Illegal pot farms continue to crop up in Tuolumne County

Since California voters approved legalizing personal use and cultivation of marijuana for adults 21 years of age or older in November 2016, illegal pot grows estimated to be worth millions of dollars have continued on private lands and public lands in Tuolumne County, from Columbia and the Don Pedro area to Groveland.

Crackdowns on illegal grows in the county over the past 10 months have uncovered thousands of plants, fire threats that include unpermitted uses of electricity and gas-powered generators, and environmental degradation, including unpermitted fertilizers, unpermitted wells, human sewage, and other substances seeping into waterways and watersheds, according to Quincy Yaley, director of the county Community Development Department, which oversees code compliance and enforcement.

Some recent crackdowns have targeted pot grows on private lands in the Jupiter area, in forested mountain watersheds west of Beardsley Reservoir on the Middle Fork Stanislaus River and Lyons Reservoir on the South Fork Stanislaus River.

On Aug. 9, a Gilroy man was arrested by California Fish and Wildlife on suspicion of unlawful cultivation of marijuana, possession of marijuana for sale, and conspiracy to commit a crime at a location on Italian Bar Road in the Jupiter area.

Civilian employees of county CDD responded to the grow that same day and found illegal cultivation of more than 2,400 marijuana plants, prohibited use of generators and gas products for cannabis cultivation, illegal occupancy, and unlawful cesspools, seepage pits, and sewage wells.

Back in October, county CDD employees investigated code enforcement violations involving illegal cannabis cultivation at the same location on Italian Bar Road and found more than 3,350 marijuana plants, chemicals including fertilizer, and unpermitted greenhouses, campsites, electricity and plumbing, a well, and illegal hazardous waste dumping.

Sheriff’s incident logs and arrest logs show a parcel number for the location of the Aug. 9 arrest, which matches county CDD code enforcement records for Aug. 9 and Oct. 10 code enforcement investigations at the same location.

A fire in late July several miles to the northeast in the Mount Knight area may be associated with pot grows in the Jupiter area. The Forest Service has not disclosed the cause of the blaze, which burned about five acres in the Stanislaus National Forest. No injuries or property damage were reported.

County code enforcement did go to the site of the Mount Knight fire and opened a cannabis cultivation case at that site, Yaley said.

Also in October, the state’s Unified Enforcement Task Force, led by the Department of Cannabis Control’s Law Enforcement Division and Department of Fish and Wildlife, served nine search warrants in the Jupiter area that eradicated 11,260 illegally grown cannabis plants and 5,237 pounds of illegal processed cannabis flower — an illegal pot haul estimated to be worth $15 million.

Tuolumne County code enforcement was involved in the operation, which included the location on Italian Bar Road, Yaley said. Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a news release about the operation.

The county began enforcing illegal cannabis grows as zoning violations back in 2018, after the county Board of Supervisors adopted an ordinance regulating personal, noncommercial cannabis growing in unincorporated areas of the county.

Since 2019, the county has opened more than 160 cases of reported illegal cannabis cultivation on 60 to 80 different private properties, Yaley said in an interview in her office Friday morning.

“We handle that through the code compliance division of the community development department,” Yaley said. “Some of those cases are on the same parcel, so we get a call every year about the same parcel. We’ll open a case, we’ll process it, we’ll close it, and then we get a call the next year. So we have a lot of repeat cases, or repeat offenders, or the same property is growing cannabis year after year.”

County employees go back year after and year to do enforcement on the same properties, Yaley said.

The properties are spread out across the county, in the Don Pedro area, in Jupiter, a lot outside of Groveland, and in Columbia. Farther east and at higher elevations in the county, illegal grows are likely on federal lands in the Stanislaus National Forest.

Under the county’s 2018 ordinance, adults can legally grow six plants indoors and up to 12 plants outdoors.

Meanwhile, the county has three full-time code compliance investigators who also have other responsibilities besides cracking down on illegal grows. Nobody with the county Community Development Department is working full-time on cannabis, Yaley said.

