Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome to the KMED News. I'm your news director, April Lewis, and I'm glad to be with you for this broadcast. In this episode, we're going straight into our main stories. We have a trio of cannabis stories with direct impacts for Humboldt county and the Greater Emerald Triangle. This is KMUD News.
Humboldt county has agreed to settle a federal lawsuit over how it enforces cannabis related code violations. The county isn't admitting wrongdoing, but it is paying $350,000 in changing key parts of its enforcement process. Brian Hudson has been following this story for years and spoke with one of the plaintiffs along with an attorney who filed the case.
[00:00:55] Speaker C: Six years ago, southern Humboldt county property owners reported being falsely accused, hamstringed and extort by county code enforcement officials and they were afraid of losing their rural homes as a result.
Humboldt county has now agreed to a sweeping settlement over how it enforces cannabis related code violations.
And one of the people who fought this the hardest and the longest was Blue Graham, a southern Humboldt business owner and a grower of vegetables.
The lawsuit was filed by the Institute of Justice back in October of 2022 on behalf of five Humboldt county property owners who said that the county's cannabis abatement program violated their constitutional rights.
After years of litigation, including a trip to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and a request to the U.S. supreme Court, the county has now agreed to change how it enforces the program and to pay $350,000 towards the plaintiff's expenses and legal fees.
One of those plaintiffs is Blue Graham, who's lived through this fight since 2018.
Graham says it started the day he came home to find not one abatement notice, but three.
[00:02:16] Speaker D: I came home after working at our restaurant that we had just opened two weeks earlier to find not one abatement notice but three abatement notices posted to my gate.
One was for my property and two were for neighboring properties. So there was three abatement letters on my gate at the same time.
[00:02:35] Speaker C: The notices were based on satellite images that the county had collected of his land over the period of six years.
[00:02:44] Speaker D: In my letter, they had satellite pictures of my property from 2012 till when I got a beta in 2018. None of the pictures showed any sort of cannabis on them, but it was alleged that I graded that I built structures with intent to cultivate cannabis and that I had cannabis in my structures.
[00:03:05] Speaker C: Graham had built greenhouses for his own vegetable garden to supply his restaurant. That did not stop code enforcement investigators from assuming that he was growing cannabis.
[00:03:16] Speaker D: So I went and Talked with Brian Bose, and they showed me these pictures, and I said, well, where's the cannabis? And he said, well, you're not just growing asparagus in these structures. Which is actually kind of interesting because they.
Months later, John Ford was on KMUD news and said, these people aren't just growing asparagus in these structures. So I don't know if it was something they all talked about.
Asparagus line, I don't really know, but it was verbatim what Brian Bose told me.
[00:03:43] Speaker C: The program Graham is describing is what the county calls the Humboldt Environmental Impact Reduction program.
Code enforcement staff used satellite imagery to flag suspected cannabis grow sites, greenhouses, ponds, and grading that they believed was related to cannabis cultivation. Those are violations which could carry penalties of up to $10,000 per violation per day. With multiple alleged violations on any single property, threatened, fines could reach into the millions very quickly.
Graham says he refused to sign the county's compliance agreement, a document that he explains would have waived his rights to sue.
[00:04:25] Speaker D: And they gave me this compliance agreement to sign, which literally took all my rights as a property owner away from me. If I were to sign that and hand it back to them that day, they. I can't sue them. They could. If I don't pay them the money that they want from me, they could take my property, my vehicles.
[00:04:43] Speaker C: What followed was years of back and forth.
[00:04:47] Speaker D: So I got the permits, I put my greenhouses back up and continued my life for two or three years. Somewhere during the negotiations with Ed Denson and them, they said they're not going to settle me because I still have my greenhouses up. He said, well, he's got a permit for it. Well, there's no way that's possible.
Go check Mr. Black. Mr. Warren Black.
He did. And then he came back and said, we did give him his permit. So they were just looking for any excuse. They didn't care if he went and did it legally.
[00:05:15] Speaker C: Years later, the county came after him again, this time over a pond he'd built for fire protection.
