When his dad died in 2019, Indy Riggs had his “come to Jesus moment.”
He sold his stakes in cannabis farms across Humboldt County to focus on the small pot grow he started with his father and brother more than two decades before at his family home on the south bank of the Eel River.
Riggs had long been running around the county, juggling businesses, spending time away from home and his kids.
His father’s death put things into focus, he said, sitting in the quirky yellow house with tangerine and purple accents his family erected on a bare plot of land bought in 1991.
“When we were kids here in Stafford, we built this place from the ground up. This is really where our roots are. This is where we’ve really taken hold, so I didn’t want to let this go.”
His neighbors are the parents of childhood friends. Riggs exchanges honey from his beehives for meat from the pigs raised next door. “It’s a good little thing we got going on,” he said.
But, Riggs worries a controversial county voter initiative on the March 5 ballot could jeopardize his family’s legacy, and future. The Humboldt Cannabis Reform Initiative, or Measure A, is spearheaded by a small group of local residents. It purports to protect small farmers by blocking large-scale industrial farming and also bring stronger environmental restrictions to the cannabis industry at large. Opponents, though, including small longtime cultivators like Riggs, say it could have the opposite effect and potentially wipe them out.
Though the measure would only affect Humboldt County, the tensions behind it mirror those between regulators, cannabis farmers and their neighbors in Sonoma County and around the state.
Riggs’ dad moved his kids to the cannabis heartland of Humboldt County pursuing a long-term fascination with the long-forbidden plant. Indy Riggs’ full name, in fact, is Indicus.
Riggs and his brother eventually ended up pursuing cultivation professionally, inspiring their father to start the process of permitting their 3,000-square-foot family plot when cannabis was legalized in California in 2016. He didn’t make it through the tangle of state and local regulations before he died, and Riggs wanted to finish what he’d started.
By the time that moment came in 2022, the once-burgeoning marijuana market had bottomed out.
Riggs has managed to keep the tiny farm afloat. But it’s not enough to sustain his family. His wife’s teacher salary now accounts for the majority of their income. He hopes to change that with modest expansions to his farm. But if passed, he said, Measure A would effectively prevent that and other necessary efforts by growers like him to survive.
Like other marijuana growers tucked into similarly verdant corners of Humboldt County’s redwood forests, hills and drainages, Riggs considers Measure A just the latest existential threat to a way of life that has sustained people and families in the economically depressed region for decades.
The longest standing farmers, in many cases second generation, outlasted prohibition and the war on drugs, when helicopters and federal agents hunted for their crops.
Like others, Riggs joined the legal cannabis markets when California voters opened them up. That shift brought other challenges — most notably a massive influx of outside investment and new growers that inundated the supply side while a Byzantine regulatory system choked off access to customers. That led to a crash in marijuana’s price per pound, which drove many out of business.
Many of those who survived the rapid market collapse after legalization say they are Humboldt County’s original growers — the same ones who survived the perils of the black market.
“I look forward to putting 20-30 years of time and energy into making this something I would want my family to inherit.”
Steve Luu
“What remains is a lot of people with a connection to the cultural economy, a heritage of people associated with the plant,” said Dominic Corva, a Cal Poly Humboldt sociologist who researches cannabis policy. “Whether you think it’s kooky or not, their identities are wrapped up in the idea that they are stewards of a plant with a global heritage.”
Measure A is another kick, growers say, when they’re already down. And it is one made all the more painful because it originated within Humboldt County, not in Sacramento or Washington, D.C.
Around the North Coast, tensions with neighbors and community groups have risen in the years since marijuana came out of the shadows. Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger, the San Francisco-based firm hired by initiative proponents, have represented several such groups, including in Sonoma County, as they seek to tighten regulations or limit operations in their communities. Such friction drove Sonoma County officials to redraw the county’s cannabis ordinance, an ongoing process closely scrutinized by concerned neighborhood coalitions and struggling farmers.
In that environment, Humboldt County’s Measure A represents a particularly tense flashpoint, and one in the heart of the Emerald Triangle — an area within Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino counties considered the state’s historic cradle for growing bud.
California’s low bar for ballot initiatives — Measure A qualified with 7,000 signatures — makes the tool attractive to people worried about cannabis farming and convinced, as Measure A’s proponents are, that local government is too friendly to the industry.