“When we get complaints, we try to target those in neighborhoods, we try to give priority to those,” Yaley said. “From a quality of life perspective, the smaller the parcel, the more onerous a cannabis grow can be for neighbors, because you have a lot of smell, as well as chemicals, pesticides, erosion. So we focus on our neighborhoods first and then move out from there, from the enforcement standpoint.”

The county does not do code enforcement on illegal cannabis grows by themselves. Civilian employees of the Tuolumne County Community Development Department who investigate code enforcement violations involving illegal cannabis cultivation are not sworn peace officers who carry firearms.

Some of them carry 10-inch blade machetes when they visit grow sites scheduled for eradication, but they do not carry guns. The county works primarily with the state departments of Fish and Wildlife and Cannabis Control on large operations.

The county Sheriff’s Office can play a support role “when they’re able to provide it,” Yaley said. “They’ve had very challenging staffing issues. They’re very short-handed at the Sheriff’s Office.”

A Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman said Friday afternoon she was checking for more information on how the agency investigates illegal marijuana cultivation in the county given its staffing shortages.

Both state Fish and Wildlife and Cannabis Control departments have sworn law enforcement officers, and they take the lead when search warrants are necessary, Yaley said.

“We go with them to do enforcement activities,” Yaley said. “A typical enforcement day looks like an operational briefing early in the morning around 6 o’clock, then we travel as a team with the law enforcement entities that are supporting us, to a nearby area when the enforcement action is going to happen. The non-sworn personnel, myself and my staff, along with other agencies, we often have water quality specialists, other environmental scientists, we hold back and we wait.”

Law enforcement goes in, does whatever they need to do to secure the scene, and then they radio the code enforcement and other civilian investigators when it’s safe to come onto the property to do plant counts, take photos, and document various violations that may exist on the property, Yaley said.

“We work that site and then we go to the next one,” she said. “Sometimes we serve two to three warrants in a day. Sometimes we’re serving up to nine warrants in a day. We also use air support, helicopters, from various law enforcement agencies and sometimes the Army National Guard, for support and for lifting out eradicated marijuana.”

No county code enforcement employees have been injured on illegal cannabis investigations so far.

“The cannabis enforcement activities the county takes, we may only be in the field a dozen days a year doing actual enforcement,” Yaley said. “But it takes a lot of prep time to be ready and it takes a lot of time on the back end to process these cases.”

Investigating leads takes time, whether the county is gathering information in response to complaints or state agencies are gathering information to share with the county.

Yaley shared public records associated with the actions taken by the county at the same location on Italian Bar Road in the Jupiter area in October and August.

In the first incident, a two-page county notice dated Oct. 10 orders property owners Maria Galvan Gonzalez and Juan Hernandez, of Lathrop, to vacate a dwelling on the property, secure permits to demolish or repair the building and correct several code enforcement violations by Oct. 17. Failure to do so would result in a final abatement order and monetary penalties and fees totaling $341,646.

In the second incident, a three-page county notice dated Aug. 15 orders property owner Jonathan Hernandez, of Santa Clara, to remove all structures present for cannabis cultivation, remove all garbage and rubbish from the property, and provide dump receipts to the county’s Solid Waste Division by this past Tuesday. Failure to do so would result in a final abatement order and monetary penalties and fees totaling $244,520.

Cited property owners who do not pay abatement costs and penalties when required get the entire amount owed added to their property tax bills and liens placed on their properties, Yaley said.

Yaley could not provide an estimate of how much county code enforcement spends annually on investigating illegal cannabis cultivation. She said she wants the public to know the county is doing the work with limited staff, it’s dangerous work, illegal growing activities are harming the environment, and the hazards associated with illegal cannabis cultivation include heightened threats of destructive fires in the fire-prone mountain forests and other remote, rural places in the county.

“We have seen evidence of fires at other grow sites that we investigated,” Yaley said. “They did not turn into wildfires, but under different conditions they could have.”

Contact Guy McCarthy at [email protected] or (209) 770-0405. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, at @GuyMcCarthy.