[00:05:22] Speaker D: So I come home from another hike, and there's a whole new abatement on my gate. And this abatement was for a violation of grading. No cannabis, no structures. Violation of grade. I had already told him yes, I graded. I put in a rain catchment on, basically for firefighting and emergency water on my property. So I had already admitted to grading, and I said, let's resolve that. I'm willing to resolve it, but not this cannabis thing.
So then Warren Black started calling me directly. I had a lawyer at this point, like, you're not supposed to contact me, contact my lawyer.
And they gave me a hearing, something that I'd been asking for for five years. Give me a hearing.
No.
So I had never had a hearing. I had all this pressure on me. But now they have this grading situation where they're like, you had already admitted to this. So we got you, and here's your hearing date. But we don't really want to do that, sir. We just want you to come forward and sign the compliance agreement, and we'll work with you on the grading. So I finally, thanks to Michelle Bushnell, got a meeting with John Ford, who I had emailed, I had asked for, to talk to him through Warren Black and other people. And every time it was night. No, he's busy. No, we're the ones dealing with this.
Finally, Michelle Bushnell got a meeting with him, and as soon as he saw that engineer report from four years earlier that I presented four years earlier, said, oh, no, we're resolving this today.
And we resolved it that day.
[00:06:50] Speaker C: Two days after Graham's individual case was finally resolved, the Institute for Justice attorneys filed its federal lawsuit that was dismissed in 2023. The plaintiffs appealed, and in December of 2024, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated their claim that the county's fines may have violated the Constitution's ban on excessive fines.
[00:07:13] Speaker D: I mean, we had so much evidence to present. I kind of wish the case would have kept going because I'm pretty disappointed with the fact the county is basically trying to act like they did no wrong to us instead of saying, hey, you know what we did? We hired.
We took your tax dollars. Because I'm a taxpaying citizen. I'm a business owner. I'm a landowner. I pay taxes to Humboldt County. We took your money, and we hired someone to look at you with a satellite, and we decided to charge you what we assume $30,000 a day for something that we assume you're doing without any evidence, without ever coming to your property. Sheriff's never been on my property. A warrant's never been served, and that's just the way it is. You're going to have to prove your innocence. We don't have to prove your guilt. There's a few of us that said, hell, no, you know, take my property. But I'm not going to. I'm not going to stand for this.
[00:08:04] Speaker C: I spoke with Jared McClain, senior attorney with the Institute of Justice, who represents the group. In an email, McLean told me if we could prove the county had been enforcing its Code the way we alleged, then it would violate the constitution four different ways.
It doesn't matter now that the county decided to settle, but we're confident that we would have proved those constitutional violations at trial, he said.
I asked Graham whether he thought southern Humboldt communities get treated differently by county officials than the rest of the county.
[00:08:38] Speaker D: Well, we're all guilty by association. It's kind of funny because we know the history of southern Humboldt. If you grew up around here like I did and your parents were maybe hippies or back to landers or whatever you want to call them, we were all guilty by association as a kid.
And we all got persecuted by police and helicopters for our whole childhood, our whole neighborhoods. They come in with machine guns, stand on our roads, in front of our schools.
But because maybe it started here and we were those hippie kids. Yeah, we're still the ones getting persecuted.
Guilty by association. You're not just growing asparagus in those greenhouses, but these other guys up here, they're good old boys, they're ranchers. So they must just be growing veggies in theirs because at the end of the day, you did not know what these people were doing on their property. You assumed what they were doing on their property. And you base these fines and these penalties based on your assumptions.
All right, so the same helicopters and guys with guns that terrorized neighborhoods when I was a kid, even they respected the constitution.
They couldn't see what was in your structure. They didn't assume what was in there. They left it alone and moved on. The county didn't do that. They didn't respect people's rights.
And that's what this whole lawsuit came down to.
[00:10:06] Speaker C: For Graham, he explains the fight was never just about his property.
[00:10:11] Speaker D: But this is my home. I was born and raised here. That's the thing. I've helped my mother helped build this community. I've helped build this community.
