Life in Casa

When I moved to Casa Dorinda on January 1, 2009, after being on the waitlist for five years, it was the height of the 2008 financial disaster which cost me a $300,000 loss on the sale of my house. I had friends from the Music Academy of the West here, and the first four years were everything I knew and expected – but the next 10 years have been nothing but noise and power tools blaring as four apartments below me and five apartments around me were torn asunder. Recently, four days of power tools have greeted me in the mornings (of course), while this fifth resident had shelves drilled into the longest living room wall. Meanwhile my tinnitus is far worse than when I moved here – but the worst was yet to come. 

This January 13th, the Martin Luther King holiday, I entered my bedroom to find water dripping from the ceiling fire extinguisher. Being a three-day weekend, I put a roasting pan below and mopped the carpeting as best as I could. 

On January 19th, the painter came and determined the leak came from the upper ceiling fire sprinkler and slanted down through the lower sprinkler. 

We then went to the living room and on the wall below just below the beam, the paint had bubbled up from leakage. This caused blistering for approximately five and a half feet from the upper slope, but in this case didn’t affect the ceiling. 

On February 19th, with a three-day forecast of no rain, Casa Dorinda sent roofers – who in the course of their work found the roof was so rotten that the man’s foot not only went through the roof, but through my ceiling
as well. 

I informed the Director of Operations, who is new on the job, that this was sloppy work because a new roof had been installed exactly three years prior (last September 2022). To which he replied, “They only did the flat roof, not the slanted portions.” This was negligence on the part of either the roofers or Casa Dorinda. To this day, only my roof and that of my neighbor to the right of me have been reroofed, while the rest of the building remains unfinished. 

These are only the highlights of life in Casa Dorinda. Anyone who buys into lifetime care needs to realize that what they buy into today will not necessarily be what they end up with in four to five years.

Renée Templeraud,
Casa Dorinda Resident

Follow the Scrubber Science

Last week, we were disappointed to discover that Santa Barbara County approved the permits for Santa Barbara’s most flagrant rule-breaking cannabis operator. Island Breeze Farms was approved this past week, despite the fact that it is the first and only cannabis operator being sued by the county for public nuisance. 

The permit also includes provisions for ineffective vapor misting as the only method of odor prevention. This technology is a masking agent that covers up odors and has been the source of concern and complaints from many in the Carpinteria community. Carbon scrubbers, on the other hand, eliminate odors from the air inside the greenhouse. After months of intense scientific study with SCS Engineers of Santa Maria, the Coalition found that carbon scrubbers are 84% effective in eliminating cannabis odors. They work. It’s as simple as that. 

The flagrant dismissal of superior odor abatement technologies makes it clear that decision-makers at the County are simply ignoring the science. Carbon scrubbers have proven to be successful in eliminating odors and should be a requirement for greenhouse cannabis operations across the county. We are extremely discontented to see the approval of such a bad operation.

We hope that when this particular grower appears before the Planning Commission or Board of Supervisors, we see justice served on a cannabis operation that flagrantly ignores the law. Furthermore, we hope to see carbon scrubbers required for all Carpinteria cannabis. Anything less is our local government’s failure to stop a very preventable public nuisance. 

Lionel Neff
Board Member, Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis