Santa Barbara County Supervisors Mandate Clean-Air ‘Scrubbers’ in All Cannabis Greenhouses

‘It’s About Time,’ Carpinterians Say of Supervisors’ Historic Vote to Require State-of-Art Odor Control

The county Board of Supervisors this week amended its cannabis ordinance to require high-tech odor-control technology in all cannabis greenhouses in the Carpinteria Valley. | Credit: Carl Perry

In a historic vote this week, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors unanimously adopted what may be the toughest odor-control regulations for commercial cannabis in the nation, requiring the installation of state-of-the-art odor control systems inside every cannabis greenhouse in the Carpinteria Valley, on or before March 31, 2026.

Seven years after a previous board approved a cannabis ordinance that was intended to make Santa Barbara County a mecca for the industry, the package of amendments that was approved on a first reading on Tuesday puts the brakes on that outlook, reflecting the political changes wrought by the wide-open ordinance of 2018.

Tackling the problem head-on for the first time on Tuesday, the board gave cannabis greenhouse growers 12 months to install “multi-technology carbon filtration” systems, also known as “scrubbers” — or an equivalent technology — throughout their operations. Scrubbers have been shown to clean up most of the smell of pot before it can escape through the greenhouse roof vents.

Growers who fail to meet the deadline risk losing their county business license, the board said. If they encounter supply chain delays or problems with electrical upgrades, they can ask the board for an additional 12 months to comply. Under the new rules, and as a condition of the annual county business license for cannabis, every greenhouse grower must sign a statement “under penalty of perjury,” pledging to “ensure the ongoing operation of their odor control system.”

A second reading of the cannabis odor-control amendments and a final board vote have been scheduled for April 1.

In the wake of the 2018 ordinance, most of the sprawling cut-flower industry in the Carpinteria Valley converted to pot. To date, the county has approved zoning permits for 27 cannabis greenhouse operations totaling 138 acres, or about 100 football fields’ worth, just outside the limits of the small town of Carpinteria. Nineteen “grows” are actively under cultivation; of these, only seven are equipped with scrubbers. Most growers have placed carbon filtration units in their processing buildings, but not their vented greenhouses.

‘A Huge Step’

Since mid-2018, county records show, Carpinterians have filed 4,050 complaints about the “skunky” smell of pot that wafts into their homes and neighborhoods — and that includes complaints from last week. Many residents have complained of headaches, runny noses, sore throats, eye irritation, and respiratory problems that they believe are triggered by the smell. But none of the complaints they filed with the county were ever enforced: There was no way to trace the smell to a specific greenhouse.

The supervisors had signaled their intention to crack down on the lingering smell of pot in the valley back in January, a week after Supervisor Roy Lee of Carpinteria took office.

“We are taking a huge step in the right direction for cannabis policy in our county,” Supervisor Roy Lee said after Tuesday’s hearing. | Credit: Carl Perry

“We are taking a huge step in the right direction for cannabis policy in our county,” Lee said after Tuesday’s hearing. “I want to say thank you to everybody who has advocated and fought for this change. It’s almost surreal that it happened. It’s a victory for our county and the residents of Carpinteria. I hope that we can help to rebuild the trust between our government and the people and show them we are listening.”

For many of the 16,000 residents of the agricultural valley, the board’s vote was a long time coming. Over the years, they organized two citizens’ groups — Concerned Carpinterians and the Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis — to try to rein in the burgeoning industry in their midst. But until now, it has been an uphill battle.

The number one priority of the county’s 2018 ordinance was to “develop a robust and economically viable legal cannabis industry.” Over the years, the board majority of then-Supervisor Gregg Hart of Goleta and the two co-authors of the ordinance, supervisors Das Williams of Carpinteria and Steve Lavagnino of Santa Maria, opposed any new odor control measures, choosing instead to seek the growers’ voluntary cooperation to solve the problem.

