyone can read them and it will help the community conversation. My colleague has brought up some suggested changes about aligning our definitions with the state regulations. I think that makes sense. Questions about the canopy nursery. He didn't mention, although I'd like to add the mix-like greenhouses, we got a letter from a member of the Farm Bureau. We heard some testimony here today that there is, I won't pretend like I know what that exactly means, but a convincing case was made to me that that is a kind of horticultural process that would be worthwhile for us to have our definition in the ordinance and get clarity about it. I think that would be helpful. The other, I don't know whether it's definitional, on the TP land use, I think where my colleague was going was the amount of disturbance that could, or additional trees that could be cut down seemed a little high. And I respect that. But it seems as though the language we have there doesn't take into account that there could be cleared land for other processes that could allow the use for commercial cultivation or operation. And to the extent that there is no other trees removed, it seems like that that's worthwhile to include, to look at those past uses as well. And if, I don't know whether the best thing is to have discretion, give you discretion about what kind that looks like, or just say if there have been previous clearing that we look at not disturbing any more of the property. My colleague brought up the co-location responsibilities and I think that we've got, we had good testimony today and we also received letters about the co-location piece and what people should be held for responsible in co-location. The language, I think what you're getting is land use, but there are so many other things that could fall into that broadly piece. So I just think we need to sharpen that as well. There was a question brought up here today that I'm, or an assertion made here today that I'm not sure is actually accurate and I wanted to get clarity from you, is in CA zones where there has, where there's cultivation already occurring where there might be co-location activity, the gentleman that was up here said that if, with the rules as it is, his operation would have to shrink by two thirds and it, my reading of the rules did not, it didn't seem like it was going there, but I wanted to get some clarity from you. It's certainly not our intent. The intent is to allow, particularly where you already have the infrastructure and structures themselves is to encourage. Right, yeah, it's in existing structures that we're not gonna have a canopy size limit. For co-location, that's correct. For co-location, okay. Then just getting back to the other things that should be in there, I thought that the letter that we received from community prevention partners to look at another additional revocation piece about failure to conduct operations in a manner that ensures securing and safeguards against diversion of cannabis to minors is a good inclusion. I also think, I'm not ready, I think this piece about advertising and the use of cartoons and characters and everything, I think there's some merit, although I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to tell you today what should be. I think that's a hard one, but I think the idea of not creating products that are attractive to minors, we could toughen the language there a little bit, and I think that that's a healthy thing for our community. I support also looking at the C2, giving some discretion. I wouldn't think C2 on a street, right there on the street makes sense, but in one instance, someone says there's a C2 piece and it's back behind the store, behind the restaurant, behind, you know, it's like deep in there, and that may be giving you some discretion to look at that, makes sense to me. The other, there was other testimony today about C4 and M co-locations and the residency requirements. That there was a gentleman here who gave testimony that if you did a co-location on a property zone, C4 and or M, that you might be required to have residents there. I don't believe that there's a residency requirement for C4 and M zones, so that we would not be imposing that. If the individual is here right now. He might've been talking right about different zone parcels sort of coming together and that would necessitate a case-by-case review. I'm not sure what we would look at there if there were multiple zonings involved. The last, there's a couple other, so those are the additions that I would add. I had a couple other questions though that I wanted to ask about because they may include adding it on there. There was a gentleman here who came, who talked about a permanent generator, a natural gas-fed generator that he uses for his well or something like that. Do we make a distinction there? We don't, in the ordinance as written, this was something that came up when we were talking to folks after the Farm Bureau meeting as well. I don't know how prevalent that is, but certainly if there's a need for a permanent generator for well use or something else, we might wanna make that distinction. But in talking to the Ag Commissioner, that didn't seem to be a common component of traditional ag. Yeah, I won't pretend like I know. But I don't know whether we would have, for the few cases that there might be, is there discretion to look at that? That's the question. Right now there's not, but it would be a very easy fix. It's just changing two words in the ordinance. Yeah, I would like to, again, if it's not prevalent, I think we're in agreement, I would think that we're in agreement that we don't want generators being the primary source of electricity because of both noise and fire concerns. So let me just say that. But if there is a part of a existing farm operation or something that is a lot more controllable than or as a backup system, then it's worthwhile at least take a look at. If I could just add, when we talk with the Farm Bureau, that point seemed to be made in conjunction with CA zoning. And I think our concern about generators is primarily in the mountains. And so I don't know if you would wanna make that. No, I'd be happy to do it for CA zoning. The other question I had was about fences. So right now the ordinance reads about having a six foot tall opaque fence around every cultivation site. And I think that there are places where that makes sense to block it from other people seeing it, so it's not an enticement to youth, et cetera. But there are some places that are, deep into someone's property, deep in the back that the establishment of a fence seems to be a sort of a habitat barrier of some kind. And that also doesn't seem to be the case that one size fits all. But the regulations seem to say you have to have it even if you're out there in the middle of nowhere where no one can get to it. I believe the mitigations provided discretion on that issue, and we would support keeping that and reviewing it on a case by case basis. Yeah, the rules now say that the growing area must be fully secure, but it's the licensing official who determines whether the area shall be enclosed with an opaque fence at least six feet in height in the varying, basically we gave the licensing official more discretion exactly like you're speaking about. Great, then sorry for not catching that when I read it. There was also concern raised about the scrubbers in CA zones. Now, I generally, when I go to our commercial ag zones, they're smelly places. They don't smell like skunk, they smell like excrement or something else. So, again, it seems the level, if it's in a warehouse in Live Oak, well, yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. If it's in a greenhouse on a CA zone land, I mean, it's just gonna be one of the smells that are gonna be there, and it just doesn't seem like we needed to have that level of intensity. Well, we know that odor is certainly something that comes up a lot, and while it may be less prevalent in some of our CA-zoned areas, it still tends to carry. I will say that there are some pretty interesting technologies that we've been reading about that do an efficient job of scrubbing. I have no idea what they cost, but we certainly don't want it to be prohibitive, but that is something that we get the most complaints about. No, and I would totally understand that, and in other zoned areas, but in commercial ag, as I said, the point's been made, I guess, I won't belabor it. And then the last question I had is, there was an assertion made that somehow we were changing our development standards around water, that we were somehow gonna not be looking at the impact on our water systems as we look at the licensure of cultivation sites. My understanding was, if I was building a house, if I was building a greenhouse, if I was gonna be building a cabinet business, that there would be water uses that part of the permit process, you would have to show that you had the water from it, legal water source, and that would be the same for the cultivation of cannabis. Certainly, and I think the fact that each discretionary use approval requires CEQA analysis, combined with the very rigorous state requirements that the Water Resource Control Board and the Fish and Wildlife are requiring, there's gonna be a lot of oversight with regard to water. I guess one other thing that I realized, just looking over my notes, that we did include, and I hope that we might look at it, the question of who has to live in the house that's on the property, whether it could be an employee or the owner, it seems to me that we want someone who's responsible to live there, but the property owner may not be the one that has to live there. I don't know that we feel strongly about that. I think that it generally would be the licensee that may or may not be the property owner. If it's one of their employees, I don't know that we would object. The idea is to have oversight to the extent that your tenant is taking care of your property, then I guess that works. And that's what I want, but the definition was pretty strict. And so I think that we should have something about a person responsible for the business, or however that can be worded rather than the property owner. So the goal is to provide oversight so it would make sense that the person most responsible for providing oversight would be included in the definition for who would be the person on site. So if you happen to be the owner of the business, you would be the person who's residing, or if not, I mean, because there's license holders that are gonna be renting their tenants. And I think some of this can be left to the reasonable interpretation of the licensing official as we move forward. And some of it will by nature of the complexities of these rules have to be left to that, but we can certainly structure something within the definition that meets your needs. Okay, thank you. Supervisor Leopold, if you wouldn't mind concisely actually enumerating what your changes were, there were a way back and forth, that's okay. So the alignment of definitions with the state for canopy, nursery, mixed light greenhouse, in definitional terms around the TP land to allow previous development to be considered, that in the C2, that we give discretion to the licensing official about the C2 zone area for manufacturing, that we add language around advertising. Do you want me to give you the code number? I think the code, the advertising and the additional piece about the revocation of licenses for interaction with minors. I have that. I think my colleague wanted to make sure that he was being clear what it is I was asking for. And the generators on C4 zone land and the scrubbers on C4. C8, sorry, sorry, sorry. That makes sense. On the changes that you're requesting to definition of canopy and the nursery to align those definitions with the state, I totally understand where you're going there. The definition of mixed light, and maybe this is something that our licensing official would want to compound on here, is that those definitions were created to apply to a statewide industry. We determined to staff that that was not an appropriate definition, mixed light and greenhouse for purposes of our local industry and for the enforcement that it was gonna take to address those issues. So it was very purposeful that we left those out. And I wanted you to know that, to the extent you're requesting us to make changes to include greenhouse or mixed light, I think staff would have questions about what your intent behind that was so that we could frame language that would meet your intent as opposed to just there being an intent that it matched the state's definitions because the state's definitions don't necessarily meet this community's needs on every issue. Well, on the mixed light, again, as I said, I don't understand how the cultivation process work, but both people from the farming community and for the cannabis community have said that that is a type of cultivation. And so I didn't know that we looked at it and because there was nothing in our materials that said we looked and we didn't put in, so. I could explain a little bit more. One of the big, huge concerns we hear is fire, obviously it was one of the issues that we heard a lot about today. And we thought it would be more reasonable to make a division on indoor versus outdoor. And if you're indoor and you have utilities, that's basically what we're gonna be regulating at a higher level than we would be regulating just a simple outdoor grow. So mixed light, if you have utilities, it's gonna come within the definition of indoor and it's gonna be more tightly regulated to deal with the fire dangers basically. That's the point of why we made those changes for this community. My suggestion is I appreciate the comments and I'm not disagreeing. If we could work something up and then when we come back after lunch, it'd give me some time to ask some question to others to better understand that and we may not go forward with that. But I just wanna, I didn't have the benefit of that conversation with you. I appreciate that. Just from a procedural standpoint, the maker of the motion is fine with these changes? Yes. Obviously, the seconder is. I'll make some brief comments. I got some quick questions as well. Thanks for everybody sticking through today on a long day but also for staff's work over the last five years really on this process. My goal in many respects is to still comport the original desires of the board to remove this out of residential areas to protect the neighborhoods and the environment. And that includes some of the underlying general plan designations of residential areas to encourage this really on CA and A land. I have concerns with it occurring on TPC at all. But I think that and I think that there are some issues with what's proposed to actually address some of the neighborhood concerns. One of them deals with the SU designation where there's an underlying R general plan designation. You currently allow it as though it's agricultural use but that was never our intention of the general plan. Is that something that can be addressed now or is that something that we should address? I think that's a cleanup item that we discussed. There was an inadvertent sort of, I think we took out the SU as a class but then reference it elsewhere as being part of A. Am I right on that? That's right, it's a cleanup item. And we can address it to bring it back within what your board originally envisioned. We didn't mean to expand the acreage that somebody could use under that category. Okay, I mean with the underlying R designation, I mean it seemed like a loophole that you could in essence to commercial cultivation areas that we're saying that it wouldn't be acceptable in other designations. So I just want to ensure that that's addressed. We'll do that. Brooke Miller, Assistant County Council. I'm hearing a different question than the one that Jason's addressing. And that is why the SU zone district were allowing that use on SU parcels with the residential general plan designation. I think our planning staff can address that question. And I think in part it was related to the similarities between those parcels and RA parcels. But they're not, right? I mean we make it, they may optically be out there who we actually designate them differently for a reason. I mean if they were zoned RA, they'd be zoned RA. If they're zoned SU, that's different. So I'm confused as to why we would treat them the same that way. It is difficult. The SU is difficult to manage. Some of the thinking that was still a little bit unclear is we were relating SU, the A zone itself, not commercial ag, but A really comes across as more of a large residential district. And so with SU, with an underlying residential general plan, we were sort of tending to think about in that same fashion as large residential, the A district require a 10 acre minimum and it has the canopies that would be associated with A. But I'm hearing, and that's why initially we thought, well let's just shift it and make it an A license. But I'm hearing that's creating some unintended consequences. But basically the board's initial direction was to allow it on RA parcels of up to five acres or more. And so SU with residential, we thought maybe that would be sufficient to allow on 10 acres or more. But I think we need more clarity. The change that we would make to address this, I think, is removing the sentence where it relates to class A licenses on parcel zone SU and move that language down to class RA licenses. Because effectively what we did is your board originally wanted the limits for SU to be the same as RA. That's originally what the direction was and it has been for the last year or so. And this change that was put in there inadvertently made the canopy limits the same as A, not RA. And so it's an easy fix to take that back, that backwards. Okay. Moving forward, I think that we should restore the setbacks to 200 feet, which was all along up until this point. I think that that should be direction. I mean, it came through in a letter that we got today, but I also, it was something that I noticed. I don't think 100 feet is as far enough. And on the draft ordinances and everything else that we had considered up until this point, 200 was the smallest setback from a habitable structure. Sorry. I think that I appreciate Supervisor Coonerty's comment to increase the level of review to at least a level four. I actually think that it should be increased at least to a level five. And I'll say why this board has level five review for at least half, if not more of all, vacation rentals in this community. It seems strange to me that you could have a commercial cultivation, a four bedroom and above was actually an item that you had changed. And I think that if we were to go to a minimum of five for a commercial cultivation business, that seems reasonable when the board's taken additional level of review for something like a vacation rental. I think that is at least akin to that. I have a concern about what could be a loophole on the above 20 acres on the nursery component or co-location component. The way I read it is that it's allowing outdoor growing on CA zone properties. And if you're above 20 acres and you have co-location, there's no limit on existing structures within existing structures. But it also just says on outdoor, it allows for outdoor growing. If you're not creating a new structure on those parcels, wouldn't you in essence be also allowing unlimited outdoor growing on those parcels if no new structure is being created? I don't think that was our intent. So we can clarify that language. It wasn't, you would fall within the first subdivision if you're growing outdoor for a single license. And the point of the provision is to encourage folks to use existing buildings rather than create new buildings and new development. That's what the point of it is. Right, so if there's clarifying language that comes back, that would be, or something that specifies that would be useful. Regarding the nursery, I am in agreement that we should look at the state regulation. I do have a concern though, because it is fundamentally different from having starts within versus a mature plan. I think that makes sense. My concern is the state language is gonna allow this to occur on parcels other than above 20 acres. So say you had some of you had 10 acres, for example. And we currently designated actually as a nursery parcel. Unless we designate that it should be, again, within existing structures and no new construction, I can actually see a lot of parcels that have, in essence, are underutilized nursery, in essence, zone parcels, having a significant amount of new construction. And one of my concerns has come from the ag community or specifically from the cannabis community is that if the market for this actually declines over time or price controls over time, then you'll end up with a lot of new structures on these locations that we're gonna be dealing with in five or 10 years that was not an intended consequence. So if we are to simply accept the state definition, I think that that would be a concern. If we are to define that it's still occur only on existing structures within those parcels within the state definition, I think that that would control a lot of those components. Lastly, and I apologize for the length of my comments here, I do have a concern regarding who passed construction within the coastal zone plus one. I can see a situation by which there's a significant amount of new hoop house construction occurring within the coastal zone plus one, which I think would actually change a lot of the visual components of the Pajaro Valley and everything else in the North Coast. So I'd be concerned about allowing that new construction, as you know, hoop houses under the real definition not with electricity, where some people think they actually are treated differently than actual new building construction under our code. And so I'd be concerned about allowing for new hoop