Taxes pay for Merced County illegal pot eradication. Sheriff wants that to change

This time of year is busy for those growing marijuana illegally so it’s also a busy time to eradicate those plants, according to the Merced County Sheriff’s Office.

An effort that uses a team of deputies weekly to cut down thousands of plants, many of which are connected to drug cartels, is expensive. Law enforcement officials are looking at options to put those costs back on landowners, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Deputies raided a site with more than 500 plants ranging from a couple of feet tall to over 6-feet in the 10000 block of Bell Drive outside Atwater on Friday, according to Sgt. Ray Framstad.

“We’re seeing outdoor cultivation using the same type of indoor technologies,” he said.

Growers are getting better at the craft and start the cloned plants inside before moving them outdoors, he said. Some use plastic to intensify sunlight, mimicking what indoor lights can do.

That means the plants are higher quality and can be grown in two harvests without using the amount of electricity that comes from growing inside, Framstad said. Cartels typically have multiple sites going at the same time, and deputies can only catch so many.

“They’re still going to profit if they get one or two grows to market,” he said.

Framstad said the team is also on pace to take 100 guns from the sites. Most of them are unregistered or stolen, he said.

The marijuana eradication team expected to clear 10 sites all over Merced County on Friday.

Sheriff Vern Warnke said he’s “treading in new water” to find a way to put the cost of operations back onto landowners. “There’s a maximum cost associated with this; 100 percent of the cost should be (paid) by the landowner,” he said. “There’s no way that that landowner could tell me they don’t know this stuff’s going on on their property.”

The efforts to eradicate can run up expenses through the hourly wages of a half-dozen deputies or so. But, there’s also costs for mileage, research on sites, the disposal of the plants and associated chemicals, and other costs, Warnke said.

Code enforcement also visits the sites, many of which have buildings that don’t match county codes, the Sheriff’s Office said.

Warnke noted the county allows anyone to grow six plants indoors.

“If you want to do something, do it legal. You won’t even see me,” he said. “I don’t know what else to do with these guys. I figure, let’s go after the pocketbook and maybe these landowners will start realizing.”