“It’s direct democracy,” said Kevin Bundy, a lawyer for the firm that wrote Measure A. “It happens at the ballot box instead of in front of the planning commission and the board of supervisors.”
For examples, Measure A’s proponents say, look no further than 1996, when California voters legalized medical marijuana use through a ballot measure, or 2016, when they legalized the recreational industry.
Critics, conversely, see the approach as an end run around a more public and collaborative process. Unlike the broad outside input involved when the county developed its cannabis regulations, opponents say, stakeholders and experts weren’t able to weigh in on the actual language in Measure A, which would add 38 pages of amendments to the county’s general and coastal plans and code. Significant future changes would also require another vote.
The campaigns for and against Measure A have drawn sharp lines. Opponents accuse the measure’s architects of electoral trickery and NIMBYism, even racism. They sued — unsuccessfully — to block its inclusion on the ballot, saying signature gatherers had misrepresented its purpose. Proponents, meanwhile, say they’ve been harassed and intimidated as county elected officials, local governments, business associations and even environmental organizations line up against them.
Suspicion and distrust boiled to the point where rumors floated in both camps that the other side has hidden support from big tobacco or other corporate interests. Campaign finance filings to date don’t support that contention.
A wind-swept ridge where tensions spilled over
If voters elect on March 5 to restrict Humboldt County’s cannabis industry, the decision will be traced back to Kneeland, a rural unincorporated community about 12 miles east and more than 2,000 feet above Eureka. That’s where a civil engineer and Chicago transplant named Steve Luu bought 40 acres of wind-swept ridgetop. On clear days, the view from the flat spot where he hopes to build stretches to Humboldt Bay and the Pacific Ocean.
Luu, who moved to Humboldt County in 2016 and works as a regulatory consultant to cannabis growers, plans to build a home and farm that will sustain his future family. He plots his homesteading dream on a decadal scale.
“I look forward to putting 20-30 years of time and energy into making this something I would want my family to inherit,” he said.
Anchoring his operation would be cannabis. Luu submitted an application to develop a one-acre grow — larger than many small Humboldt County operations but small compared to sprawling farms in other counties.
Concerned neighbors called his proposal a “mega pot grow.”
When Luu learned about the opposition, he chose to scale his farm back to 10,000 square feet, which avoided a public hearing. He describes an attempt to compromise. Neighbors however deemed it exploiting a loophole and worried he might expand by stacking permits one smaller plot at a time, bringing a growing number of water tanks and other structures.
“It just got overblown,” Luu said. “I don’t think what I’m proposing to do is a huge impact.” At least one of his future Kneeland neighbors came around once he met them and explained he intended to raise a family, not just cannabis crop, on the property, he said.
Steve Luu near Kneeland in Humboldt County, Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024. (Kent Porter / The Press Democrat)
Steve Luu near Kneeland in Humboldt County, Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024. (Kent Porter / The Press Democrat)
Others did not, and, according to Luu and other farmers, their opposition spiraled into the ballot measure. Two of the principal funders and drivers of the ballot measure campaign live in Kneeland, within miles of Luu’s property.
“It’s not anything about this grow in particular or Steven Luu in particular,” said one of them — retired sociology professor Betsy Watson. “It’s just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
From there, Watson, and her neighbor, Mark Thurmond, a retired veterinarian, connected with Bundy, who drafted their ballot measure.
But in some respects, Measure A’s origins can be traced back further than Luu’s proposal.
Corva, the CalPoly Humboldt sociologist who opposes Measure A, points to the “green rush” of the 2010s. During that period, when medical cannabis was legal but recreational use remained unlawful but likely, there was a massive influx of outside investment into unregulated, if not downright illegal, cannabis farming. Like with many sudden, natural-resource driven industrial booms, there were plenty of downsides.
“The growers, they feel like they own the county.”
Ken Miller
“There were not good things going on,” Corva said, “in more remote areas, pretty bad environmental practices. In less remote areas, a springing up of industry in neighborhoods that were not really prepared for it.”
The people who would go on to spend considerable amounts of their personal wealth and time to push Measure A onto the ballot say they were strongly affected by the green rush. They recall how it brought traffic, crime and environmental damage — often using passionate language that has fed their opponents’ claims of an anti-cannabis stigma.
“They were hostile, aggressive drivers,” Thurmond said of new faces he saw. “They pass you, they flip you off, they force you off the road.”
