The team of four Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputies and a sergeant who busted dozens of illegal pot operations and confiscated tens of millions of dollars’ worth of marijuana over the past seven years has been broken up.
The move was made official at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors hearing on the budget for the coming fiscal year. Cannabis tax revenues have dropped from a high of $15.7 million in 2020-21 to $5.4 million in 2024-25. A glut on the market, much of it illegal pot, continues to depress prices, and the board was looking for ways to save money.
The $2 million cost of the enforcement team — including a $19,185 monthly lease for office and warehouse space in Santa Maria — has been the largest single line item in the county’s year-to-year cannabis budget. And during the early years of legal cannabis, there were plenty of illegal grows to raid.
In the team’s first nine months of operation, in 2018-19, it confiscated marijuana plants valued at $106 million and dried marijuana valued at $15 million, records show. As the years went by, deputies continued to seize substantial amounts of illegal cannabis, though at a slower rate.
“Progress has been achieved in this field,” Sheriff Bill Brown told the board Tuesday. “Our county has significantly reduced the black market presence and discouraged illegal operators. … This is not the time to let our guard down.”
In recent years, though, enforcement work has shifted largely to the time-consuming investigation of illegal marijuana sales and the supervisors decided they had other priorities.
Earlier this month, the board cut one deputy from the cannabis team, leaving $1.5 million in the budget for it. On Tuesday, the board shifted two of the team’s remaining deputies to the sheriff’s narcotics enforcement team — one for the North County and one for the South Coast — as specialists in cannabis. The board also cut the sergeant’s position from the cannabis team.
The supervisors then decided the team’s last remaining position would become a “felony warrant” detective. He or she will track people charged with felonies who have failed to show up in court and are now in hiding, with warrants out for their arrest. Supervisor Steve Lavagnino of Santa Maria had brought up this longstanding problem at the June 4 budget hearing.
Brown told the board his department was holding nearly 10,000 “unserved warrants,” including those for about 2,000 felonies and 8,000 misdemeanors, some for crimes committed decades ago. About 1,300 people have multiple warrants out for their arrest, Brown said.
The designated “warrant detective,” he said, would create a “most wanted” list and, in coordination with other departments, begin to bring those people to justice who pose the greatest risk to public safety. The cost, designated as a one-time expense, will be $302,000 for this fiscal year, ending June 30, 2026.
In a testy exchange on Tuesday, Board Chair Laura Capps questioned Brown about the expensive Santa Maria lease for the cannabis enforcement team, which she noted has cost the county $1.2 million since 2019.
“That is news to me,” said Capps, who had asked the sheriff for more information on the lease in advance of the hearing. “It’s an alarming eye-popping number that shows me I’m not sure we’re using these funds efficiently.”
In preparation for Tuesday’s hearing, Brown proposed moving the team from the Santa Maria warehouse into a smaller space for half the rent in six months.
“I’m all for enforcement, but I don’t know what could justify a lease of $20,000 a month, and now you’re willing to shift it away because the scrutiny has occurred,” Capps said.
Brown replied: “That is absolutely not the case.” He explained that in addition to the cannabis enforcement team, the narcotics team is housed in the Santa Maria building because an existing sheriff’s office in the South County was “falling apart” and was “almost uninhabitable.”
Lavagnino pointed out that the Santa Maria building had been used to store confiscated marijuana from past raids.
Brown said he was proposing to downsize the Santa Maria lease because the South County building — the former food bank on Hollister Road — is being refurbished and will be available for use during the fiscal year.
“There’s nothing surreptitious about this,” he said.
For now, the Santa Maria lease remains in the cannabis budget, for $239,000.
With some of the funding freed up from cannabis enforcement team, the board funded a half-time sheriff’s deputy position for cannabis business licensing, if needed. It also restored $70,000 of $90,000 that had been previously cut from the budget for tax audits of cannabis growers.
Finally, the board allocated $240,000 in cannabis revenues to the Immigrant Legal Defense Center, a nonprofit with offices in Santa Barbara and Santa Maria. The funds will pay for two therapists to work with family members affected by deportations. There are 65 people on a wait list for mental health services at the center, including children.
Melinda Burns is an investigative journalist with 40 years of experience covering immigration, water, science and the environment. As a community service, she offers her reports to multiple publications in Santa Barbara County, at the same time, for free.
