On first impression, the town appears spare and lacking any centralized identity—not unlike similar-sized other cities found in the western expanses of the Mojave Desert. Flat, with no unique natural geological features to boast, Adelanto is as unremarkable a landscape as they come. Discarded plastic bags and other free-range trash pepper undeveloped acreage not claimed by KB Homes or one of the other corporate tract-home developers that began colonizing this part of the desert during the 1990s. Unlike adjacent Victorville, which is sited along the picturesque Mojave Narrows riparian corridor and prides itself as a Route 66 stopover with a relatively intact historic downtown district, Adelanto has no postcard viewscape or roadside nostalgia to celebrate.
Instead, U.S. Route 395 bisects the town, linking the Inland Empire in the south to the Eastern Sierra to the north and beyond. In this stretch of highway, big rigs barrel up and down the roadway in a continuous stream. Passenger vehicles turning onto the town’s few side streets pass by cookie-cutter tract homes. Located in what appears to be the town’s center are city hall, a community park, the San Bernardino County sheriff station, a couple of convenience store/gas stations, two lodging options, and a few local and retail chain businesses. Besides the new “Crossroads at 395” at Palmdale Road (a destination marketplace at the extreme southern end of the city limits showcasing the usual retail big-box chains, fast-food franchises and other consumer schlock) it is easy to pass through Adelanto without knowing it.
Hotpoint electric-iron inventor E.H. Richardson founded Adelanto in 1915 via a $75,000 land purchase after doing quite well from his iron patent residuals. Richardson planned to develop one-acre home sites within the larger Victor Valley, located just north of Cajon Pass, for WWI veterans suffering from respiratory illnesses. Unfortunately, Adelanto didn’t materialize into the master-planned community that Richardson had initially envisioned. Instead, it became known for its deciduous fruit orchards and later for its numerous poultry operations. George Air Force Base (AFB) supplanted localized agriculture when the military opened it in 1941. Throughout the Cold War years, George AFB sustained the community until 1992, when the military decommissioned the facility during the Clinton administration.
Today, the abandoned, derelict ruins of George’s former base housing ominously face Victorville’s Federal Correctional Complex positioned at the eastern boundary of Adelanto. The military base now serves as the Southern California Logistics Airport, operating as a civilian “global intermodal logistics gateway to the Western United States.”
Doing Time with a View
During the early 1990s, with the base closure looming, town officials sought new economic stability by shifting to an “incarceration infrastructure,” not unlike other struggling communities in California seeking ways to fiscally support themselves.
Adelanto’s first prison was initially built and operated as a state-run correctional facility in 1991. The prison was later purchased from the city in 2010 for $28 million by Florida-based GEO Group, Inc., the second-largest for-profit private prison contractor in the U.S. GEO immediately converted the facility into the Adelanto Detention Center, resulting from a contractual agreement signed in 2011 with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In addition, GEO constructed a second detention center, located just west of the original prison in 2012. The combined east and west detention centers house the highest number of immigrant detainees in California—on average, 1,100 a day, and include those waiting for asylum hearing outcomes. GEO’s 2015 annual report states that $1.84 billion in total revenue was received that year from these joint ICE operations. However, the management of GEO’s Adelanto ICE facility has a troubled history and is not without criticism—it was the epicenter for the 2013 immigration protests. Radio station KPCC also reported in 2015 that three detainees have died over the five years since the facility opened due to “lapses in care.”
GEO additionally operates the 700-bed medium security “Desert View” Modified Community Correctional Facility for the state. The city’s third incarceration facility is San Bernardino County Sheriff’s High Desert Detention Center, which opened in 2006, holding around 700 pre-sentence inmates on average per day.
With three existing prison facilities and a fourth approved by the city council in late 2015 (GEO proposed the fifth facility but later withdrew it due to community opposition), it is understandable why Adelanto is branded as a prison town. Of course, it doesn’t help that a high-security U.S. Federal Penitentiary in Victorville is located at the city’s eastern border—inevitably adding to Adelanto’s unflattering prison reputation.
And while Adelanto welcomed the prisons into its community during the 1990s, the city failed to require the prisons to hire workers residing in Adelanto, forcing locals to compete with other Victor Valley residents for jobs here. Still, the combined prisons are Adelanto’s largest employers. About $160,000 is collected annually for housing inmates and detainees within city limits. However, the revenue stream has failed to keep the town financially above water, so by 2010, the City of Adelanto faced insolvency and nearly went bankrupt.
Enter John “Bug” Woodard Jr., 58, a first-time Adelanto City councilman, voted into office during late 2014. After serving as a former board member for the High Desert Tea Party, he was encouraged to run for Adelanto’s city council by the San Bernardino County Young Republicans. Still, Woodard prides himself for not being a “career politician,” even though he plans to run for reelection in the next cycle.
John originally hails from Glendora, but relocated with his wife, Katy, to the Victor Valley from Pismo Beach in 1998. Besides his councilmember role, Woodard wears various entrepreneurial hats, as a real estate broker, a music-festival promoter and an online seasoning salesman. Woodard additionally finds time to help raise three small grandchildren, whom he and Katy adopted a few years ago.
John, who has the appearance of an ardent Grateful Dead fan, is well known in these parts for hosting his annual Woodystock Blues Festival at his rural ranch property east of Apple Valley. This affiliation, plus a radical initiative that he and his fellow councilmembers pitched to voters to bring the city out of its fiscal slump, branded Woodard as a “left-leaning hippy” for those not familiar with his more conservative personal politics.
The proposal, a controversial ordinance to license large-scale indoor cultivation of medical-grade marijuana within the town’s designated industrial-zoned district, was solicited initially by Woodard and other Adelanto city officials, including Mayor Richard Kerr via Pasadena entertainment lawyer and medical marijuana advocate F. Freddy Sayegh. Woodard became the first council member to support and promote the initiative, which local law enforcement and the city’s school board had contested. When Ordinance No. 545 passed in a four-to-one vote in November 2015, local attitudes began to shift.
Adelanto is the second city in Southern California to allow legalized, large-scale cultivation of medical marijuana. Desert Hot Springs, Palm Springs’ fiscally troubled next-door neighbor, was the first to do so in 2014. After the ordinance passed in 2015, things began moving very quickly for Adelanto: Woodard regularly spied darkly tinted, pricey vehicles belonging to would-be investors, including a rare gold Bentley, cruising the warehouse district. Requests for commercial marijuana cultivation and manufacturing permits soon began pouring in.
Initially, city officials had planned to limit the number of commercial marijuana cultivation permits to six but decided later to expand zoning in response to market demand. As a result, twenty-seven companies had secured the non-refundable $7,000 twelve-month commercial cultivation or manufacturing permit within Adelanto’s designated warehouse district by early 2016. Historically, this area has housed forty-four manufacturing businesses, including a now-defunct yacht company and the city’s second-largest employer, General Atomics, known for developing and producing military drones.
As of February 2016, the city has licensed thirty-two permits. In addition, a handful of celebrity entrepreneurial growers has expressed interest in doing so, including Ky-Mani Marley, one of Bob Marley’s sons, B-Real of Cypress Hill, and Tommy Chong, plus some other well-known musicians and athletes. Other investors, including Sayegh’s Adelanto Research Facilities, will concentrate on medical marijuana research and the development of cannabinoid-based treatments for Alzheimer’s, pediatric epilepsy and various forms of cancer.
Although first voted down, medical marijuana dispensaries may be allowed to operate in Adelanto depending on whether or not a new, upcoming 2017 ordinance slated for a vote passes. Woodard is pushing to eliminate the proposed dispensary zone as he feels it doesn’t make sense to direct medical cannabis patients to purchase within one area. Instead, Adelanto’s plan will allow three to four dispensaries to set up shop based on one dispensary per every 8,300 citizens.[1] Still, Woodard feels that the city may need to permit additional dispensaries within its borders because Adelanto currently stands as the only municipality in the region allowing them to operate legally. The city will, of course, collect sales tax on all medical marijuana sales plus any future legal sales of recreational pot.
