Odor-Control Pact With Carpinteria Cannabis Growers Breaks Down

It’s been more than two years since the Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis signed a peace treaty with a leading growers’ organization in the Carpinteria Valley.

Today, the coalition says, that agreement is in tatters.

The August 2021 agreement was an odor-control pact signed by the coalition, a countywide advocacy group of about 200 members, and the Cannabis Association for Responsible Producers, or CARP Growers, representing most of the valley’s greenhouse owners.

The coalition’s assent was a tacit concession that suing the growers and challenging their permits had failed to halt the wholesale conversion of the flower greenhouses ringing the beach town of Carpinteria to smelly, industrial-scale pot.

Now, however, the coalition has gone back to court.

In September, the group filed a class action lawsuit in Santa Barbara County Superior Court against Case and Alex Van Wingerden, a father and son who are members of CARP Growers.

They own 19 acres of cannabis at Valley Crest Farms and Ceres Farm on Casitas Pass Road. The lawsuit alleges that the “ever-present noxious odor” and “thick, heavy, strong stench of cannabis” in the neighborhood from these operations is a violation of the state Clean Air Act.

Valley-wide, the coalition says, the growers are dragging their feet and failing to adopt state-of-the-art, clean-air technology in their open-vented greenhouses. Carbon filters called “scrubbers” have been shown to be effective in preventing the “skunky” smell of pot from wafting out of the roof vents and into urban neighborhoods.

Yet only four of 20 active “grows” in the valley are fully equipped with them, county records show.

In all, that’s 28 acres of cannabis greenhouses with scrubbers out of a total 116 acres under cultivation, or not quite one acre out of every four.

“We’ve been played,” Lionel Neff, a coalition director who signed the 2021 agreement, said this month. “We thought we were all working together on an answer to the problem. Everybody was rejoicing. We’d share beers together.

“Now we’re looking at this as promises made, promises broken. We kept our promises and they broke theirs.”

As the private agreement breaks down, though, public policy may be shifting in favor of a requirement for the use of scrubbers in cannabis.

For the first time, during an
impromptu discussion at the county Board of Supervisors meeting this week, three out of five supervisors signaled that they were open to the idea.

“There’s good technology out there,” said Supervisor Laura Capps, who represents the Goleta Valley and has long advocated for stricter regulations for cannabis. “If it were any other industry, we would be requiring it.”

Seven more greenhouse operations totaling 30 acres are slated for scrubbers next year, records show; the growers agreed to install them as a condition of their zoning permits.

That means that in all, 58 acres, or just under half of the cannabis acreage under cultivation in the valley, could be equipped with scrubbers by the end of 2024. But that’s only 39% of 149 acres of greenhouse cannabis approved for permits to date.

CARP Growers Responds

Under the 2021 agreement with the coalition, CARP Growers committed to “continuously employing the best available control technology” so that the smell of pot could not be detected beyond the growers’ property lines.

The association also agreed to a protocol for responding to odor complaints that, depending on the scope of the problem, could lead to a requirement to install state-of-the-art equipment.

In return, the coalition agreed not to sue the growers or oppose their project applications at county hearings, and even pledged to support them. CARP Growers hailed the agreement as “historic” and sent out press photos of their representatives smiling and clasping hands with coalition directors.

During the year that followed, the coalition spent $150,000 helping the growers test odor-control technologies.

Simon van der Burg is the co-founder and managing partner of Envinity, a Netherlands firm that has spent $800,000 developing a carbon scrubber for the Carpinteria greenhouse industry. He is shown here at Ever-Bloom with Envinity scrubbers in the background. Credit: Melinda Burns photo

“This is the first I’ve heard of any collapse of an agreement with the coalition,” Graham Farrar, the CARP Growers president, said earlier this month. “We’re still certainly operating as if it’s intact. We’re all doing the things we said we would do. Many people are working on scrubbers on their own volition.”

Farrar is one of the largest cannabis growers in California, with 125 acres of greenhouses in Ventura County and 11 acres in the Carpinteria Valley.

The intention of the agreement, he said, was not to impose a one-size-fits-all technology on CARP Growers members, but rather to find a solution tailored to each site. Some greenhouses are not in close proximity to homes, he noted.

