Nasal navigator

Sniff, sniff. 

Do you smell that? Of course not. You need a Nasal Ranger to really get a good whiff of odorific cannabis. I don’t mean to make light of the plight of Carpinteria’s cannabis-odor-plagued residents, but tying a Santa Barbara County ordinance to something you wear on your nose is simply too much. 

Especially with a name like that. Do you wear a park ranger hat and badge while operating the Nasal Ranger? I hear there’s a couple of federal agencies with an excess of hats and badges right now and not enough employees to wear them. 

Would a Nasal Ranger fit on my beak? I’ll get certified to operate one, if so. 

We can’t have any unauthorized operators out there, you know. They would be Rogue Rangers, and we can’t have that! And if you’re a mouth breather, don’t even think about going through the certification process. We can’t have that, either! 

As part of a raft of cannabis odor ordinance modifications, the Nasal Ranger is tasked with testing cannabis odors at the property lines of indoor cannabis cultivators within the Coastal Zone. The county Board of Supervisors voted to implement the ranger and mandate multi-technology carbon filtration (MTCF) systems and set an odor threshold of 4 D/T (umm, dilution over threshold, duh). WTF? 

I feel very lost in the lingo. My language skills are at a loss. 

But everyone in the know, knows, you know? As long as they know, that’s all that really matters.

While the ordinance amendments passed unanimously onto a second reading, 5th District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino wasn’t sure if the board was moving in the right direction on cannabis. 

“Honestly, I think we’ve over-regulated this industry to death,” he said. “I know there are people that will say that the ordinance gave [growers] free rein, basically, and that’s just utterly ridiculous. I mean, it’s just revisionist history.”

It’s really just NIMBYs at their finest, or at their worst, whatever you want to call it. The board can’t make everyone happy with its decisions, but I got a little cackle out of it, even if it was at others’ expense! 

You know what else has me cackling? The city of Santa Maria, which is always complaining about onerous state regulations stifling business but wants to regulate battery energy storage system (BESS) facilities out of city limits. Santa Maria is looking at implementing a “de facto moratorium” on those bad boys of the energy industry. It used to be oil, right? What happened? 

The blame for that can be placed squarely on Vistra Corp. and its management of the Moss Landing BESS facility that caught fire in January. It’s literally like no one on the Central Coast even knew what they were before that catastrophe, and now public officials can’t distance themselves enough. 

Santa Maria Planning Commissioner Robert Dickerson seems hell-bent on just regulating them out of the city. He said that the commission is recommending that if a potential BESS developer happens “to figure out a way” to apply for a project, the application should “trigger” staff to look into creating a literal moratorium. 

That’s wild. I get it. The technology is still fairly new with lots of unknowns. But isn’t there another way? We do need to create electricity storage.

The canary is always triggered. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.

This article appears in Mar 27 – Apr 6, 2025.