Clearlake >> At a Clearlake City Council meeting Thursday night, council members approved the first reading of a no grow marijuana ordinance by a four to one vote. A second reading and adoption is scheduled for a meeting on Feb. 26. If successful the ordinance would ban all cultivation of medical marijuana in the community.
Under the current ordinance, adopted one year ago, six to 48 plants are permitted on a sliding scale. However, council members feel that this policy has negatively affected the City of Clearlake. “We have been compassionate for a year and the marijuana growing has done nothing but get worse,” said Mayor Denise Loustalot. “We should have been discussing this a long time ago.”
Those in support of the zero tolerance policy list dangerous living conditions among their issues with the current state of marijuana growth. Various community members present at the city council meeting said they feel unsafe walking their dogs, letting their children walk about their neighborhoods and enjoying their yards. Some said that they are considering moving while others claimed the marijuana problem has deterred people from accepting jobs in the area.
Dave Hughes, a real estate agent and a 40-year resident of Clearlake, said his house was broken into and he thinks the intruder was searching for pot, drawn in my the smell from surrounding homes. “The odor attracts the person that maybe wants to commit the home invasion,” he said. He added that his wife was in “a panic” when his neighbors started growing pot.
The council members were sympathetic with these concerns. “We have been asked to please make our city safe and that’s what we’re doing,” said Councilman Russell Perdock. “That is my responsibility as a council member to protect people who cannot protect themselves.”
Dissenting Councilman Bruno Sabatier was quick to place blame on the city council for issues with the current ordinance. “We failed to create the right tools to be able to enforce the right plan,” he commented. Sabatier said that the regulations themselves were not the problem, but the civil department lacked the ability to enforce those regulations. “We misconstructed the tool. There’s not much we could have done with the tool we created … We were not able to do what we wanted to do last year … We need to take ownership of this error rather than blame the growers.”
“There was a misconception that this was a law enforcement ordinance. It was a civil ordinance,” Clearlake Chief of Police Craig Clausen clarified.
For this reason, Sabatier did not favor a no grow ordinance. He instead hoped for a more enforceable six plant policy. “Why should we shut people down for something that doesn’t need to be demonized?” he asked. “I offered to do a compromise because I would like to see a compromise … We’re here to represent the people.”
While many citizens had problems with Sabatier’s proposal, they favored it over an all-out ban of medical marijuana. A large number of people said they require the substance for a personal ailment or know a friend or relative who benefits from it. They say traditional medicine either doesn’t work as well as medical marijuana or they can’t use it due to side effects like acid reflux, liver damage and seizures. Many citizens criticized the city council for not addressing other issues in the area, such as the degraded lake, the damaged roads and especially another serious drug problem.
“You take meth, which is the major problem in this county, they didn’t even address it,” said Anthony Sig.
Though people on both sides of the issue stand at odds, it was agreed that the problem lies with those who took advantage of the ordinance implemented one year ago. Many people, both for and against the zero tolerance ordinance, recalled seeing homes growing well over the legal number of plants. People against a zero tolerance policy feel the ordinance criminalizes even the citizens following all regulations.
But proponents of the ordinance, including four members of the city council, feel the only way to address the increasing marijuana problem is to start over. “At this point we have to take our city back,” said Vice Mayor Gina Fortino-Dickson. She feels that the best way to get rid of the large growers is to, “say, ‘This is not tolerated at all.’ Right now we have to do something drastic.”
She also said the community’s big growers, the few “bad apples”, are the cause of the zero tolerance policy. “Those bad apples are huge. Sometimes you have to cut the whole orchard down in order to save the soil.”
Hughes shared this idea. “The only thing we can do is go back to nothing,” he said, explaining that as a real estate agent, he has trouble selling homes due to the high amount of plants in the community. He explained that he once had a client cancel an escrow after driving around the area. “I cannot sell a piece of land next to a grower … What responsible citizen is going to buy a house next to a grower?”
Some argue that the council members didn’t conduct enough research into the technicalities of growing medical marijuana. “They could have done better research on this topic,” said Sig. “Don’t be closed minded. Be open minded. Learn it.”
Sig sited an argument which states that pot gives off an unpleasant odor, however, he said that there are six different strains of marijuana, each with a different smell including some that are odorless. “People don’t research things,” he said. “A lot of things would have been different if they had researched it.”
Whether or not there was a lack of adequate research, Hughes felt the concerns of Clearlake citizens helped seal the fate of the no grow ordinance. “If there weren’t so many complaints we wouldn’t be here,” he said.
But, Sig asked, “What about the people who didn’t complain?”
Jennifer Gruenke can be reached at 900-2019.
