Existing operation seeking 5-year permit extension
The county supervisors are scheduled to hear an application for commercial cannabis cultivation on Valley Ford Freestone Road during their regular weekly meeting on Aug. 31. The application is for an existing medical cannabis operation that is currently in the county’s Penalty Relief Program. The applicant, Free Stone Ranch, LLC is seeking approval for three hoop houses, 500 square feet of indoor cultivation, a wholesale nursery and processing of site-grown plants. The owner is related to ASG North Bay Inc. that operates a medical cannabis dispensary in north Santa Rosa, near Wikiup. The permit would be for five years and is also subject to state cannabis licensing and tax regulations.
County planning staff and other agencies have completed an extensive environmental and land use review and found no significant impacts to the environment, water or energy use and visual aesthetics. The 10.72-acre property is located at 1478 Valley Ford Freestone Road. The cultivation operation would employ six people and would not be open to the public. The property has three wells and 28,00 gallons of water storage capacity. There is a single residential structure on the property.
A month-long public comment period recently ended with no collected comments. The public can attend the Aug. 31 virtual Zoom meeting and offer comments during the hearing that begins at 2:45 p.m.
The application is one of just under 100 applications that have been stuck in the county’s permitting pipeline for several months and even years. Currently, the county has embarked on a major revision to its Commercial Cannabis Cultivation Ordinance that has put a halt on all new applications to grow marijuana. That update process is now scheduled to take two years before county supervisors vote on a new ordinance. Following a full environmental impact study by consultants, a series of public sessions will be held in front of the planning commission with final public hearings by the supervisors in the spring or summer of 2024.
Staff-proposed updates to the commercial cultivation ordinance, first released in February 2021, were ultimately rejected by the supervisors in May, triggering the longer review and update process. Staff proposals would have moved cultivation permits to the agricultural commissioner’s office away from the planning department where applicants like Free Stone Ranch faced a bottleneck of public hearings and staff shortages.
The proposed new ordinance was met with a barrage of complaints and critical comments from both would-be rural neighbors to new pot grows and from local cannabis industry representatives and growers. Neighbors wanted more requirements to mitigate off-site impacts from marijuana odors and perceived safety issues from the activity that is still illegal under federal laws. Growers said the proposed updated ordinance had some merits to better welcome a fledgling new agriculture industry but came with too many costly requirements.
Updates and other information on the county’s efforts to update its 2018 ordinance are available online at https://sonomacounty.ca.gov/Cannabis-Program.