Humboldt County never reckoned with its own failure to control the green rush, Corva said. But he also said any lingering prejudice toward cannabis growers is now misguided. The growers who have survived are small-scale, regulated and generally tied to the areas in which they live and work.
John Casali, who runs the picturesque 5,000-square-foot Huckleberry Hills Farm in southern Humboldt County, grew up learning from his parents how to grow covertly in patches spread out through the rugged hillsides during prohibition. He acknowledges the damage that growing undercover sometimes caused, especially as operations intensified — he recalls burying generators near creeks to hide the noise, risking diesel spills.
“We were all just make-shifting, trying to hide what we were creating in the woods. And so, as things failed because we weren’t professionals at it, the thing that really took it in the shorts was the environment,” Casali said. When outsiders flooded in with larger scale operations during the green rush, the impacts were magnified. From the outside, Casali said, it was hard to tell the growers apart.
Casali went to prison for eight years after federal agents tied him to a grow operation near his family home. Today, California Fish & Wildlife and the Department of Cannabis Control bring tours to his marijuana farm to show what a sustainable operation can look like. Casali estimates he put around $250,000 into permitting and upgrading his operations when he became a legal operator. “As much as I didn’t want to do all those things, it was helping the environment, and I learned a lot,” Casali said.
Corva, the sociologist, called Measure A “a holy crusade against the green rush.” But, he said, “that was 10 years ago, and these people do not know or refuse to acknowledge, let me say, because they have seen these faces, they have heard these voices, they know these stories, and yet it’s still not enough for them.”
In part, the skepticism of Measure A’s opponents can be traced back further still, to conflicts between environmentalists and the industry that dominated the Redwood Empire well before cannabis — timber.
When Press Democrat reporters met with Watson, Thurmond and three other proponents of Measure A at a Eureka pizza joint, most of them said environmental activism in the face of logging’s onslaught had shaped their lives in the region, and in some cases was the reason they’d moved there.
As a sociology professor at what was then Humboldt State University, Watson helped mediate disputes between environmentalists and timber companies, keeping her own environmental ideology to herself until she retired. Even Bundy, their lawyer, spent years advocating to protect old growth forests and watershed headwaters in the area.
Up against an industry that dominated the regional economy, environmentalists saw local government as co-opted and not on their side. Today, it’s cannabis that has outsized sway in Humboldt, said Ken Miller, a McKinleyville resident and Measure A proponent.
“There’s a similar sort of cabal going on here,” he said. “The growers, they feel like they own the county.”
It may not be clear cutting or harvesting old-growth redwood trees, but Measure A’s backers say they’ve seen the serious environmental impacts from the proliferation of cannabis grows. They worry particularly about water, saying cannabis farms draw off watersheds while their water catchment systems reduce runoff that would otherwise replenish streams. As in the past, the county, they say, is not enforcing its rules.
Common sense protections or a nail in the coffin
The means, rather than the ends, most sharply divide the two opposing sides.
“The stated intent of the (Humboldt Cannabis Reform Initiative) is to support small cannabis farms while discouraging environmentally destructive cannabis operations. These principles are also our core values,” the Humboldt County Growers Association wrote in an early open letter to the initiative proponents. “Over many years of engagement in cannabis policy, however, we have found that well-intentioned policy can often produce counterproductive and even destructive results if these intentions are not informed by robust public input and close attention to detail.”
“It will be a light getting snuffed out in the county that’s carrying it the brightest.”
Dominic Corva
Proponents came up with what they see as common-sense provisions that would cap cultivation permits and farmable acres per watershed, block new or expanded growing permits over 10,000 square feet, put limits on water and energy use, mandate more stringent inspections and require the county investigate any complaint regarding an operation’s compliance.
“It’s built on (the county) ordinance,” Watson said. “It’s just giving it teeth.”
But many cultivators argue the initiative would be a disaster that would hit farms of all sizes with restrictions out of step with reality and could encourage a return to illicit cultivation and the damage that comes with it.
They consider the permit and size caps draconian, noting 10,000-square-foot limits fall far short of qualifying as large-scale operations, which aren’t a dominant feature of Humboldt’s landscape given the regulations already in place.
Initiative details that, on their face, may seem straightforward, critics say, could trap growers in an impossible situation. Adding any new structures — to adapt in a changing market or even make environmental improvements — could be blocked or come with hurdles growers say are unreasonable. For instance, the addition of a new drying shed, nursery or water storage could trigger an often insurmountable condition that the farms be served by a “category 4” road, which can come with upgrades of up to $250,000 per mile. Under the ordinance for legacy farmers designed to bring unregulated operators into the legal system, there was no such requirement. Many smaller operations are tucked down winding, backwoods roads that are far from category 4 status.