And so that's the reason that keeps me here. I love it. I love my home. I love where I live.
I'm making breakfast right now out of food from my garden, from the very greenhouses. They abated me for that. I got the permit, put right back up in their face and said, yeah, what else?
I'm not going nowhere.
[00:10:37] Speaker C: Under the agreement, the county must now send a warning letter before issuing any formal notice of a cannabis related violation.
This giving property owners 30 days to prove that cannabis isn't being grown Before a citation is ever filed.
New property owners can no longer be held responsible for a previous owner's cannabis activity.
Unless cultivation continues for more than 30 days after they take title.
And if someone requests a hearing, the county now has to schedule one within 60 days, a sharp change from the years long waits that Graham and others had described.
McLean told me that the warning letter requirement will likely have the broadest impact because it applies to anyone the county accuses going forward.
Still, the county has not admitted any wrongdoing.
[00:11:29] Speaker D: But understand this, the actions of the county has made our county poor, broke and struggling.
They killed the goose with the golden egg illegally and with the abatement program. All the people I know that went legal, except for maybe a couple, they're struggling. So they're not hiring people.
They're not spending money very much at the stores. They're not going and buying the new truck at the dealership for their farm.
[00:11:55] Speaker C: The settlement closes a chapter that KMUD News and Redheaded Black Belt first began documenting six years ago. Whether it changes how the county treats property owners going forward is something blue. Graham and many of his neighbors say they will be watching closely for KMUD News, I'm Ryan Hutson.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: Another batch of cannabis permit revocations has been approved by Humboldt County's Board of Supervisors.
[00:12:29] Speaker E: Daniel Mintz reports Humboldt county is continuing to take action on non payments related to cannabis cultivation permits and 14 more have been revoked.
Having revoked dozens of permits for non payment of Measure S excise taxes, Humboldt County's Board of Supervisors moved on to non payment of administrative FEES. At its Aug. 25 meeting in February 2025, the board directed noticing permit holders with outstanding Measure S debts of a December 31, 2025 deadline for payment.
Planning and building department fees were also due and senior planner Cliff Johnson set an initial step before revocation.
Suspension of permits was taken early this year for those with fee debts.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: On February 27th of 2026, in accordance with that direction, we did suspend 22 cannabis permits for lack of payment of planning and building fees. We notified them that they needed to resolve those by March 31.
We have continued to allow people to come in and resolve those outstanding fees. As of of yesterday, six of those permits have resolved outstanding planning building fees. Five of those prior to us sending out the notice of public hearing and preparing the staff report.
[00:13:53] Speaker E: Two more permit holders have resolved their fee debt situations, bringing the total number of revocations to 14.
Board Chair Mike Wilson described the process as having some leeway, saying folks respond or don't and even up until the moment we have a meeting, we are flexible in helping people try and keep these permits as long as possible.
The Scale of some of the debts and the additional factor of lack of state licensing was discussed in this exchange between Supervisor Michelle Bushnell and Johnson.
[00:14:24] Speaker F: So when I was referencing through these. And I do understand what you said, Cliff, about these are for planning and building fees, which some of them are quite small. I'm wondering if there were any. Or did you try to cross reference any of these to see if they owed measure us as well?
[00:14:40] Speaker A: None of these owed measure S. They. Because we brought. We've already actually dealt with those that owed measure S. Okay.
[00:14:47] Speaker F: Wow. That's incredible. Because some of them are like $800.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
One of the things that we did do is we looked through and tried to cross drive from some state licenses as well. And most of these have no current state licenses or those state licenses.
[00:15:04] Speaker F: Okay. So that would invalidate their Humboldt county permit or Humboldt county anyways. So. Okay.
[00:15:10] Speaker E: Bushnell gave her take on the county's handling of the revocation process and said there was some misunderstanding about it that she's tried to clear up.
[00:15:19] Speaker F: Thank you also to. For being willing to continue to work with folks. I know I got a call on Monday afternoon. People were panicking like, why are we doing this? And I said, well, if you look, you know, read the staff report, it says in there, and this is direction from the board. And they're just not randomly denying, you know, or revocating permits. So and. And if you think you're on the list, please call.