The ordinance requires cannabis cultivation employers to hire half their workforce locally. Adelanto’s unemployment rate hovers around 10.8 percent (the national average is 5.20 percent), so this is welcome news.
Soon after the city passed the ordinance, Newport Beach businessman Don Kojima swept up forty-two acres within the “zone” for a scant $375,000, setting off a flood of investors looking for similar deals, thus tripling property values overnight. In addition, some long-time Adelanto property owners within the zone chose to sell and move their businesses to other locations not zoned for lucrative cannabis cultivation, making a ridiculous profit in the process.
For instance, the OC Register reported in February 2016 how “one property valued at $1.5 million was flipped for $4 million.” In 2015, the Sacramento Bee stated that five acres of vacant land, initially purchased for $350,000 by CalCann Holding Corp. and intended for cultivation, was later resold for a whopping $1.8 million. Even though cannabis investors must finance real estate and infrastructure to run their operations in hard cash, the federal government prohibits bank loans to businesses that grow, process, or sell cannabis. Regardless, Adelanto’s land green rush was on.
California’s medical-marijuana industry accounted for half of the legal sales of the substance within the U.S in 2015, yielding $2.7 billion in sales revenue.[2] With the legalization of recreational pot in November 2016, sales are expected to double. Up to 300,000 pounds of cannabis will be grown and processed annually in Adelanto at full production.[3] In turn, all cannabis-related activity conducted within Adelanto city limits, including cultivation, transportation, testing and sales, will be taxed at five percent. With other commercial activity and property taxes, this tax could provide upwards of a million dollars a month—a windfall for the cash-strapped city whose current general fund budget runs
$13 million annually.
Woodard is excited to see how this new revenue will improve the overall quality of life for local Adelantoans. When I toured one of the designated cultivation warehouses with John on a usually rainy afternoon, we discussed how this initiative would dramatically remake Adelanto as it exists today.
I was especially encouraged by a conversation with one local investor, who graciously led John and myself on a tour of his clone grow room, within an existing unfinished warehouse space undergoing a significant electrical renovation. This gentleman, who, with his family, owns and operates a convenience-store chain within the Barstow area, is expanding into the cannabis-cultivation business and is considering opening a local dispensary to market and sell his family’s product. Inside, the lush green “mother” trees, grown for cloning, represent a variety of cannabis strains, including Girl Scout Cookies, LA Confidential, Northern Lights plus “OG” (Original Gangster).
Under bright grow lights and whirring fans, we discussed how the ordinance has the potential to change Adelanto for the better. Our guide was genuinely hopeful that the incoming revenue would provide much-needed infrastructure improvements and attract support businesses, including security, construction, maintenance, sales, distribution and shipping, along with management positions that could potentially employ local residents. He also expressed how the cannabis industry must lead the way to implement renewable energy sources within the entire production loop, stating that “this warehouse alone will require as much electricity as 150 average residential homes.” His company’s business plan is to source at least half their power demand from a combination of solar energy and cleaner-burning natural gas.
Commercial Cannabis’ Indoor Carbon Footprint
Researchers estimate that industrial indoor cannabis cultivation consumes nearly three percent of California’s overall electricity output—equal to the average electricity use of one million households. Additionally, commercial cannabis cultivation emits carbon dioxide equivalent to those produced by one million average cars. Overall, it consumes one percent of the nation’s total electricity use.[4]
A senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Evan Mills, published a widely circulated 2012 paper titled “The carbon footprint of indoor Cannabis production,” detailing these astonishing statistics.[5] A 2016 report in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law states how energy consumption accounts for one-third of indoor cultivation total production costs.[6] As the burgeoning industry expands after other states legalize marijuana, the strain on electricity grids throughout the U.S. will “grow exponentially” beyond what many municipalities can actively sustain.
