Plans for a new cannabis greenhouse equipped with what’s promised to be a state-of-the-art odor-control system sailed through the County of Santa Barbara’s Planning Commission this Wednesday morning by a vote of 5 to 0. Even the commission’s two most vociferous critics of the cannabis industry’s inadequately mitigated odor impacts — Michael Cooney and John Parke — spoke positively of the plan unveiled by Cresco California to install carbon filters or scrubbers inside the proposed greenhouse. Cresco, one of the major cannabis operations in the country, applied for a greenhouse that’s about three-quarters the size of Paseo Nuevo Mall.
This new system — proposed two weeks ago just hours before the Planning Commission was first scheduled to vote on the project — was unveiled in response to 700 emails of community opposition and disappointment about another odor-modifying system that just two years ago had been extolled as the industry gold standard for odor control. That system involved vapor mists sprayed high into the air around the perimeter of greenhouses that are designed to chemically neutralize the tangy olfactory impact caused by cannabis terpenes. After two years, it’s clear this system — known as the Byers Scientific system — has clearly not quieted community concern nor persuaded members of the Planning Commission that the problem has been adequately addressed.
Critics of the cannabis industry have been insisting almost since the first cannabis greenhouses went operational in the Carpinteria Valley that carbon filters or carbon scrubbers were the most effective way to address odor creep. For almost as long, they’ve been told that carbon-scrubbing technology required more electricity than Southern California Edison could reliably deliver to Carpinteria, located at the outer reaches of its service area. Likewise, they were told that Carpinteria’s inventory of greenhouses — many of which date back to the 1960s — were too old and rickety to accommodate carbon scrubbers.