So I just want to say thank you to your guys staff for continuing and even this morning willing to work with people.
[00:15:52] Speaker E: The fee debts range from the $800 low cited by Bushnell to about $8,000. On the high end, the revocations were unanimously approved.
They create a new chunk of cost. According to a written staff report, the cost of staff time to process the revocations is paid through the county's general fund. And thus the Planning and Building Department will be more restricted in discretionary activities it can pursue this year and more reliant on activities that are grant funded or paid by fees in Eureka. For KMUD News, this is Daniel Mintz.
[00:16:38] Speaker B: Redacted documents obtained from Humboldt county reveal the contractual and reporting relationship between the Howard Buffett foundation, the Northern California Coalition to Safeguard Communities and Law Enforcement, KMUD News reports.
Last week, KMUD News reported on documents showing the funding relationship between the Humboldt Sheriff's Department and the Northern California Coalition to Safeguard Communities, or NCCSC for short, which is funded by the Howard Buffett Foundation.
The documents also showed direct signatures from Humboldt Sheriff William Honsel in his role as NCCSC president, approving a $2.9 million wire transfer in total approved funds of over $3 million for the 20252026 fiscal year. Also included was over $500,000 in approved NCCSC funds directly for the Humboldt Sheriff's Department.
While the NCCSC consistently makes claims that is combating human trafficking, its focus is almost entirely on cannabis enforcement to achieve that goal. Those financial disclosures were illuminating, but there is something else about the documents we obtained from Humboldt county that may be even more revealing. Reports and agreements from the last two years between the Howard Buffett foundation and the NCCSC detail specific reporting requirements, requirements that likely directly impact Humboldt County's law enforcement operations. For example, in a document we obtained that details terms and agreements between the NCCSC and Howard G. Buffett foundation, also known by the acronym hgbf, it states, any change in the NCCSC Board of Directors must be reported immediately to to the hgbf, including changes in the elected status of any individual board member. NCCSC Board of Directors positions are considered key staff and any change will immediately trigger a review of the NCCSC grant and could result in termination of future funding and return of any unused funds.
This illustrates that the Buffett foundation is maintaining direct control over NCCSC staffing in and decision making who work with NCCSC President William Honsl. Later in the same document, it's made clear that personnel decisions go beyond the NCCSC Board in the terms of the grant. It states, the grantee shall immediately notify HGBF of any organizational changes during the term of the grant that may impact the implementation or the results of the project, including but not limited to changes in key personnel in the project, key personnel of the grantee's organization, changes in tax status, or other substantive changes in the project or the organization which could impact the project.
End quote it's important to remember that the NCCSC is working directly with sheriff departments, and personnel changes could represent members of county law enforcement. While the language is vague, the mission of the NCCSC is carried out by the counties involved in the organization, especially Humboldt and Mendocino, whose sheriffs are the President and Treasurer of the nccsc.
These projects are accomplished as a result of action by law enforcement. That means that a foundation run and named for the child of a billionaire has a direct link to and reporting requirements impacting law enforcement across at least four Northern California counties. The NCCSC Terms and Agreement document also details specific reporting requirements which resulted in the interim and annual reports are document requests to Humboldt county unearthed. Much of that is fairly standard and requires interim reports six months from a project or yearly start date followed by an annual report at 12 months. That reporting includes salaries, supplies, contracted services and quite a few other cost categories. By funding the NCCSC instead of these sheriff's departments directly through grants, the Buffett foundation is likely saving itself from some scrutiny with a degree of separation. As shown in our previous reporting on documents from Lake and Humboldt counties, the NCCSC takes funding and requirements from the Howard Buffett foundation and then produces approved line item funding for each sheriff's department on an annual basis. Redacted interim reports produced by the NCCSC for the Howard Buffett foundation in 2025 in 2026, along with an annual report from 2025, detail some of the operational strategies employed by sheriff's departments utilizing NCCSC funds. Since NCCSC leadership and its Public Information Officer are part of Mendocino and Humboldt County's Sheriff's offices, it's a bit unclear where the Sheriff's office stops and action directly taken by the NCCSC begins.
