SHERIFF'S DEPUTIES BACK TO HUNTING FOR POT GROWS IN SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS

SANTA CRUZ -- The annual fight to stop illegal marijuana gardens from
sprouting in the Santa Cruz Mountains begins this month and, once
again, the Sheriff's Office will get federal funding to support its
efforts to eradicate large-scale pot grows.

The county Board of Supervisors gave Sheriff Steve Robbins the
go-ahead this week to apply for and accept about $120,000 in federal
money that funds a deputy sheriff assigned to marijuana enforcement
and a portion of an assistant district attorney position.

Deputies uprooted almost 43,000 pot plants in the county last year, a
marijuana crop worth more than $75 million.

Supervisor Neil Coonerty cast the only dissenting vote. He said he
voted against the Marijuana Suppression Program Grant because
Sheriff's Office efforts should be focused on methamphetamine crimes.

Last winter, the Sheriff's Office received a $330,000 grant to create
two new deputy sheriff's positions dedicated to methamphetamine
investigations and Robbins said his staff has redirected most of
their efforts to methamphetamine enforcement. Sixty percent of
Sheriff's Office drug arrests are meth-related and deputies who
handle drug cases, once called the Marijuana Enforcement Team, have
been renamed the Narcotics Enforcement Team.

Robbins acknowledged during the meeting that marijuana enforcement
isn't popular, however, he defended the need for the Drug Enforcement
Administration grant to locate and eradicate large grows in rural
areas. The Sheriff's Office has received the DEA funding for several years.

"We've been targeting the outdoors, rather than the indoors," Robbins
said. "These are the ones that someone is going to get hurt if they
stumble on them"

Sheriff's deputies located 26 outdoor plantations on public and
private lands in 2006; in the grows they found 60 percent more pot
plants than in 2005.

Many of the grows were located in state parks near popular hiking
trails and concern about public safety is paramount, Robbins said.
The outdoor marijuana growing season runs from April to October.

"We got a lot of tips last year from hikers [and] state park rangers
who don't want to deal with it in their community," he said. "The
most disturbing thing is we're finding a lot of the workers in them are armed"

No serious confrontations between growers and outdoor enthusiasts
have been reported in the county since hikers ran across armed men in
the Santa Cruz Mountains 15 years ago, but a man brandished a knife
at deputies, then fled into the woods as they raided his grow last
summer. Guns were recovered at other gardens in 2006 and, at one
grow, deputies found a camera with photos of men posing with weapons
in front of the maturing marijuana plants, according to Robbins.

The grows also wreak havoc on the environment, according to narcotics deputies.

Marijuana growers leave trash, pesticides, human feces and,
sometimes, deer carcasses in the gardens, and their cultivation
practices cause erosion and stream contamination.

The DEA grant only funds one deputy sheriff and 20 percent of an
assistant district attorney position. The funding will not be
directed to rehabilitating the land where marijuana gardens were planted.