Santa Barbara residents sue over 'sewer-like' smell
Residents in Carpinteria, California, File Class-Action Lawsuit Against Cannabis Farms Over Odor Issues.
California’s legalization of recreational cannabis turned Santa Barbara County into one of the biggest pot growing regions in the world, bringing hundreds of acres of marijuana to a region that historically hardly grew any. But not everyone is happy about their weedy new neighbors.
A group of residents of Carpinteria, a beachside town in southern Santa Barbara County, filed a class-action lawsuit in September against two pot farms they allege are destroying their property values. The issue, the residents say in the lawsuit, is the farms are emitting a “sewer-like” smell of cannabis.
“The neighborhood surrounding their property has a thick, heavy, strong stench of cannabis on a near daily basis,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit, first reported by the Santa Barbara Independent, was filed by the Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis as well as three Carpinteria residents — Chonnie Bliss Jacobson, William Hahn and Danielle Dall’Armi. Hahn and Dall’Armi are the owners of a local rose farm. The defendant farms are Valley Crest Farms and Ceres Farms.
The lawsuit alleges that Valley Crest Farms and Ceres Farms have failed to install carbon-based filtration systems, which some of the surrounding farms have used to reduce their odor emissions. Instead, according to the lawsuit, the two farms are using a technology that attempts to mask the smell of pot by emitting fragrant scents that smell like Febreze.
The residents say the smell from pot farms has reduced their property values, damaged their rose business and an event business and forced some families to use respirators inside their own homes. The lawsuit says that they “want relief from the awful smells and noxious odors and chemicals that they are being assaulted with on a daily basis in their homes.”
Cannabis farming has become a massive industry in Santa Barbara — it’s now the county’s second biggest cash crop, with $260 million worth of cannabis grown last year — but it’s also controversial. Local politicians have been accused of being too friendly with pot farms, and the farms themselves have been accused of bringing foul odors and harming the surrounding grape and avocado fields.
The September lawsuit is the latest legal volley thrown by the Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis. Lionel Neff, a board member for the group, told the Independent last week that the coalition has spent more than a million dollars fighting pot farms in the county.
In 2021, the coalition brokered an agreement with the surrounding pot farms in which the farms agreed to reduce their odor emissions, and the coalition agreed to stop suing the farms over it. However, Neff told the Independent that the group considers the agreement broken, saying that “we’re looking at this as promises made, promises broken. We kept our promises, and they broke theirs.”
Neff said in an emailed statement to SFGATE that the area's cannabis growers have failed to install technology that would effectively reduce the odors.
"The growers were supposed to make best efforts, they simply have not. There is technology out there that has been scientifically proven effective, yet growers continue not to use it," Neff said in the statement.
Alex Van Wingerden, one of the farm owners and a named defendant in the lawsuit, also did not return an SFGATE request for comment.
The plaintiffs are asking a judge to force the farms to stop emitting odors as well as pay damages, although the lawsuit says the plaintiffs would likely drop their suit if the two farms installed carbon-based filters.
