News

The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors decided yesterday to take its draft medical marijuana outdoor cultivation ordinance to the hills.

The proposed ordinance would require outdoor medical pot farms to be registered with the county public health branch and to follow certain rules -- or be considered a nuisance. Farms would have to register once a year; prove that all the buildings on the farm are permitted; show where the water for the plants will come from, how much of it will be used and whether the farmer has the right to it; and prove that no illegal chemicals are going to be used on the plants.

The draft-- which you can read on the board's website -- notes some registration method alternatives, including one in which the information that a permit applicant gives the county would be returned to the applicant and not kept by the county.

This set-up might avert the sort of troubles seen in Mendocino County, which tried a permit program -- then stopped it after the feds made threats -- and now is fending off U.S. Justice Department efforts to secure the information growers had given the county when they registered their farms.

As noted in a report on yesterday's board meeting in the Times-Standard today, Humboldt's staff is patterning the ordinance after a so-far more successful one passed in Tehama County. The T-S reports that the board decided to have staff set up several public meetings in rural Humboldt, south end and east side, for more ordinance talk.

Over at the LoCO, Kym Kemp wrote an excellent piece on the draft ordinance and had several folks invested in the topic weigh in.