Mendocino County’s Board of Supervisors (BOS) unanimously voted 5-0 on Sept. 14 to rescind the Commercial Cannabis Activity Land Use Development Ordinance (CCAO). It had adopted the ordinance only 11 weeks earlier by a 4-1 vote.
The turnaround was the supervisors’ response to a successful citizen-driven referendum campaign that gave the Board two choices: to rescind the ordinance or to put it to a vote of the people.
The contested ordinance would have expanded the allowable size of cannabis cultivation sites from one-quarter acre to as much as 10 percent of parcel size and would have opened an unknown number of parcels to new cannabis cultivation in the county’s rangeland zone – the wildlife-rich, but dry and fire-prone hills in the eastern portions of the county.
Prominent among the public’s objections to the ordinance were the scarcity of water, the Board’s choice to avoid doing a countywide environmental impact report (EIR) and the county’s failure to control illegal cannabis operations.
The CCAO had been the subject of strong opposition since its public unveiling late last year. By March, hundreds of letters objecting to it were submitted to the BOS and the county Planning Commission. Despite an unprecedented level of opposition, on June 22 the Board adopted the CCAO, with only Supervisor John Haschak dissenting.
The next day, a newly formed grassroots organization known as The People’s Referendum to Save Our Water, Wildlife and Way of Life (TPR) launched a referendum petition drive aimed at repealing the ordinance. According to state law, TPR had 30 days to gather approximately 3,400 valid signatures from Mendocino County registered voters
Despite triple-digit temperatures, COVID-19 restrictions and even out-of-county paid disruptors funded by corporate cannabis interests, 115 volunteers from across the county gathered nearly twice the number of required signatures in 28 days, turning them in to the county elections office on July 20. On Aug. 27, County-Clerk Recorder Katrina Bartolomie reported that a sufficient number of valid signatures had been gathered.
“This decision by the Board sends a clear message to the residents of this county that we can influence our elected representatives,” Ellen Drell, TPR steering committee member said. “Let’s not forget that fact or let down our resolve to keep it that way.”