A 2020 county Grand Jury report that called for stronger regulations and slammed the board for collaborating with the growers’ lobbyists was largely ignored. The two citizens’ groups sued the county over its ordinance and lost; appealed dozens of cannabis projects and lost; and sued several growers, settling with two of them. A voluntary odor-control agreement between the coalition and CARP Growers, an industry group, fell through. The coalition spent more than $1 million trying to promote stronger regulations.

Then, during March 2024 elections, Carpinterians threw their weight 2-1 behind Lee, a Carpinteria city councilmember running against Williams, a veteran politician, for the 1st Supervisorial District seat. In a surprise upset, Lee won narrowly. In the fall of 2023, supervisors Laura Capps of Goleta and Bob Nelson of Orcutt began meeting on their own to discuss how to implement a requirement for scrubbers.

“The weight of public opinion has finally hit home,” Lionel Neff, a boardmember of the Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis, a countywide citizens’ group, said after Tuesday’s vote. “The supervisors are acknowledging that their predecessors turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the concerns of Carpinterians. The neighbors have suffered for eight years. It’s about time that the growers met their obligations to be good neighbors and addressed the odor issues.

The Cost to Growers

One model of scrubbers, developed by the Envinity Group, costs $22,000 each. At a recommended density of 10 per acre, it would cost at least $30 million for growers across the valley to install them, and that’s not counting the cost of electrical upgrades. | Credit: Courtesy

On Tuesday, several growers asked the board to consider granting tax credits to help them pay for the new odor-control technologies.

One model of scrubbers, developed by the Envinity Group, an air purification engineering firm in the Netherlands, in partnership with a few growers in the valley, has proven to eliminate 84 percent of the smell of cannabis, on average, before it can escape through the vents on the greenhouse roofs. But at $22,000 each, these models are expensive. At a recommended density of 10 per acre, it would cost at least $30 million for growers across the valley to install them, and that’s not counting the cost of electrical upgrades.

“A couple of our locations are actually quite far from anything, essentially, and none of our neighbors have ever complained to us,” Tadd McKenzie, co-president of the Pacific Dutch Group, told the board. In fact, he said, some neighbors “are pleased because we changed our crop from chives to cannabis,” and the smell is “not nearly as offensive as the chives were.”

“We’ve paid a substantial amount of the taxes that have been collected in the county,” McKenzie said, referring to the county tax on growers’ gross receipts, or sales. A tax credit for growers would help speed the implementation of the new rules, he said.

“It’s going to be a very substantial cost to us to install the required scrubbers as well as the power infrastructure that’s required for our projects,” McKenzie said.

McKenzie also asked the board not to require scrubbers for areas where “juvenile” nursery marijuana plants are grown. The plants do not emit odor at this stage, he said. Pacific Dutch has installed scrubbers at New Horizon Farming, a five-acre nursery “grow” at 4532 Foothill Road near the Carpinteria High School, but would like permission to remove them, McKenzie said.

Autumn Shelton, co-owner of Autumn Brands at 3615 Foothill, said the board should “do more research on the scrubbers to make sure they do work” before requiring them across-the-board.

Jared Ficker, a spokesman for CARP Growers said, “This could be the most comprehensive odor ordinance related to cannabis that we would see in the nation.”

CARP Growers is supportive of scrubbers, he said, but electrical upgrades can be time-consuming and cost more than the scrubbers themselves. He asked the board to consider granting tax credits to the growers, and requested that deadline extensions for scrubber installation be allowed over-the-counter.

“There are a lot of things related to actually implementing this that are not in control of the operators,” Ficker said.

Whitney Collie, vice president for compliance at Ever-Bloom, Roadside, and Maximum greenhouses, told the board that 42 Envinity scrubbers will be installed next week at Maximum, a four-acre greenhouse operation at 4555 Foothill, near the high school. That would bring the total to eight “grows” with scrubbers, out of 19 actively under cultivation.

Ever-Bloom, 11 acres of cannabis at 4701 Foothill, helped test the Envinity scrubbers and was the first in the valley to install them; Collie said the operators and their neighbors have been “very pleased” with their performance.

