Roseville Medical Marijuana Growers Must Now Keep Crops Indoors

Beginning today, anyone growing medical marijuana in Roseville will need to keep their crops under wraps.

The City of Roseville’s new medical marijuana outdoor cultivation ordinance goes into effect today.

The Roseville City Council passed the ordinance in June. The new restrictions are a result of complaints from neighbors about the marijuana's pungent odor.

“We wanted to give everybody a grace period so they could start harvesting everything, the stuff that they already have in the ground," said Dee Dee Gunther, Roseville’s police department spokesperson. "(Growers have known) Nov. 1 was a date that they needed to start making plans for, to bring those cultivations inside or start making other arrangements.” 

The new rules impact patients or authorized caregivers who grow marijuana for personal medical use.

Under the new rules, the city’s code inspectors will cite growers whose crops are visible or able to be smelled by neighbors or passerby.

Growers and property owners who violate the ordinance could be fined up to $500 a day if warnings to concede are not corrected, Gunther said.   

While the new restrictions stem from neighbor complaints about the plants' permeating smell, they could ward off the potential for future related crimes, Gunther confirmed. However, the new rules are not the result of any increase in crime related to the cultivations, she said.

Neighboring counties have seen crimes committed at homes with exposed medical marijuana gardens. In those cases, criminals have burglarized residences wanting to use or sell the marijuana for recreational purposes.

“So far people in Roseville have not had medical marijuana burglarized as far as we know,” said Gunther. “We’ve been fortunate so far. Certainly that’s one of the safety things you have to think about. But the main (concern) for Roseville, that was brought to the city council, was the odor.”

“The City's new ordinance treats outdoor cultivation of medical marijuana and other violations of the new ordinance as ‘public nuisances,’" she explained, stressing that violators will not be arrested.

She said violators will likely receive a warning from code enforcers before being given citations. City Spokesperson Megan MacPherson said code enforcement officers were unavailable to comment.

The public nuisance violations are administrative citations and their related fines are handled by the City Attorney's office, Gunther said.

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