Sonoma County’s largest approved legal cannabis grow to date appears set to harvest its first plants late next year.
While that’s good news for Petaluma cannabis farmer Sam Magruder, it also illustrates the bureaucratic difficulties that have plagued the cannabis growing process in unincorporated Sonoma County since cannabis became legal statewide in 2018.
To get a conditional use permit to grow up to an acre of cannabis indoor and outdoor at his Petaluma Hills Farm has taken Magruder about two and a half years.
“There’s a lot of environmental studies, land use studies, setback requirements, you have to create a (California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA) document,” Magruder said.
In order to get a permit, environmental and land use studies are required by the county which can include geological and biological assessments and other tests, according to Alexa Rae Wall, owner of Moonflower Delivery in San Rafael. Wall’s separate cannabis cultivation business, Luma California based in Penngrove, recently hit the two-year mark in trying to get a conditional use permit to grow cannabis in Sonoma County.
Proving a proposed cannabis grow would not violate CEQA “is where people are getting stuck,” Wall said. “People are just waiting in line to get their environmental information processed.”
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