Supervisor Steve Lavagnino of Santa Maria, a co-author of the 2018 cannabis ordinance, said, “I hope that folks understand that at this point, without significant odor-control implementation, the industry is going to die anyway because of pushback from the community. The industry’s been singled out again and again … Elections have consequences, right? So this is where it’s at.”

Lavagnino said he was supporting the odor-control amendments “with some severe reservations, because the last thing I want to do is put somebody out of business that’s got 250, 300 people working there … I hope that we don’t end up with a situation where we’ve just strangled off the last of the industry.”

More New Rules

Ever-Bloom, 11 acres of cannabis at 4701 Foothill Road in Carpinteria, helped test the Envinity scrubbers and was the first in the valley to install them. | Credit: Courtesy

In the balmy Mediterranean climate of the Carpinteria Valley, cannabis growers control the temperature inside their greenhouses by opening hundreds of roof vents, allowing both hot air and the noxious smell of cannabis to escape. Residents say the smell rises during the day and settles back down in the evening. The smell can travel long distances; there are hot spots in the foothills and along the beach.

In addition to installing scrubbers by March 31, 2026, the board required valley growers to shut down the perfumed “misting” systems that they currently use to neutralize the smell of pot after it escapes through the vents. Many residents have complained that the mist leaves an oily residue in their yards and has a disagreeable “laundromat” smell. By some estimates, the misting systems are sending several hundred tons of plant-based deodorant into the valley’s air every year.

In a separate 5-0 vote on Tuesday, the board unanimously amended its zoning ordinances to set an odor threshold at the property lines of greenhouse operations. Specifically, the board said, a grower will be out of compliance if the smell of pot at the property line exceeds a threshold of “mild to transient” for three minutes.

The testing will be performed by county employees equipped with Nasal Rangers, hand-held devices that are used to sniff the air and measure odor. To initiate an inspection at a greenhouse property line, the county must receive at least three odor complaints within a 60-day period or five within 24 hours.

A large cluster of cannabis greenhouses is shown here at the eastern end of the Carpinteria Valley, toward Nidever Road. | Credit: Courtesy

The growers will be required to equip their scrubbers with “run-time” meters, showing when the filters are or are not functioning. They will have to make the data available to the county annually and upon request. The county also will conduct annual inspections.

The zoning amendments will be operative 12 months after Tuesday’s vote, or upon certification by the state Coastal Commission, whichever comes later. There will be no odor testing at the greenhouse property lines until the amendments go into effect, county officials said.

In the meantime, at the board’s request, county Planning & Development will post growers’ odor-control plans online when they are updated for scrubbers. And the county’s burdensome odor complaint system will be streamlined with an app that can “geolocate” the users with GPS and identify the exact location of the odor they are experiencing.

Cannabis Acreage Caps

Left out of the board’s actions on Tuesday was any relief for residents of Buellton and Solvang who are downwind from the outdoor cannabis operations along Highway 246 and Santa Rosa Road. They complain about the stink of pot during the spring and fall harvests of cannabis that is grown under hoops or in open fields.

The county has licensed 560 acres of outdoor cannabis but only one greenhouse in the North County, a half acre at Hidden Oaks Enterprises, located at 5935 Dominion Rd. east of Orcutt. The new odor-control regulations will apply to all existing and future cannabis greenhouse operations in the county.

Supervisor Joan Hartmann, who represents Buellton and Solvang and areas where outdoor cannabis has taken root, said that as an odor-control measure, she favored reducing the county acreage caps for cannabis in both the North County and the Carpinteria Valley, now set at 1,575 acres and 186 acres, respectively. Hartmann voted for the 2018 ordinance, but on Tuesday, she said she had been “shell-shocked” by the air quality impacts that followed.

At Hartmann’s request, the board said it would address how and whether to change the cannabis acreage caps at a hearing next May.

“The air that we breathe is a public resource,” Hartmann said. “We’re shifting the burden back to where it belongs — on the industry that is contaminating the air.”

Melinda Burns is an investigative journalist with 40 years of experience covering immigration, water, science, and the environment. As a community service, she offers her reports to multiple publications in Santa Barbara County, at the same time, for free.