Santa Barbara Cannabis Update: Sniffing Smoke, Where’s the Fire?

The Santa Barbara County supervisors voted to crack down on tax delinquent cannabis operators this Tuesday, just as California’s State Auditor launched an audit of how Santa Barbara County and five other California counties have issued cannabis business permits over the past five years. The state audit was championed by Assemblymember Reginald Byron Jones-Sawyer Sr. of Los Angeles, who argued it was necessary to determine if the business license processes of the six counties are open, fair, or susceptible to corruption. According to the California Auditor’s Office — which did not use the term “corruption” — the effort will evaluate whether the rules and regulations adopted by individual counties are clear, transparent, fair, and to what extent conflict of interest and other forms of abuse and favoritism are evident. A spokesperson for the Auditor’s Office declined to confirm the identities of any of the six counties, but Santa Barbara County Supervisor Steve Lavagnino — a strong supporter of Santa Barbara’s emergent cannabis industry — confirmed that Santa Barbara was one of the six.

“And it’s a good thing,” Lavagnino said. “I look forward to someone who knows something about it looking at what we’re doing and letting us know what we can do better. I think it will be fair.” 

With the speed at which Santa Barbara’s legal cannabis industry exploded and then imploded, the county sports more cultivation licenses than any in the state, while the crop’s olfactory impact on neighbors led to outraged complaints of political favoritism and kid-glove regulation. What critics decry as corruption, supporters describe as growing pains.