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Mountain View broke away from a county-wide crackdown on backyard marijuana growers Tuesday night, after City Council members agreed to abandon the city’s ban on outdoor cultivation for personal use.
In a 2-5 vote, with Mayor Pat Showalter, Ken Rosenberg, John Inks, John McAlister and Mike Kasperzak opposed, the council rejected a one-year moratorium on outdoor marijuana cultivation, making Mountain View one of the few cities in Santa Clara County to drop the restriction.
Last month, the City Council passed a temporary 45-day urgency ordinance that prohibits outdoor marijuana cultivation in Mountain View. The vote was seen as a pre-emptive move in case Proposition 64, also known as the Adult Use of Marijuana Act (AUMA), passed on election day, which would make outdoor marijuana cultivation legal on Nov. 9. Proposition 64 passed with 57.1 percent of the vote across the state, and nearly 68 percent of Mountain View voters supported the measure.
Under AUMA, adults 21 and older are allowed to legally possess, process, transport, purchase, obtain or give away up to an ounce of marijuana, and can grow up to six marijuana plants. It’s still against the law to smoke pot in a public place, and the state’s regulatory and licensing infrastructure for recreational dispensaries is expected to take at least a year to complete.
Despite the delay on dispensaries, city staff argued that the passage of the AUMA creates a “regulatory gap” because the city has no ordinances to regulate outdoor pot grows in the city. The ballot measure limits residents to up to six pot plants, which have to be in a “locked space” and out of public view. Without additional city-wide steps to regulate outdoor cultivation, the AUMA could cause an increase in crime, an odor nuisance and inappropriate uses of pesticides and herbicides, according to the staff report.
With the urgency ordinance set to expire on Friday, Dec. 16, city staff recommended a one-year moratorium on outdoor cultivation in order to give them more time to craft new regulations, which could restrict lot size and distance from neighboring fences. But City Council members remained unconvinced that outdoor marijuana plants were going to amount to a major public safety hazard or a nuisance with pot odors wafting into nearby yards.
Council member John Inks, who was the sole dissenting vote against the urgency ordinance last month, called the moratorium “bureaucratic hyperbole” pretending to be for the public benefit, and said there wasn’t a lot of concrete information backing the city’s claim that outdoor marijuana would trigger more crime or a threat to public health.
“This type of ordinance is about authority, control and regulation, and later on being able to tax,” Inks said. “It’s all about control, and this is going to encumber what some may consider legitimate uses of marijuana.”
The Mountain View Police Department reports that since 2005, three of the city’s eight homicide cases were marijuana-related, as well as two of 22 attempted homicides, 11 of 98 robberies and three of five home-invasion robberies. Mature marijuana plants can be worth as much as $5,000 each, making it a valuable commodity that can be an attractive target for theft, according to the staff report. When pressed by council member McAlister, Mountain View Police Lt. Frank St. Clair said the cases were specifically related to the illegal sale of marijuana.
All but one city in Santa Clara County has adopted at least an urgency ordinance banning outdoor cultivation, and eight have moved forward with permanent bans, according to the staff report. The city of Santa Clara has not adopted any ordinance related to outdoor grows.
Neil Jensen, a long-time Mountain View resident, told council members that he is a cancer patient who has used cannabis as an alternative to opioids in order to get through the pain of chemotherapy. He said the city’s ban on outdoor marijuana cultivation puts him in a tricky spot because he would either have to leave the city or pay a small fortune to grow it indoors. The third alternative, he said, is to break the law.
“Am I going to have to go to jail because of such a stupid thing (as) growing plants in the backyard?” Jensen asked. “For what? To protect children? I grew it before this marijuana proposition passed — there’s no problem.”
Council member Lenny Siegel voted for the ban despite his support for Proposition 64, and said there are still too many unanswered questions. He said the city has a role in clarifying what the AUMA means when it says outdoor plants cannot be visible “by normal unaided vision from a public place,” particularly in shared spaces and backyards viewable by neighboring balconies. What’s more, he said, the city has a responsibility to prevent people under the age of 21 from accessing marijuana that’s potentially accessible outside.
