While the maximum acreage allowed for cannabis cultivation across unincorporated Santa Barbara County will decrease by the end of September, the new limit won’t impact current growers—which are essentially grandfathered in under a recent Board of Supervisors directive.
At its Aug. 26 meeting, the board voted 5-0 to reduce the acreage cap from 1,575 to 1,417 on its second reading, which will put the rule into effect on Sept. 25. The supervisors initially considered higher reductions during the June 3 meeting as part of the county’s recent cannabis program revisions.
The board ultimately agreed that staff should explore the 1,417-acre option, which “provides a buffer for projects that are still in the pipeline, accounting for long-standing applicants and pending approvals,” county cannabis program manager Carmela Beck explained at the June 3 hearing.
Current cannabis cultivation projects in unincorporated areas of Santa Barbara County total to 1,190 acres, while an additional 167 acres are tied to projects in the works that have already been approved.
Beck returned before the board at its Aug. 19 meeting for the cap reduction’s first reading. She also led a presentation to address staff’s responses to the Santa Barbara County grand jury’s June 20 report titled Cannabis Taxation and Expenditures.
She summed up the report as “focused on right-sizing the cannabis program’s expenditures considering program contraction and diminishing revenues.”
While staff agreed with some of the report’s findings, including stats on declining cannabis tax revenues, Beck noted that many of the report’s recommendations have already been implemented, some just a few days before the report was released.
On June 17, the Board of Supervisors cut approximately $1.28 million from its total cannabis budget, to ensure that annual operating expenditures don’t exceed annual cannabis tax revenues.
In the June 20 report, the grand jury noted that its investigation was conducted between August 2024 and May 2025. The grand jury also acknowledged that the Board of Supervisors “initiated significant changes” to the cannabis program, “many of which are consistent with the findings and recommendations in this report.”
“I think that’s the first time I ever looked at a grand jury report and thought, ‘Oh, we just checked off that,’ … It was so weird,” 5th District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino told the Sun in July.
He said the timing was coincidental.
“It’s just intelligent people all looking at the same thing and kind of coming up with the same conclusion.”
Second District Supervisor Laura Capps also commented on the synced timing at the board’s Aug. 19 meeting.
“The grand jury really did their work here, but we were also very much aligned—almost by the week—and got the timing really right,” Capps said.
This article appears in Aug 28 – Sep 7, 2025.