ECO Z Collective
I am a new ownwer of a collective. I an looking for medicine for my patients of my clooective. Looking for top shelf medicine for 1500.00 to 1800.00 per unit.
Indica, saltiva & Hybirds.
Please call me at 714-955-2678.
Sincerely,
Zack / Owner / President

Please make your opinions known!

—Admin.

1. Limiting Indoor growing to anything more stringent then the scaling limits in trinity county, would dis advantage hum county with out just cause. (http://www.trinitycounty.org/Departments/Planning/PDF/Medical%20Marijuana%20Moratorium%20Fact%20Sheet%20&%20Complaint%20Form.pdf)

2. limiting the amount grown for some and space of grow for others is ripe for abuse for example a collective allowed 1500sqft of out door grow could grow off season crops of auto flowering plants in heated green houses, wile the farmer limited by weight would not have that option.

3. by trying to permit everyone and everything involved you will destroy access to the jobs wile creating massive application and enforcement costs. a farm hand doesn’t need to get a permit, why should a trimmer?

There are very good reasons for not ever making rough drafts or works-in-progress of anything public, whether art, film or ordinances. Mainly, there will always be people who don’t understand how dramatically something can change and will vehemently shoot the proposal down, hurling curses and epithets at the writers, when what is needed and asked-for is constructive criticism and new ideas.

But that is the risk one runs in a democracy, no? We’d rather have it that way, keeping with SoHum traditions and values, than the less savory alternatives of letting the County officials run things or playing the standard political game and buying politicians and making backroom deals.

As to HuMMAP meetings being open, let us know if you’d like to bring your ideas to a meeting and we’ll let you know when the next one is. They are generally small and informal.

As to us being qualified, we’ll be the first to say that we’re not! This is why we set up this site and have been soliciting input from the public from the very start. We need help to work out a small-farmer-friendly version to counter the un-friendly ordinance the County came up with. We are the only group who is actively soliciting public input, so we expect criticism. There are also considerable differences of opinion among us that have yet to be worked out, as anyone who has been to a meeting should certainly know.

We’d be surprised if anyone who cared was actually unaware that we’d turned in a draft to the County Planning Staff, given that we post it here and we post it on the HuMMAP Facebook page—always, I may add, asking for more input and comments. (We even allow anonymous people to comment.) I think the fact that we submitted a proposal was also reported on KMUD. I guess this just means we need better outreach, huh?

Regarding the indoor size: it was a sloppy error that indoor got in there at any size. (It now has a strikeout through it.) Most of us in SoHum feel that indoor should only be for personal medical use, at about the same size as the Eureka city ordinance (up to 100ft/sq) but we need to have more input from NoHum, where more people grow indoors.

I can also say that many of us are not in agreement about the limits on number of licenses as written. That is definitely going to change, for exactly the reasons you mention. As the marijuana economy (medical or possibly recreational in 2012) transforms rapidly, everyone in the industry will need to have as much freedom as possible to creatively adapt and find their niche in the larger economic ecosystem. So, for example, a grower could also open a medical marijuana “dispensary” of sorts in the form of a “bud and breakfast,” sell edibles made from their trim, conduct local guided tours for clients and so on.

At the same time, the challenge is to try to prevent giant outside corporations from monopolizing the industry and to head-off the formation of a homegrown good-old-boys network who, through their crony networks, end up controlling all the dispensaries and nurseries in Humboldt, overproduce “Humboldt-branded” medical marijuana and gobble up most of the dispensary contracts in the urban centers for Humboldt-branded outdoor pot. This would leave most mom-and-pop growers completely out of the loop.

Is it possible to strike such a balance, between preventing monopoly and promoting a democratic marketplace on the one hand and stifling creativity, competition and opportunity on the other? I personally don’t know and it has been the subject of many heated discussions.

We’d love to hear anyone’s input.

We haven’t had more public meetings up north because we don’t have folks from the Humboldt Bay area who can backstop organizing them. We can’t do it all from down here. Please drop a line to the contact email and we’ll plug you into the conversations, and hope for your help in spreading them up North.

The 1500 square foot number will rise. How high? Depends on responses to what we’ve put out so far. All in all, we knuckleheads need more help to work more effectively, and we hope you’ll join us.

The thing about Kelly is that the feds don’t care. So we’re looking for a balance between many contending standards and considerations. It ain’t easy and it won’t be straightforward.

Same goes for the ‘convoluted draft law itself,’ which engages with the complexities of our evolving industry. We’re trying to help the county consider what’s actually out there, but we don’t expect this draft to be the end of the process. I hope you’ll stay with it too, your comments are spot on, and I appreciate getting them.

It also bears mention that ANY type of limit on cultivation parcel sizes may not be enforceable, just as the Kelly decision threw out the hard cap on plant numbers found in SB 420. Nothing in Prop. 215 or SB 420 authorizes local governments to act on their own.

With that said, we turn to the convoluted draft law itself, and it raises as many questions as it answers. Permits for everyone, an 11-member council, and no real teeth to ensure compliance from growers who tend to bend and break the laws anyway. In short, the draft ordinance focuses on the right issues, but it’s all over the map when it comes to solutions. Smaller bites of the apple may be more palatable to everyone involved.