Lawsuit Seeks to Shut Down Busy Bee’s Organics in Wine Country
County Must Rein In Booming Cannabis Industry, Coalition Says.
Taking aim at an industry it views as disruptive and out of control, a citizens’ coalition is suing the Board of Supervisors and the owner of Busy Bee’s Organics, a 22-acre cannabis project on Highway 246 that was unanimously approved for a zoning permit last month.
In a lawsuit filed on April 23 in county Superior Court, the Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis, Inc., a nonprofit group, alleges that Sara Rotman, the owner of Busy Bee’s, and her agents illegally expanded a medicinal operation from a single greenhouse in early 2016 to more than seven acres in 2018 — and that the supervisors broke their own zoning rules in validating that expansion with an after-the-fact permit.
The coalition claims that the county failed to properly review the environmental impacts of cannabis on the lucrative wine-tasting business in and around Buellton, including the pungent smell of marijuana plants; and that the county broke state law by allowing cannabis operations such as Busy Bee’s to qualify for tax breaks as agricultural preserves.