“I’d like to see if we can come up with some answers to that before we just open up the gates,” Siegel said. “I’m hoping that most people with private spaces will be able to plant if they so desire, but I’d hate to send police out not having good instructions about what the law really says.”
Kapserzak said the city already has mechanisms in place to resolve nuisances and neighborhood disputes, and could address the problems that arise following the passage of the AUMA without additional regulations.
“A nuisance is still a nuisance and it probably could still apply to abusive marijuana growing outdoors,” he said. “We don’t throw away the rest of the law because you can grow an outdoor pot plant.”
Great! This and rent control will make this city a new Hayward within the next 10 years.
What do you mean? In what ways will Mountain View become more like Hayward due to these policies?
Of course it won’t be like Hayward. People are just mad they are on the losing side of a social issue.
Someone still thinks booze is just fine by cannabis is evil..EEEEEEVIIIIIIL
Glad to see the City Council using some common sense.
Kudos to the City Council for doing something positive in the name of civil rights and social justice. No one should be banned from growing any plants on their own property, and especially when the plant in question is cannabis (marijuana), which the DEA in 1988 called “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” And especially when it also happens to be one of the most important and powerful botanical medicines on earth…
http://www.businessinsider.com/health-benefits-of-medical-marijuana-2014-4/#it-can-be-used-to-treat-glaucoma-1
…with a 10,000 year history and a perfect safety record of zero deaths, again as affirmed by a legal ruling of the DEA in 1988.
Prohibition, and the propaganda of fear that surrounds it, is he sole reason anyone is even worried about cannabis being grown in their neighborhood. If more people grew their own cannabis it would become *less* of a target to potential thieves. Given the plant’s astonishing value to human health every city, including Mountain View, should immediately start offering tax incentives to grow cannabis for the community.
Pot is legal folks. Get used to it. We are gonna grow it. After decades of hypocracy we finally have justice.
“Hypocrisy”? More like stupidity, especially when someone states “the plant’s astonishing value to human health” – really?
I really would have preferred my name not be used in this article for all the world to see. It kind of sets me up as a potential target, if you know what I mean. Fortunately cannabis consumers are generally honorable people, who aren’t known for taking what doesn’t belong to them. It’s not their nature. I try to live by that optimistic outlook; but sometimes it’s not so easy.
People look stupid when they cling to old beliefs that have been proven untrue, like people still professing there is no medical benefit to cannabis in the face of over 20 years people giving up organ harming chemicals to treat their ailments an finding relief without the side effect with cannabis.
Here’s one of the endless links available to ease you into the world of reality, and away from the world of “I’m never going to change my mind”
From business insider:
http://www.businessinsider.com/health-benefits-of-medical-marijuana-2014-4
The list is endless and so are the amount of people who have discovered that organ damaging chemicals can be replace with cannabis.
Beyond “Really”, it’s actually Really and Truly.
It doesn’t bother me that adults want to use another method to escape reality temporarily. It’s the children I worry about. A lot of our youth in Mountain View use marijuana to self medicate from the enormous pressures of society here in Silicon Valley. They see adults, parents, friends and neighbors doing it. And after all, it is medicine isn’t it.
Such a waste.
Yes, and the youth could always get it on the black market, which was why even back in my day pot was easier to get as a kid than legal and regulated alcohol. They see their parents extolling the virtues of wine and beer, and if/when they do get a hold of it, many become dead. That’s a national fact/tragedy.
Legalizing pot will also make it more difficult for kids to get it, like booze, but if they DO end up getting it, it is a MUCH MUCH more safe product. It will not literally kill you like booze literally kills our kids in astounding numbers.
Because of it’s impact on the current kid friendly black market, legalization is good news if you are actually worried about kids. If you have another agenda, you’ll use worry about kids as a way of trying to sway sentiment to your line of thought.
Pot stinks.
I hope that other cities benefit from a responsible citizen like Neil coming forward to counter fear and bigotry. Bringing cannabis out of the closet and into the garden hugely reduces its energy and material footprint. It is also a positive step in normalizing our cultural relationship with this long-domesticated crop.
The restrictions imposed in the county and in other cities are a huge subsidy for commercial operations. It would be more honest of the people advocating restricting home growers to acknowledge they are promoting the for-profit cannabis industry.
Unincorporated County Resident