Santa Barbara Planning Commission Greenlights Another Cannabis Operation
Pot Opponents Are Determined to Appeal Every Permit Permitted
It’s not exactly Godzilla versus Mothra. But in Santa Barbara, it’s the next best thing. It’s cannabis, which, like water it seems, has become all about the fighting. Depending on who you ask, last week’s knock-down-drag-out in front of the County Planning Commission over a proposed new cannabis greenhouse in Carpinteria went either six or seven hours long. Either way, I was down for the count.
In the anti-cannabis corner stood Maureen Foley Claffey — known to friends as MoFo — wearing a red blouse (the signature color of the movement), on which hung a wooden clothespin as a rhetorical flourish. Long ago, MoFo worked at the Independent as an editor and reporter. Today, she describes herself as a “farmer’s daughter,” the home-grown sprout of a family seed first planted in the Carpinteria Valley in the 1860s, and, more importantly, the mother of a 7-year-old girl. At the podium, MoFo is whirlwind. And she is pissed. She’s pissed about a lot of things. But at the top of the list is, of course, the smell.
In the other corner stood Graham Farrar, a home-grown Goleta boy himself, who often recalls riding his bike past lemon orchards now turned into condos. Farrar looks a little like a grown-up version of Opie — the kid on The Andy Griffith Show. Except in this case, Opie happens to be anentrepreneurial savant with a cyborg’s analytic brain, who dropped out of high school and managed to get in on the ground floor with such stratospheric home-grown start-ups as Sonos and Software.com.