house construction in the coastal zone plus one as additional direction. And that's my levels of comments. Do you want him to know if he's gonna accept it? Surveyser Coonerty, are they acceptable? Okay. All right. Well, as the second, I would just say the language about the hoop house, I get where you're going with it. It would be nice to see the language, you know, before I'm ready to sign off on it, but I appreciate that. I guess, and I guess this is my question, which is from my perspective, I'm not ready to make a policy decision about any number of these things right now. And I also, I have no expectation that the planning commission will agree with us, nor will we necessarily agree with the planning commission. So trying to get to an agreement or to language right now seems to me to be premature and maybe sending this all forward and letting the planning commission work through these issues. Cause again, I don't know what the impact would be on hoop houses or on some of these other proposals. And so can we let this, can we outline the series of issues where we'd like to see changes and like to see more testimony and more input from the community to understand without trying to get to a specific language today? Well, my sense is that we should make an attempt to see if there is something that is least within the realm with the under, and share this with the planning commission that this isn't mean that there's 50 vote to these provisions, but we want them to study it so when it comes back, it doesn't have to do that repetitive process. I appreciate the staff trying to help us not have to keep on repeating ourselves, but to try to get some language, but with the understanding to the planning commission that this isn't on this menu of suggested changes does not mean that we all agree with this, right? Which I think is what you're trying to get to. It is, I'm just, before we start hashing out exact language to understand the impacts. I just want to like to figure out a way to not have this be an endless process, but also to not make bad policy on the fly, essentially. Yeah, the suggestion that I made earlier is simply a tool that's available for your use. If it doesn't meet your needs today, then that makes sense, but I've heard a number of suggestions from the members so far, from the three members that are concrete in nature that we could easily reduce simply into the ordinance in yellow highlighting and bring it back after lunch, and there's a number of things that we cannot deal with today, and those are many of the things that you would want the planning commission to vet, including the reduction of how much acreage would be appropriate on TPZ or how many trees would be taken against TPZ, but it's really up to the maker of the motion and the board as to how you want to handle it going forward today. Move on. Suvezer, first and then Suvezer-Cabin. I really appreciate the comments about the noticing requirements, the pesticides, the water use and co-location. I do want to just make one general comment of something that's of concern to each and every one of us, and that's the black market. It's with us today, and it may well be with us tomorrow, to some extent as well. That's the reality of it all. I'm afraid, but the best way we can do this to address that concern is to establish regulations and then with some of the presumed revenues we're going to have for the general operations of the cannabis industry that we oversee it and know what we're talking about and what are the limitations. So I think that I don't know that it's going to solve the black market problem, but I think it's a step in the right direction, at least. There's a couple of things that in the timber harvesting thing, I issue, I just, I'd like to see where we'd have it where it would be a cannabis operation would be allowed in that zone if there was no new development or clear tree clearing. But then again, we can discuss that later. I think you've said that in essence, but I want to make that clear. And one issue, as I say, I appreciate what was brought up, a lot of what was on my mind, but the issue of the compassionate use and how we're going to address this, we have a lot of people and we are known very well in Santa Cruz County for providing cannabis to treat those who cannot afford it very well. Now how do we address this? I guess it would be through our tax structure and I don't want to have this become a record keeping or a nightmare of such, but maybe it would be to forgive the tax implications that we've imposed in the county on those who are giving it to these dispensaries. I'd like to find a way that we can accommodate those who are unable to purchase this product, but dearly need it. And I, like I said, it gets into finance and all, but I think that we really should be able to have some sort of an inclusion of that issue in how we are our final decision that we would allow some of those who cannot afford this product to have use of it. You're looking over here at me, so I'll respond. And unfortunately, the compassionate use aspect of the business model has been left out at the state level. So it's just not a business model going forward that the state recognizes. And so for us to create our own separate set of rules around allowing cannabis to be given away would be in conflict with what the state has envisioned at this point. And I know that there are some moves on the horizon to fix that and recognize at the state level and recognizing that this is an iterative process and that we may be making changes to this for the next four or five years. That is something that maybe we should look out for changes to be made at the state level so that we could remain consistent with what the state is authorizing. Those would be my only comments about that. Okay. Yeah, I think we can do it better. I think we can. Please. Thank you. We can do it better. This is the case in a lot of things at the county level compared to the state or federal. And I appreciate your comments. But my, my, but I just think just on my own personal thing, and maybe we should make an effort with this board to encourage the state officials, state legislators to include something like this thing. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Supervisor Caput, please. Thank you. I'll do this real quick. On first blush, a lot of the amendments and everything seem okay. But if they're significant, I don't like instant analysis on having to go through this and look at the significance of all the amendments. So that's why I would like to wait a little bit on the amendments, but anyway. And the other is the community prevention partners of Santa Cruz County, a drug-free communities coalition. I would like to add some of their recommendations. I can't remember who spoke on this, but I do have children at home. And just looking at this picture, it kind of, if I find it irritating up here on the board, a chocolate candy or whatever, sitting on my kitchen table or bottles with the little green tops that two-year-olds would want to put in their mouth. And I don't know where these cannabis plants, that's fine. But if there were redwood trees there before or tan oaks or fir trees, and they were cut down to put them in, goes for that greenhouse too, that would bother me. I'm big on the protection of the environment here. So anyway, I'd like to add an amendment too, but I'm gonna wait, because again, I haven't had time to even look at this, but I do like the way it was written. And look at all the interest we have here. People that showed up in the morning, people that spoke. To me, that's great. I think almost everybody that's been here today is gonna comply with the rules and regulations. The people that are not gonna comply are the ones that are right now doing the illegal selling and cutting and ruining the environment. They're not here, obviously. So those are the people we need to get out there and actually stop. But I'd like to see more interest in my priorities where we get a lot of people for the homeless issues that we have to deal with. Mental health outreach and the facilities for people in our county, and also public safety, and I can go on and on. I'm just saying cannabis is showing a lot of interest and it's showing a lot of participation, but I'd like to see priorities get more of our time. I'm all for buffers in the residential ag. I heard that mentioned before. I'm all for that. I'm for regulations that we're putting in place and I think most of us here are, but that goes with enforcement. We have to enforce whatever we're gonna regulate. And if we're not, we might as well have not even started this whole process. Environmental protection, big. If we're gonna ruin one of our greatest assets would be the beauty of our redwood forests and also areas close to the ocean and the beaches. What are we gonna be left with? But pesticide use, I wrote that down. That's a big issue with me. I don't know what kind of pesticides they use on the marijuana plants, but for me, any of that stuff that washes into the streams, maybe it affects the honey bees that are out there and we're losing them. And all kinds of impacts for native birds and habitat that's here in our area. That's gotta be a big concern and especially also people living in the neighborhoods if there's gonna be some spraying or some kind of use of pesticides that is a danger to people and or animals, that's a concern. So I'm gonna be looking more into that, what kind of pesticides. I've been talking to the Agriculture Commissioner and all that. There was a meeting last week with probably about 200 farm workers that dealt especially with pesticide use and the effects it has on the people that work in fields. This is a little bit different. The one a week ago was people that are working on strawberries, apple growers, raspberry and tomato and vegetable growers. But I wanna protect the timber zones big time and this is a serious issue. This isn't just agriculture, okay? This isn't just strawberries. It's not just apples or oranges or tomatoes. You don't get high from eating all the ones I just mentioned, okay? We're talking about a drug. This is marijuana, cannabis. It's a drug and so we can't take it lightly. It isn't just like any fruit or vegetable that's out there. My concern, my biggest concern is that our motivation is still tied to medical and compassionate use and that we're not encouraging the recreational use of it. And that's why I like having an amendment that says we're not gonna have the camel cigarette. Remember a character, a comic character years ago or that we don't all of a sudden see signs at Little League Fields saying we're now advertising at Little League Fields. Maybe that's going a little far but I wanna make sure it doesn't go there. My motivation is still to protect our environment, protect our children and still make it legal and accessible but with regulations that we are going to enforce and that our motivation is never gonna become money. Okay, we gotta watch out for that, all right? We're gonna get some tax revenue and we're gonna get more money for our budget. That is not my motivation because that motivation is greed and greed actually begets more greed. My motivation is more compassion and medical and having regulations rather than the money aspect of it. And I hope that's true with all the motivation of the people speaking here today that their number one motivation isn't making a lot of money but the motivation is protecting the environment and the people that live in Santa Cruz County because that's what counts the most to me. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Just moving back to the maker of the motion to confirm as the intention that we will come back after a lunch break with something to review that we'll just send down to the Planning Commission at that point. I think, I don't think that's gonna be useful because I think we're gonna have five issues that we can agree on and five issues that we need more information on and it's just gonna, so we don't really, we aren't ending up saving any time. I think it's better just to send this all down to the Planning Commission and let them come back with a series of alternatives. If Council could just explain to me the process of how that would work, since you're not then incorporating it, these proposed changes into an ordinance, or are you? Yes, well, yes, what we would do is, I understand there's been specific recommendation from Supervisor's friend, Leopold and Coonerty, the staff have taken notes on. We will go back and make those changes. I don't have specific reference changes from Supervisor Caput or McPherson that we could put into the ordinance at this time. What we would do is go back and make all of those changes or our best efforts to make those changes before it goes to the Planning Commission and it'll go to the Planning Commission. The Planning Commission will do what it does with it and then it'll come up to you folks. If you have significant changes to make under Government Code Section 65010, it will have to go back down to the Planning Commission for review and then it will come back up to your board again. But it sounds to me like there's agreement amongst your board on the necessity for these changes to be made, but there's not agreement on coming back after lunch, so that's what I'm hearing. So it seems like the process would be best be served by not coming back after lunch and letting staff go back and write the language up. And I can give my recommendations after then and it could be looked at. I don't have to present it right now. You would be able to provide it once it comes back to us actually through the Planning Commission. If you have something you would like for the Planning Commission to consider, now would be the time to do it. Otherwise, you have to wait until the Planning Commission has sent something back up to us to make those amendments. It'll be separate from the amendments that were proposed today. It would be in addition to the amendments that were proposed today. As I understand it, are you just wanting to incorporate some of the language that the letter from Community Prevention Partners is suggesting regarding the youth? Right, two elements to read it in the record right now. Three elements of that have already been included in the recommended changes in regards to the setbacks in regards to the minor, one of the reasons for revocation in regards to advertising, which are three elements that were listed in that letter already. He spoke about it. I'm sorry? And he spoke about it. And that you had spoken in favor of. So was there a different element besides those three in this letter that you specifically wanted added in? The language would be pretty much on the advertising comic characters. And advertising at Little League and stuff like that. Supervisor Leopold already requested that that be included in. Okay. And if I could just clarify that the motion includes recommended actions one through five that's on the first page of your staff report because that is also where you'd be confirming that we would be using the statutory exemption that you'd be directing the Planning Commission to hold a public hearing on February 28th and you'd be directing the clerk of the board to set a public hearing for March 13th at your board. And then if you could also clarify a conjunction with Environmental Review. If you go with the staff recommendation, give us direction regarding publication, you know, posting on our website and each of the public comments on the draft DIR. Correct. My motion would entail supporting all staff recommended action in regard to those measures. And the seconder agrees. Is there any additional direction from the board on this? And with an understanding that what the board is sending now is really an ordinance framework down to the Planning Commission. This isn't committing the board to this specific ordinance. This isn't committing the community to any final decision. As was expressed here, board members may not necessarily support what comes back from the Planning Commission. It may not agree with each other on some of the things that we're asking the Planning Commission to look at. So a vote today in favor of something isn't necessarily an endorsement of what is being sent down to the Planning Commission. It's just the next step in a public review process. Is that understood by the board? All right, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The pass is unanimously. Thank you all for coming here today.