Cannabis in the county: Covelo
An interview with Sheriff Matt Kendall
Mendocino County Sheriff Matt Kendall’s roots go deep throughout the county.
His great-great-grandfather moved from Boonville—formerly called Kendall’s City—to Manchester due to health concerns and, a couple of generations later, in 1966, his mother and father moved to Covelo where Kendall was born and raised.
“It’s devastating to me to see what’s happening there. I get emails, phone calls, snail mail—from a former teacher, from my daughter-inlaw, from old friends—about the violence, the water trucks, the gunshots heard at night. It has become the most dangerous place to live and it’s just not acceptable,” Kendall says.
Last summer, in the dark of the evening, he and his team showed up with a SWAT team to a gun battle at Biggar Lane and Crawford Road;
neighbors said they heard 15-20 minutes of gunfire.
“We had to lock down the grow site, insert deputies inside and keep them there all night. It was too dark and too dangerous to search for suspects. The next day we found bullet holes in everything but not a single drop of blood.”
There has been an explosion of methamphetamine and heroin connected to all of this.
“It’s not just marijuana; when drug trafficking organizations show up to the party, they bring all their tools with them. Right now, it’s happening in Covelo but it’s beginning to affect all of our smaller communities.”
Are there cartels in Covelo?
“Absolutely. This is very big money run by these organizations. It’s Mexicans, Russians, Bulgarians. The amount of violence is ridiculous.”
A friend called to tell him there are a lot of new people in Covelo that he doesn’t know; they’re coming from San Jose, California; from Juarez, Mexico; from Phoenix, Arizona. The friend has kids in school and he is scared.
Kendall says if he had 500 men and 500 helicopters for 500 days, he couldn’t put a dent in the problems he is seeing right now. He has to triage the most egregious offenses: any trespass grows on someone else’s property; any grows run by drug trafficking organizations or cartels; any grows with violence or gunshots coming out of them or human trafficking; and any environmental degradation in sensitive areas.
“We will jump on these immediately and everything else will trail behind.”
Kendall shares some Google Earth photos with me on our Zoom screen.
He pulls up one from 2017—an area of about three square acres out by Refuse Road where the Covelo dump is located. He points
out six little grows with less than 300 plants.
By 2020, when the entire field was taken over by grow houses, he removed 25,000 plants, all illegal grows.
He pulls up another photo taken in 2016 of Post Mountain in Trinity County, about 90-minutes to two hours from Covelo.
“When I started to put a lot of pressure on, they all started moving there.”
There are bulldozed trees, hundreds of bladed acres, hoop houses.
“This is what Mendocino is going to look like pretty quickly.”
Another Google Earth photo taken prior to 2018 shows a section of the Eel River, about a 10-minute drive east of Covelo. As he zooms in, the object in the middle of the river becomes recognizable—a large water truck pulling from the river.
A photo from about 2017 shows the middle of town right next to the high school he attended; he points to all the grows around it—here, here, here and here.
“It’s easier to count the places that don’t have marijuana than those that do. This photo was taken four years ago; imagine what it looks like now.”
The Sheriff’s Office marijuana unit has one full time sergeant, one full time deputy and one half time deputy for the entire county.
There are eight deputies,
some of whom go to work every day in Covelo, assigned to the Willits substation, covering all the communities in the north sector.
The county’s population has increased by 70 percent since 1970 but his personnel numbers have not gone up to match.
“I’ve been told from growers that they cannot
make money selling in the legal market for $400 to $500 a pound. When the market begins to collapse, and it will, with no oversight and no taxation, the black market will stay strong and more people will be driven into it because it will continue to pay more. As long as there’s a strong black market, the legal market will never get to where
it should.
“The folks who got into the program early are trying, but without enforcement, without inspection, without oversight, who’s going to play by the rules?
“When the bubble bursts and this market ends, we will be left with a great deal of problems; when they all pack up and leave, we will have yet more poverty than what we have now. This situation is poisoning our future and we cannot have it.
“Without the necessary initial oversight, it has become a massive beast. I am opposed to anything that does not include enforcement requirements.
“The Board (of Supervisors) is saying the only way we can get beyond these problems is to open it up further but, without enforcement included in the plan, that is going to create a much larger problem if they continue to do it as they have in the past. Unless they say ‘we will give you the funding to deal with the bad actors,’ it will not be successful.
“The time to have put in enforcement regulations was when the ordinance was first set up. They could give me $100 million tomorrowanditwoulddomeno good for four years. If I hire a deputy sheriff today and send him to the police academy,
it would take one full year before I could get one full day’s work from him.”
He says that personnel is a tough thing right now. Police academies used to have 40 cadets; the College of the Redwoods has about 15 right now.
“People don’t want to be policemen anymore; it’s too dangerous of a job.”
The department is down to 25 deputies on patrol for the entire county to cover day shifts and night shifts. In the north (almost 50 percent of the county), on the coast and in central Ukiah, there are two deputies and one sergeant working per shift.
“The county has to make an investment into the future; it has to be funded and it’s not going to be an overnight fix. It will take three or four years to get this taken care of,” Kendall says.
“The good news is I see marijuana legalization moving across the U.S. and people are realizing that public safety and environmental health must go hand in hand.
“I also see the public supporting us in dealing with these problems, in cleaning up this mess; it’s going to affect too much for too long if we don’t. The department needs this support and with it we can do anything.”