Indeed, Denver’s electrical grid was overwhelmed by the high energy demands of its legalized growing facilities during 2014, when The Denver Post reported that 354 local indoor cultivation operations sucked up 200 kilowatts of electricity. The city’s electricity use was double the amount these same operations required in 2012. Desert Hot Springs (DHS) has, too, been experiencing excessive demands on its spare electrical grid as large-scale legal cultivation multiplies within its city limits. Despite the high concentration of industrial wind turbines and solar located throughout the area, Southern California Edison stated that it could take up to nine years to boost DHS’ existing electrical grid to accommodate the additional loads required by cannabis growers.[7]
Although Adelanto is poised to lead the way in renewably produced cannabis cultivation, city officials did not require a certain percentage of electrical usage from localized solar or wind within its 2015 ordinance. However, Councilman Woodard commented that “the industry will naturally move in that direction to keep costs down on the bottom line.”[8] And that is likely to happen, as the 2015 Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act states that there will indeed be future regulations in place to offset carbon emissions for indoor cannabis cultivation.
Most existing warehouses under conversion within the cultivation zone would not be capable of sustaining the weight of large rooftop solar arrays. And if implemented, the solar energy produced would not provide enough electricity to power the cultivators’ excessive energy requirements. Still, new construction can handle rooftop solar if adequately designed. Plus, developers can source undeveloped adjacent land for off-roof solar energy infrastructure. With excessive energy production costs plus heightened public scrutiny of these operations, it behooves cannabis growers and investors alike to make their operations sustainable and energy independent.
On February 2, 2017, a groundbreaking ceremony for Adelanto’s new HDO Industrial Park took place. This $60 million, 630,000-square-foot commercial development will feature twenty-one buildings providing space for cultivation, manufacturing and other related activities in the city’s newest expansion zone. Industrial Integrity Solutions (IIS), the company overseeing the project, will provide 550 permanent jobs with 225 jobs for Adelanto residents, while generating over $2 million in municipal tax revenues annually. Additionally, IIS will contribute $100,000 to support local Adelanto charities servicing its residents.
The groundbreaking does signal that things are looking up for Adelanto. However, whether Adelanto can sustain this bold foray into industrial-scale marijuana cultivation remains to be seen. As more California municipalities suffering similar financial woes join the pot cultivation fest—as they did during the 1990s with prisons—an excess of marijuana could potentially flood the market. How will the legal pot business fare over the long term? That’s anyone’s guess.
Former Adelanto Mayor Richard Kerr, who served from 2014-2018, was arrested and charged in August 2021 with accepting more than $57,000 in bribes in connection with a 2018 corruption probe involving the city’s legal cannabis operations. In addition, former Councilman Jermaine Wright, arrested on similar bribery charges in November 2017, will be tried during fall 2021. John Woodard has since relocated to Kingman, Arizona. This article is co-published with KCET Artbound. Visit Artbound’s Mojave Project page here.
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FOOTNOTES (click to open/close)
[1] John Woodard, email correspondence with with the author, February 20, 2017.
[2] Ian Lovett, “In California, Marijuana Is Smelling More Like Big Business,” New York Times, April 11, 2016.
[3] Brooke Edwards Staggs, “Prison town goes to pot: Desert city Adelanto hopes cultivating marijuana will save it,” OC Register, February 2, 2016.
[4] Outdoor marijuana cultivation, especially illegal growing operations within public lands, is not without controversy. For further reading see Josh Harkinson, “The Landscape-Scarring, Energy-Sucking, Wildlife-Killing Reality of Illegal Pot Farming,” Mother Jones, March/April 2014.
[5] Advocates for the commercial cannabis cultivation of medical and recreational pot including High Times, contest Mills’ findings. For further reading see Dan Skye, “How Much Energy Does Indoor Pot Really Use?” High Times, May 3, 2016.
[6] Gina S. Warren, “Regulating Pot to Save the Polar Bear: Energy and Climate Impacts of the Marijuana Industry,” Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, April 22, 2016.
[7] Gregory Heilers, “Is Marijuana Saving Small Towns?” Mary Jane.com, March 17, 2016.
[8] John Woodard, email correspondence with with the author, February 20, 2017.