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Cannabis irrigation water demand is many times higher than a single-family house or even wine grapes. It is unconscionable that we are approving more high-water intensive uses in areas that are already struggling to support existing and already permitted users.

Permitted uses with high water demand impact groundwater supplies and those supplies are not infinite and inexhaustible. Unfortunately, our County's Groundwater Sustainability Area reports use unrepresentative, historic data to populate their modeled scenarios leaving an optimistic assessment of our long term water supply. Meanwhile, we continue to approve high water demand uses - like cannabis - without having a true understanding of potential impacts on project-adjacent wells and on groundwater availability in the county as a whole.

The future of Sonoma County's water supplies seems highly uncertain as we head into year 3 of a historic drought. While Sonoma Water and Federal agencies are responding to the acute and immediate water shortages of these last few years, it seems we are still failing to take into account the longer term changes in water availability brought on by climate change. Failure to take these long term changes into account in evaluating future supply skews the picture of how much demand the county can truly sustain in the coming decades.