MENDOCINO CO., 8/5/26 — Mendocino County Sheriff Matt Kendall and the president of the Mendocino Cannabis Alliance aren’t often on the same side of the county’s cannabis arguments. But on one point they agree: legalization was rolled out in a way that set licensed growers up to fail.
“The legalization of marijuana was rolled out in fashion to kind of put the legal growers against the law before they even started,” Kendall said in an Aug. 3 phone interview. “I’m blown away by some of the things that our licensed growers have got to go through, whereas the unlicensed do the exact opposite. So, are we setting up a fair system?”
Steve Amato heard the sheriff’s words read back to him the next day and didn’t hesitate. Amato is president of the Mendocino Cannabis Alliance, the trade group for the county’s licensed cultivators, and farms both cannabis and wine grapes outside Hopland.
“It’s been a very onerous process, without a doubt, on all levels,” he said. “And it is a very onerous process, for sure, that no other agricultural product even remotely goes through. And part of that is because we’re not allowed to be defined as agriculture yet, which is part of the major problem.”
A licensed cultivator, Amato said, answers to the state and regional water boards, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the county and the state Department of Cannabis Control: “You’re talking about four to five different agencies in order to just try to get a cultivation license and operate it.”
The county wrote its cultivation ordinance around 2015 and rolled it out in 2016, before Proposition 64 passed statewide, Amato said, and allowing 10,000 square feet of cultivation felt “very adventurous” then — it was supposed to be a stepping stone. “And then we just kind of fell into, like, that became a law of the land forever,” he said, recalling that supervisors at the time described the ordinance as a starting point that would be revised over time. That “never really happened,” he said.
The ordinance resulted in regulatory management no other crop faces, he said. Removing a shade tree near an active cannabis garden could draw a violation or block a license. “Meanwhile, how many trees do you think were removed in the name of the vineyard process?” he said. “But there was no parity, you know, to any other agriculture.”
The growers who remain have a sympathetic ear inside county government. Angela Godwin, the county’s agricultural commissioner since June 2024, put it plainly in a phone interview Wednesday: “I even have a soft spot for the cannabis people. They come in and they work really, really hard.” She knows the county’s outlaw-growing history, she said, “but everybody I see works really hard.”
Where it goes down a rabbit hole, in her telling, is exactly where Amato started: cannabis still isn’t considered agriculture. Pesticide regulation runs through federal EPA labels, Godwin said, and because the federal government won’t recognize cannabis as a crop, even fully licensed growers fighting spider mites are left interpreting broad labels written for other crops. Cannabis is “one of those stepchildren,” she said. “It is an ag crop. It absolutely is.”
The sheriff’s explanation for the rabbit hole reached back to his youth. “I think it was Ronald Reagan that was talking about government,” Kendall said, recalling the former president’s line that when something works well, government steps in and regulates it out of existence.
“I don’t know that some of the regulations that were put into place were there for any reason.”
