Humboldt County says, I owe over 4 million in fines
for somebody else's crime.
In 2018, after California legalized marijuana, Humboldt County's
division of code enforcement launched a program using satellite
images to ticket and find anyone.
Its specs of growing marijuana without a permit.
As a result, innocent homeowners across the county
face millions of dollars in fines for things they never.
I've got this notice on my gate, and literally I look at it and says,
I own $30,000 a day for growing cannabis when alls I've ever done is
grow vegetables in my greenhouses.
We've got, uh, the fine notice, the end of August, 2021.
It was 16,000 a day.
When I looked at the abatement notices, I realized I was getting
charged $83,000 a day for hoop houses that had already been.
Humboldt County is a sprawling county, five hours north of San
Francisco in an area known as the Emerald Triangle Because of its long
history of cannabis cultivation.
The county which is home to Redwood Forest National Park is
nearly the size of Connecticut.
This is a community of people who moved out in the
seventies back to the landers.
They called them and they scraped together whatever pennies they
could, and they bought old, logged out land that no one
else wanted, just like I kind of got with this place and they
turned it into a community.
For the last four years, Humboldt's Code Enforcement
office has scoured historic satellite photos to look for any
sign of cannabis cultivation.
If they saw a greenhouse or a leveled garden plot, they
just assumed it was cannabis.
And immediately started finding the property owner tens of
thousands of dollars per day.
They rarely ever inspect alleged violations in person.
Having a greenhouse is proof enough for the county, and in some cases,
they assess the fines to a new owner for previous owners problems.
That means that innocent homeowners like the Thomas's are left to.
We met in a Gore, California.
I had four children, two of them autistic twins, and one of them,
Steven became an award-winning cross country runner and he
attained quite a bit of news and hope for other autistic families.
And a movie was made about our family, uh, named Miracle Run.
Unfortunately for the Thomas's in 2018, a wildfire destroyed
their home in Southern California.
They decided to move to Humbolt to retire on a piece of property in
the heart of the Redwood Forest.
I had been a loan officer in the past and a real estate agent
and, uh, I a paralegal degree.
And so I was careful about what I was buying and I
read all the documents.
It went through title it, cleared title, and then all
of a sudden, uh, week later after we moved in, there's, uh,
several page notice on the gate that we had a code violation.
It said that we were growing marijuana illegally.
When I read the paperwork, I found out that it was put under LLCs
name, who was the previous owner.
The Thomas's bought their property with a clean title.
In fact, the county waited to issue the fines until
after the land change.
The code enforcer told them that a previous owner had used a
three story barn on the property to grow cannabis and that their
only option to avoid the fines was to tear it down in 10 days.
Just the fear that this puts in your mind and the, and the
pain of being told that your dreams are gonna be gone and
you're gonna be without anything.
They're asking us to spend over a hundred thousand dollars.
To tear out this barn because the previous owner was breaking
a rule or a law, and we had nothing to do with that.
The way this was looking was that we were gonna lose everything.
The Thomas's were not alone in facing astronomical fines for the
county's code enforcement program.
A similar thing happened to Blue Graham who built two greenhouses
on his land to grow vegetables for his wife's restaurant.
They're finding me $30,000 a day for growing vegetables in
my greenhouses when alls they had to do was come and look.
And instead of that, they're claiming that I, that I
grew cannabis they could have seen for themselves.
A property owner gets just 10 days to fix the issue, but in the case
of people like Blue Graham and Rhonda Olson, even if they tear down
the greenhouses, it is not enough.
The county wants their money to.
Rhonda removed the prior owners greenhouses and was still getting
fined more than $80,000 per.
It's been two years and I've done everything that I thought
that they wanted me to do, and they keep coming back with fines
and more abatements, and I don't know how a person can pay it.
It just made so much stress in my life.
Blue Rhonda and the Thomases are only a few examples of
over 1000 property owners being targeted by the county's abusive
code enforcement program.
So far, the county has issued more than 1200 citations
totalling hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.
The process for resolving the issue is rarely made clear
to the property owners, and even when they do address the
issue, the county continues to assess additional fines, all
without providing any hearings.
And it, it's frustrating.
I try and talk to them.
I try and they tell me what I need to do.
I do it.
They say, That's not good enough.
Um, I've tried to get my home permitted.
They, they say, You can do it.
Then they say, you can't.
So I can never get a straight answer from these guys.
The fines are constantly changing and you say,
I'm doing all this stuff.
Then, then bring me to court and prove it, which they've told me.
They don't have the proof.
They just want my.
We sued Humboldt County to put an end to its abusive
code enforcement program.
Homeowner should be able to have a garden or a greenhouse without
facing baseless accusations and ruinous fines from an abusive
code enforcement officer.
Like I said, this is my home and these are my neighbors.
And this is a really tight community, and it's not
just me that got affected, it's my whole neighborhood.
And it, it's frustrating.
The reason I'm standing up is because that's how I was raised.
Um, you gotta be tough out here to live.
I J's lawsuit argues that humble violates due process.
It forces people to prove they're innocent, but never
provides them a chance to do so.
All while millions in excessive fines continue to grow.
We're here to shut down this abusive system.