Mendocino County Sheriff Seeks $4.5M to Rebuild Cannabis Enforcement Unit, Target Illicit Grows

The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors will consider ratifying a $4.5 million grant application Tuesday that Sheriff Matt Kendall says could finally give his department the staffing to meaningfully pursue illegal cannabis operations — something chronic under-staffing and a lack of dedicated funding have made nearly impossible.

The application, submitted to the Board of State and Community Corrections under California’s Proposition 64 Public Health and Safety Grant Program, would fund five staff positions, specialized equipment, and investigative tools dedicated to combating illicit commercial cannabis activity through December 2031. The board is being asked to ratify the submission after the application’s deadline required the Sheriff to file before Tuesday’s meeting.

Kendall said the money from that would allow him to formalize what has until now been a patchwork enforcement effort held together largely by legislature funded overtime pay.

“We don’t have the funding to pay for personnel, full time personnel, to be dedicated to [illicit cannabis enforcement],” Kendall told Redheaded Blackbelt in a phone interview Monday.

The staffing picture he describes is stark. With his investigative bureau operating at half capacity, cannabis enforcement has become something the department gets to when other crimes allow — which is rarely. Kendall has previously told Redheaded Blackbelt that his office lacks the resources to participate in joint enforcement efforts with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife or the Department of Cannabis Control. Without dedicated personnel, illicit grows, in practice, only get attention when a more serious crime, like last year’s two cannabis-site homicides, forces the issue. (See our reporting on the first homicide here and the second here.)

A $600,000 allocation of state general fund dollars — secured by Mike McGuire, now Senate President pro Tempore, in 2021 as part of a $1.5 million, three-county enforcement initiative — has been funding cannabis enforcement overtime for the department, but that money is now running out. Kendall expressed deep appreciation for McGuire’s role in securing it, and its impact has been concrete: the county’s two homicides at illicit cannabis sites last year were investigated largely on those resources. Without a replacement funding source, that investigative capacity disappears.

The Prop 64 application, if awarded, would provide a longer runway. The bulk of its budget is dedicated to personnel: two full-time detectives, a half-time deputy, a half-time criminal intelligence analyst, and a full-time code enforcement officer, along with patrol deputy overtime. Equipment requests include drones, night vision goggles, off-road vehicles, and civil citation software.

Mendocino County is also a member of the Northern California Coalition to Safeguard Communities, a five-county law enforcement partnership focused on human trafficking and organized crime at illegal cannabis operations. Kendall sits on the coalition’s board alongside the sheriffs of Humboldt, Lake, Trinity, and Siskiyou counties. That coalition funding has provided some resources to Mendocino, but Kendall said the department’s staffing shortfall has limited how much the county can leverage it. Without dedicated personnel, even available grant money cannot be fully put to use. The Prop 64 grant, in his view, is the missing piece.

The scale of the problem, he said, is not widely understood. As the cannabis economy has collapsed, many residents assume the large illicit grows have too, but Kendall said the numbers tell a different story. In an aerial surveillance assessment about two years ago, a deputy flew the county cataloguing illegal grow operations and found that an estimated 40 percent of previously identified sites had shut down, but the 60 percent that remained had increased in size by approximately 30 percent. The net effect was a larger total footprint of illegal cultivation, not a smaller one.

Those grows, he said, bring a constellation of associated crimes — environmental destruction, labor exploitation, and violence — and community attitudes toward enforcement have shifted accordingly. “We’re in this really strange time now where the mom and pop growers do not want to see these bad actors coming to town,” Kendall said. “When we go out and we serve a search warrant, we got people standing on the side of the road giving us a round of applause because they are tired of what this has brought to town.”

The new enforcement effort would represent what Kendall calls a reinvention of COMMET (the County of Mendocino Marijuana Enforcement Team). He said the reconstituted unit will operate differently in one fundamental respect: everything will be on camera. “It’s going to be kind of COMMET reinvented,” he said. “100% of our investigations are captured on those bodyworn cameras now.” The technology, he added, has advanced to the point where cameras activate automatically — when a deputy draws a weapon, the camera turns on. “The industry is saying, ‘Hey, we understand that when you’re stressed and being shot at, it needs to be on.'”

Though California legalized commercial cannabis in 2018 under Prop 64, Kendall said he does not expect the illegal market to disappear quickly, drawing a comparison to Prohibition. “They did not have that cleaned up for about 15 years, and that’s what we’re going through right now,” he said. He hopes the grant period changes the trajectory. “By 2031, we will hopefully see that a lot of these issues are gone.”

His enforcement pitch is also, at its core, an economic argument. Legal cannabis prices have collapsed since the commercial market launched, driving small licensed growers out while pushing illegal operators to slash costs — a pressure Kendall said flows directly into labor exploitation and trafficking at grow sites. The county’s wine industry faces its own headwinds, leaving fewer sectors capable of absorbing workers into legitimate employment. “I don’t want to see us losing all of those jobs or losing that economy.” The line between a struggling rural economy and rising crime, in his view, is direct. “I can draw a very straight line between people not working and crime. If we had a booming economy and everybody was going to work, we would not be facing the amount of crime that we’re facing right now.”

With current funding set to expire this year, Kendall is asking supervisors to back a longer-term shift from reactive enforcement to a sustained campaign against illegal operations aided by grant funds. The Board will decide Tuesday whether to move that effort forward.

The Board of Supervisors meeting begins at 9 a.m. today, Tuesday, March 24 at 501 Low Gap Road, Room 1070, in Ukiah, and is also available via Zoom.