Sitting under a clock permanently set to 4:20 in the office of her cannabis distribution business in Arcata, Sequoyah Hudson, who also operates a small farm in the Dinsmore area, lays out what she sees as the measure’s flaws. She’d been hoping to combine her two side-by-side 10,000-square-foot parcels under one license to stay solvent. But that attempt to save money and stay nimble could be interpreted as a prohibited expansion, she said, “even though there’s nothing different with the operation other than consolidating some costs in a bigger picture.” She worries, too, that the initiative could compromise two grants she secured to install rainwater storage and solar installation.
A March 2023 Humboldt Planning and Building Department analysis said as much, warning the initiative could prevent “permit modifications needed to keep pace with an evolving statewide cannabis industry and possibly preclude installment of new improvements for environmental sustainability.”
But, Watson and other proponents say the initiative’s defined purpose — protecting the environment — should require the county to interpret situations that pop up through that lens. If not, “probably one or two (law)suits will take care of it, and the county will back off from their extreme analysis,” Watson said.
Bundy said the response from growers and county government are typical of any industry’s response to increased regulation. “They’ll paint it as being extreme; they’ll say this is going to shut the industry down,” he said.
Growers involved in the “No on Measure A” campaign, though, feel the threat is real enough that they’ve poured their limited resources into tanking it. The solidarity has been heartening, Hudson said, but it’s meant sacrificing other priorities, like a fledgling communal campaign to promote Humboldt cannabis.
In August 2023, the Humboldt County Growers Association met over the need to rally against Measure A. The meeting turned emotional when growers realized what they’d have to give up, the group’s policy director, Ross Gordon, said. With the permitting process finally almost complete for those who lined up in 2016, people were turning toward projects to build brand and get better prices “so that we can actually make some money.”
“To then be like, ‘We have to take a step back. You’re actually still fighting for your permits, and you’re still fighting for basic land use, it’s just a huge bummer.” It felt symbolic, then, that the meeting took place inside the shuttered Cecil’s New Orleans Bistro, a popular Garberville restaurant that closed along with many other businesses as money in southern Humboldt dried up.
No on Measure A signs are numerous in Humboldt County, this one in Arcata, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024. (Kent Porter / The Press Democrat)
No on Measure A signs are numerous in Humboldt County, this one in Arcata, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024. (Kent Porter / The Press Democrat)
The months leading up to the vote have seen a flurry of action. Proponents and opponents have shown up at city council meetings all over the county to make their case. The opposition kicked into high gear. “No on Measure A” signs dot windy, verdant, rural roadsides and hang in Arcata coffee shop windows. On a recent gloomy Friday afternoon, a dozen picketers rallied on a downtown Eureka street corner.
In the face of such vocal opposition, proponents have mixed outlooks on their chances at the ballot box. Thurmond, however, sees a pathway to victory through a potential silent majority.
Either way, Watson takes solace in the fact that the endeavor has brought attention to holes in the county’s current regulations and enforcement. “The pressure, the scrutiny,” she said. “I think we’ve already won a bit.”
Meanwhile, opponents of the initiative feel hopeful given the unusually diverse range of supporters they’ve collected — from environmental groups and farmers to the local Republican Party and sheriff. But growers, too, wondered if there could be a silent majority of voters, preparing to come out against them.
“If I can’t make it here, and I’m forced to leave this property, there’s a really good chance that the next person that buys this place won’t take care of it as well as I do,” Casali said. Those with concerns “are better off working with people that plan to live here the rest of their life than newcomers that don’t know what it’s like to live in these mountains.”
If Humboldt County’s small-scale growers, and the culture they represent, can’t survive, chances are dim for success across California, Corva said.
“It will be a light getting snuffed out in the county that’s carrying it the brightest,” he said. “If it can’t happen here, it’s not going to happen anywhere.”
You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on X (Twitter) @AndrewGraham88.
You can reach “In Your Corner” Columnist Marisa Endicott at 707-521-5470 or marisa.endicott@pressdemocrat.com. On X (formerly Twitter) @InYourCornerTPD and Facebook @InYourCornerTPD.