“There’s nowhere in there where it designates a specific model, technique or odor technique,” Farrar said of the agreement.

No Mandate

Though the smell of pot is much less noticeable in the valley than it was five years ago, residents say, hot spots persist in neighborhoods around Foothill and Casitas Pass roads; Padaro and Cravens lanes; Via Real; La Mirada Drive; and the polo club on Foothill Road.

That includes neighborhoods near greenhouses owned or operated by present and past presidents of CARP Growers.

Carpinterians have filed more than 3,000 odor complaints with the county — including 350 this year — since the county Board of Supervisors opened the doors to a “green rush” in 2018. Many residents have complained of health problems such as asthma, sore throats, headaches and eye irritation that they believe were brought on by the smell of pot.

The Van Wingerdens did not respond to requests for comment on the recent lawsuit. But in a court filing, they stated that they were operating in compliance with state and local laws. They also submitted a plan to the county earlier this month proposing to install scrubbers at Ceres Farm, at 6030 Casitas Pass Road, by the end of 2024.

What’s most frustrating, Neff said, is that the county Board of Supervisors has not identified carbon scrubbers as the “best available” technology for odor control or mandated them for use in the valley’s greenhouses.

“All this is brought on by the county,” Neff said, noting that the coalition has spent more than $1 million on lawsuits, appeals and the agreement with CARP Growers.

Most growers in the valley, including Farrar and the Van Wingerdens, are still using odor control systems that release a perfumed mist into the outside air to “mask” the smell of cannabis. Some residents have complained that the “laundromat” smell is as bad as the smell of pot.

Changing Minds

On Nov. 14, the Carpinteria City Council, which has long pressed the county to enact stricter regulations for the industry, voted 5-0 to send a letter to board Chair Das Williams, a chief architect of the county’s cannabis ordinance and a resident of Carpinteria, requesting that the county start requiring the use of carbon scrubbers in new and previously permitted cannabis greenhouses as the “sole best available” technology for odor control.

And on Tuesday, county Supervisor Bob Nelson introduced the subject for the first time, during a board discussion on cannabis tax revenue. He represents a portion of the Santa Rita Hills west of Buellton, where a number of outdoor cannabis operations are under cultivation.

“There should be at some point a shift to best available control technology,” Nelson said.

He requested that the board revisit the question of cannabis odor at a future hearing.

Supervisors Capps and Joan Hartmann, whose district also includes part of the Santa Rita Hills, enthusiastically agreed.

Supervisor Steve Lavagnino of Santa Maria, a co-architect of the cannabis ordinance, cast the only “no” vote, suggesting that requirements for new technology could put growers out of business and trigger layoffs.

“Do we regulate any other odor in agriculture?” he asked. “You’re not going to be able to put odor control in outdoor grows … I think we’re opening a Pandora’s Box.”

Although he voted to revisit the question, Williams has long favored seeking the growers’ voluntary cooperation as the fastest way to get scrubbers installed.

“Am I satisfied with the progress? I’m not,” Williams said in an interview. “But I think things are moving in the right direction.”

He said again on Tuesday that it would take two years to change the ordinance to require them. He also noted that the county can require scrubbers if growers are unable to resolve odor problems when neighbors complain — though, admittedly, the county has never taken that step.

“The only thing that has stood in the way of it has been knowing the source of the odor,”
Williams said in an interview. “Mandating a specific technology is a bad idea …We might have a technology in a year or two that’s even better. We don’t want to have a system that we then have to unravel.”

Mike Cooney, the county planning commissioner for the Carpinteria Valley and Williams’ appointee, takes a different view. At the commission level, he said, “We’ve constantly called for an amendment to the ordinance to require scrubbers.”

“I’d rather have someone stop growing than not put the scrubbers in,” Cooney said. “I would like to see the county be more aggressive. If we say a year and they don’t have them in, there ought to be at that time a revocation letter that goes out and says, ‘Thirty days from now, your permit will be invalid.’”

Melinda Burns is an investigative journalist with 40 years of experience covering immigration, water, science and the environment. As a community service, she offers her reports to multiple publications in Santa Barbara County, at the same time, for free.

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