An active lawsuit contends dirt stirred up by construction of Mirasol Village in Sacramento led to the failure of an indoor cannabis growing operation at a nearby property. Plaintiff Betty Mitchell said she's encouraged after Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Richard K. Sueyoshi made several case rulings in recent weeks allowing her to continue to pursue negligence, fraud and punitive damage claims against the defendants.
"The decision was made not to remediate the site," said Mitchell, a social worker who specializes in assisting the unhoused. "I'm an unintended consequence."
Mitchell's suit, first filed in April 2025, contends the soil at the site of Mirasol Village in
Sacramento's River District contained chlordane, a synthetic insecticide used for about 40 years before the federal government banned it in 1988. She said operators annually used it on the site when it was first military housing and then the Twin Rivers public housing project. Twin Rivers was demolished in 2018 and 2019 for development of Mirasol Village, a mixed-income community of 427 units on the same property.
In 2017, Mitchell got a lease for an indoor cannabis growing and cultivation operation at 301 Dos Rios St., just west of where construction was planned for Mirasol Village between Dos Rios and North 12th streets. Three years later, according to the suit, cannabis from Mitchell's operation began failing state-mandated pesticide testing because of the presence of chlordane.
Read more at The Sacramento Business Journal
