LAKEPORT — Joining a minority of California counties that have foregone adopting temporary moratoriums on industrial hemp cultivation, the Lake County Board of Supervisors decided Tuesday to welcome the industry and intends to regulate it by developing hemp-specific zoning rules.
As California gets ready to put temporary regulations into effect for the hemp industry—regulations that will need to be approved at the federal level by 2020 before becoming permanent law—counties around the state are deciding how to prepare for an influx of hemp growers.
At least 15 counties have adopted moratoriums in advance of hemp industry regulations, while less than half that amount have said “no” to such a moratorium.
The timeline for creating a plan for hemp is not quite as compressed now as it had been last week. According to Lake County Agricultural Commissioner Steve Hajik, the state made changes to its proposed hemp regulations on Friday, requiring another public review period before adoption. Whereas counties had expected to be dealing with hemp registrations as early as this week, Hajik estimated that possibility has now been pushed out to May.
Nevertheless, Hajik expressed concern that without clear regulations in place, unanswered questions will remain as the county begins to accept hemp registrations.
“Since there are no established state regulations yet, I think it’s premature to be registering people to grow hemp when there is nothing that we can tell them,” Hajik said. “And they’re going to be in jeopardy because I don’t know what the regulations are going to be in the future.”
Hajik added that if many growers start cultivating hemp in Lake County, he and his staff will not be able to test hemp for THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis—which is legally required to be under 0.3 percent in industrial hemp—due to a lack of manpower.
“We don’t have enough staffing to do it,” Hajik said. “That’s the bottom line.”
Hemp, a cannabis plant that is marijuana’s non-psychoactive sibling and is used in a variety of products from textiles to concrete to fuels, was described Tuesday by board members and members of the public as both a potential economic boon and a threat to the local cannabis industry, because cross-contamination between the two plants can reduce the potency, and therefore the value, of marijuana.
Cannabis cultivator Mike Mitzell addressed the board on this issue, saying that “industrial hemp and weed don’t really coexist… It sounds nice, but you can’t have industrial hemp near cannabis.”
Other California counties have created buffer zones to separate pot from industrial hemp, but the distance required to prevent all cross-contamination can be miles, which would effectively push hemp out of an area where cannabis already exists.
District 2 Supervisor Bruno Sabatier argued that the two crops can work together. “I think that there’s a definite place to co-exist here, hemp and cannabis,” he said, adding that it would take development of regulations to be able to make that work.
Initially supporting a temporary moratorium on hemp, both Sabatier and Board Chair Tina Scott ultimately agreed, along with the rest of the board, to direct Hajik to allow hemp registrations once state laws allow them.
District 1 Supervisor Moke Simon spoke in favor of allowing the hemp industry to cast its seeds in Lake County.
“Just because you don’t understand something, you can’t just ban it all the time,” he said. Simon added that regardless of a county moratorium, the hemp industry, now federally legalized, is an inevitability, and noted that the seven tribal nations in Lake County will make their own decisions about allowing industrial hemp.
