Deschutes commissioners fine-tune pot rule changes

Deschutes County commissioners say they are trying to let recreational marijuana growers run their businesses while still being mindful of people who live nearby. The main issues people have: how growers manage the smell, lights and noise coming from their facilities.

Commissioner Tammy Baney said they’ve been gathering information over the past year. She said a big challenge they’ve found is that production facilities are moving into rural areas where people live and want to enjoy their land.

NewsChannel 21 was at a meeting Monday where, for hours, commissioners discussed regulations to find some sort of middle ground.

“We’re trying to seek balance,” Baney said. “It won’t be perfect, but our hope is that we can help to mitigate those impacts that benefit the industry but also benefit the rural character of Deschutes County.”

To help, commissioners are making the regulations’ language more specific, so growers know exactly what’s expected of them.

For example, the code now says for odor, growers have to provide evidence that their methods of controlling smell are as effective as they claim.

For lighting, their lights can only be visible from the outside from sunrise to sunset.

For noise, commissioners have decided growers can only be held responsible for noise directly coming from their production facilities and not other background noise.

However, they did not come to a final agreement on how many decibels are acceptable after accounting for that background noise.

“The number we’re trying to come up with is, over the ambient noise, how much more should be allowed,” Baney said. “You might have an HVAC system and it might run at 42 (decibels). If I have 44 HVAC systems that’s running just next door, I suspect (the total volume is) going to be a lot higher than 42 (decibels).”

There’s also the question of medical marijuana growers.

Since 2016, the county has approved 46 recreational marijuana production facilities. Of those, 20 are licensed, but not all of them are fully operational.

There are more than 700 medical marijuana grows in Deschutes County alone, but they operate under the Oregon Health Authority. The county has no official registry of them, a point of contention with law enforcement.

“Say you call and you say, ‘I can smell this odor and I hear these fans, or whatever it is,'” Baney said. “And we say, ‘What property is it?’ and you say, ‘You know, I can’t really tell where it’s coming from, but it’s in this vicinity.'”

“Right now, we would have to go through each address, call the Oregon Health Authority and say, ‘Is this it? Is this it?’ and then they let us know when we hit the address that actually is a medical marijuana grow.”

Commissioners will meet again Oct. 16 to review the decisions they agreed on Monday and tackle the issues they didn’t resolve, specifically noise and water regulations.

They’ll also have to decide whether medical marijuana grows can be regulated along the same lines as recreational ones or if they’ll need their own set of rules.

Commissioners said their goal is to create a balance for everyone who lives and works in the county.

You can find a link to all of the regulations commissioners reviewed Monday here under “attachments.”