Man, who thought setting fire to a green plant would be so controversial? But wait a sec, I’m not talking recreational cannabis, which is legal first thing on Jan. 1, 2018.
No, I’m talking about Steve Minami, the 23-year-old Guadalupe resident who allegedly torched the Santa Maria Police Department’s (SMPD) Christmas tree in the department’s lobby. What a Grinch!
According to the SMPD, officers “were dispatched to their front lobby” when Minami allegedly got mad because he didn’t think the department was responding adequately to his paranoid concerns that his computer was hacked. I guess they moved pretty fast after their tree went up in flames because the dude didn’t get very far from the precinct before he was arrested.
Well, Minami is getting plenty of attention now! He’s facing charges of felony arson, vandalism, and pubic intoxication. I wonder what he was on. That’s gotta be good eggnog if you’re setting the Christmas tree on fire!
And if he was paranoid before, I bet he is now. The SMPD took Minami to the Santa Barbara County Jail (thanks again, Sheriff Bill Brown for closing the Santa Maria Branch Jail), which is currently a subject in a federal class action lawsuit because of the god-awful conditions there.
Both Santa Barbara County and the Sheriff’s Office are the defendants in the case, which isn’t seeking damages, but rather any kind of progress toward making the jail and its staff more hospitable for those with disabilities or mental illnesses (see page 7).
I don’t want to make any assumptions about Mr. Minami, but if he set a police department’s Christmas tree ablaze, he might not be the most balanced individual. Hopefully Sheriff’s Office deputies at the jail won’t do to him what they’ve done to those with mental illnesses in the past, which is lock him up for days in solitary confinement, without a bed, without treatment. That kind of thing, you know, tends to make an unstable person worse rather than better.
At least the jail doesn’t contract with Corizon Health anymore, but geez, they sat on that problem long enough. The county’s Board of Supervisors voted to extend Corizon’s contract in 2015, which was after Raymond Herrera, a 52-year-old father from Lompoc, died of a raptured spleen and cirrhosis of the liver in the jail.
The company that the Sheriff’s Office contracts medical care in the jail to now is California Forensic Medical Group, but according to a report on the jail by Disability Rights California, that company has its own problems, and plenty of the issues in our jail haven’t been solved.
Sheriff Brown famously called the jail the county’s “de facto mental health institution” at a county supes meeting years ago. That would already be a huge concern if it weren’t for the fact that the jail is very old, decrepit, and filthy. Inmates are already stacked like sardines there, sleeping on mats on the floor, in facilities that were constructed before modern building codes were on the books.
The jail isn’t a safe, sane place to keep people, which is why I still shake my head over Brown closing the Santa Maria Branch Jail. Not only does that put the burden on North County law enforcement to drive all the way to the county jail, but it only makes the overcrowding issue there worse. And the new North County Jail isn’t going to be done until 2019, so something’s got to give in the meantime.
I want to know what in Brown’s budget is sucking resources from North County and leaving the main jail a decrepit and dangerous place. Who’s burning all that green, Bill?
Speaking of burning green—not a Christmas tree, this time—I wonder how the county supes are going to tax the recreational and medicinal cannabis industry locally. Cannabis is the new “billion-dollar industry” according to advocates, that is, until they’re talking about taxation.
Everybody’s a libertarian once they stand to make a boatload of cash, but even the more conservative-minded 4th District Supervisor Peter Adam scoffed when a Santa Barbara County cannabis cultivator suggested a 1 percent tax at a Dec. 14 hearing on the matter.
Adam also made one medicinal weed purveyor look pretty foolish during public comment, when she asked the board not to impose high taxes on the cannabis industry. She said the taxes would be “cumulative” with state and city taxes and would be an undue burden on her patients.
That’s when Adam asked her how much she paid per pound and what she sold it for per ounce, going into farmer mode with a calculator app on his phone. His eyebrows and famous mustache shot up in unison when he discovered that her profit margin was between 60 and 80 percent on the green stuff.
“I don’t know if you’re making me feel sorry for you,” Adam said, chuckling, “and I applaud you for caring so much about your patients, but maybe you’re gonna have to rejigger the math when we’re done with this.”
And 1st District Supervisor Das Williams chimed in as well to point out that the county tax wouldn’t stack on top of a city tax, just with the state’s tax.
“I think you should be very happy having a much lower tax in the county,” Williams said.
The meeting also saw its fair contingent of anti-cannabis folks, mostly residents from Tepusquet canyon who feel their rural community is being compromised by cannabis growers. Vans of “sleazy” people are rolling through the canyon, they say. Folks in Carpinteria are up in arms as well about the smell of grow operations, some of which are quite near a private boarding school there. Those concerns are real, and should be considered, but those who asked the county to ban all cultivation outright are delusional.
I don’t mind telling you, I’m glad recreational cannabis is legalized, and that prohibition is over in California. That being said, it sure irks me when pro-weed people appear uninformed or downright clueless on how simple regulation and representation work. The same goes for the vehemently anti-pot people who think a simple flowering plant is an evil stain on society.
Lest anyone forget, the county is facing a budget deficit in the tens of millions thanks to the ongoing pension crisis, and I don’t mind paying more for some OG Kush if it will fill the county’s coffers. Who knows, all those green leaves could translate to lots of green paper.
The Canary is sober when considering a tax on weed. Send your thoughts to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 21-28, 2017.