If there is even a difference in the 2025 NCCSC Annual Report produced for the Howard Buffett foundation, it states, to strengthen response efforts, Siskiyou county has onboarded a forensic interviewer and crime analyst. These roles are critical in conducting trauma informed interviews on the scene and in developing detailed profiles of potential suspects. To support ongoing investigations, Humboldt county has hired a program coordinator to oversee budget management, reporting and stat tracking, along with a public information officer to manage the website, social media accounts and media requests.
This section illustrates a direct connection between Sheriff's office personnel and Howard Buffett foundation reporting requirements, along with NCCSE influence on the org chart of of these departments. The 2025 NCCSC Annual Report also details relationships with private companies.
One section reads, to enhance our ability to identify victims of human trafficking, our OPS team received training from DARC Staffing Solutions, who is a cannabis farm labor contractor. DARC Staffing Solutions explained proper wages, safe working conditions and the appropriate use of personal protective equipment for individuals in this line of work. This improves investigators capacity to understand proper working conditions. This collaboration also opens the door to a potential partnership with a company that places employees directly on farms.
We have asked the NCCSC repeatedly for information on contracted services and and consultants but have yet to receive a reply. The annual report document also details NCCSC operations on DCC licensed cannabis farms. Reading it has become increasingly evident that some individuals are operating within both the legal and illegal cannabis markets to maximize monetary gain and in some cases benefits from tax write offs. This dual market strategy has created opportunities for bad actors within the legal market to exploit labor, violate Department of Cannabis Control regulations and disregard environmental standards. In year three, investigators served multiple search warrants at state licensed locations.
As we move into Year four, investigative efforts will continue to focus on uncovering abuses within the regulated cannabis industry, end quote A more recent document, the 2026 NCCSC Interim Report from March, shows that influence is growing beyond county Sheriff's departments. One example is the office of Humboldt County's district attorney. A section of the 2026 document reads, quote, A huge success we've had in the last few months is the hiring of a circuit prosecutor who started in February 2026. The Humboldt County DA office has contributed a HT circuit prosecutor to the coalition to provide more consistent expectations, support and follow through in building human trafficking cases across all NCCSC counties, end quote it is interesting that the Humboldt County DA is now contributing a prosecutor to to multiple counties on behalf of the NCCSC and its mission. The 2026 NCCSC Interim Report also details partnerships and outreach involving the California Department of Cannabis Control in Shasta county, along with providing training for a Sheriff's Office crime Analyst in Siskiyou County.
Training goes beyond the government level. The 2026 report stated, quote, to enhance detection and response capabilities in geographically remote areas, our agency is strengthening coordination with local partners who maintain a physical presence in these locations.
Because law enforcement personnel cannot be in all areas, specifically in locations where a search warrant is required, expanding awareness through trained partner networks is both strategic and necessary.
Through this initiative, we will provide structured training to partner agencies, utility providers and other field based personnel on recognizing indicators of suspicious or unlawful activity, proper observation and documentation procedures, and safe and secure reporting protocols.
It is unclear if non sworn personnel like utility workers are being asked to simply look out for signs of human trafficking or for gray market cannabis grows. In general, patterns of NCCSC influenced enforcement, especially those by helicopter, tend to look more generally for illegal cannabis along with signs of human trafficking. Although highly limited by multiple pages of redactions, financial information and reports from the NCCSC created for the Howard Buffett foundation provide some insight into the organization's structure and strategies. In particular, we now have a better understanding of the contractual relationship between the Howard Buffett Foundation, Northern California Coalition to Safeguard Communities and multiple county governments in and law enforcement in Northern California.
Reporting for kmud, I'm April Lewis.
That's all for our News broadcast Thanks for listening thanks to our rotation of broadcast engineers Dennis Marr, Katie Phillips, Bianna Federico, Michael McCaskill, Larry Lashley and Javier Rodriguez.
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