CARPINTERIA, Calif. _ In this seaside town, readers of the local paper recently came upon a curious photo: the school district superintendent and four administrators standing and smiling in a field of marijuana plants.
They were wearing caps with the logo of the grower's brand, Glass House Farms.
People already critical of the explosion of marijuana cultivation in the area were outraged.
"The appalling poor judgment necessary for educators in a district leadership role to jointly agree to such a promotional stunt is unlike anything any of us has ever witnessed," Lionel Neff, a retired toy company owner, told the school board at a meeting the following week.
The photo accompanied a story about the Carpinteria Unified School District accepting $189,000 from a cannabis growers association to hire a middle school mental health counselor. Superintendent Diana Rigby and school board President Andy Sheaffer did not respond to requests for comment.
For the last two years, pot has divided Carpinteria, as Santa Barbara County officials allowed it to be surrounded by the densest concentration of cannabis farms in the nation. Residents complain the farms saturate their homes and children's schools with the skunky smell the plant is famous for. Growers counter that they are providing jobs and paying taxes, while installing state-of-the-art odor control systems to mask the funk. Now debate has turned to the influence the marijuana industry is wielding. Flush with capital from multimillion-dollar harvests, marijuana cultivators have become local philanthropists and political donors. While critics say their money is corrupting, growers say they are simply being good citizens.
"A lot of the cannabis farmers are longtime cut-flower farmers here, and the donations are clearly in line with what they've been doing for 30 years," said Graham Farrar, owner of Glass House Farms and president of the industry association CARP Growers that made the donation to the middle school.
The cultivators worked the local levers of power like few others. They lured editors and reporters away from the local paper, Coastal View News, as their publicists. They became active in Rotary and Lions clubs, football and softball leagues, the arts center and the beloved Avocado Festival. They hosted a gala and auction in September for Girls Inc., donating $50,000 up front and contributing much more during the bidding. The event, called "An Evening in Bloom," raised $250,000 for the nonprofit.
They've been generous with politicians. At a fundraiser at a wine tasting room in March, growers donated $32,500 to Carpinteria's county supervisor, Das Williams, who led the effort to make the county the state's leader in legal cannabis production.
But the growers have a formidable opponent in a group of several hundred residents, Concerned Carpinterians, who are fighting the farmers' permits and working to oust Williams in the 2020 election.
They charge that the growers are buying silence and inaction from the school district and county supervisors, who have the power to require pot farms to relocate farther away from homes and schools and seal their facilities.
"We see the extreme proliferation of cannabis in Carpinteria, very high concentration of cannabis farms around schools and homes," Gregory Gandrud, an accountant and former city council member told the school board after the photo was published. "There's a very corrupting influence with the money."
Late last year, CARP Growers was in discussions with the school district to donate $28,000 for the high school to buy science equipment. The deal fell apart when a school board member, Maureen Foley Claffey, objected to the district taking money from an industry that is still illegal under federal law.
Foley Claffey, who had a daughter in the first grade, also voiced personal concerns. The flower grower next to her house was now cultivating pot and the smell was intense. A delivery driver, looking for the grower, got lost and came to her house trying to find the right address. He was delivering gun safes, she said.
"I couldn't understand why my neighbor needed a gun safe, much less multiple gun safes," she said.
In December, she read a story in Coastal View News about CARP Growers donating $1,200 for students to go on college tours; it included a photo of Farrar and two other growers holding a ceremonial oversized check for $1,200. But the board item to approve the gift said the donation came from the Rotary Club. Foley Claffey made the board amend the agenda to acknowledge on the record that, regardless of who wrote the final check, the money came from the growers.
Shortly thereafter, a former board member launched a recall petition against Foley Claffey, and pro-cannabis people began promoting it on the NextDoor app. Saying she felt threatened, she resigned in April. Foley Claffey, whose family first settled in the area in 1863, moved out of the district in the fall.
"I feel even more strongly now that the industry has co-opted the school district," she said. "These are multinational interests behind these grows. They don't care about residents and students."
In August, Superintendent Rigby reached out to the growers to seek funding for a middle school mental health counselor. CARP Growers agreed to pay $63,000 for three years. Only one board member, Rogelio Delgado, voted against it.
Rigby, three school principals and another administrator agreed to tour Farrar's farm. "I showed them the beneficial insects we use, the recapturing of the water," Farrar recalled. He handed them free caps, he said, and asked to take a photo to accompany the press release about the donation.
