Opinion: People should not be living in fear

To the community,

One of the great things about the neighborhood I live in is that we haven’t had to worry about burglars. Until now.

Suddenly, our neighbors are reporting their cars are being broken into. However, in most cases, these break-ins are not reported to the police because many of my neighbors grow medical cannabis and they are afraid to contact the police for fear they will be raided and shut down by city officials for violating the new South Lake Tahoe cultivation ordinance.

Steve Kubby

Here’s a report from one of my neighbors: “Last night my husband and I went to bed to be awoken by the teenager that lives with us at midnight because when he walked home from a neighbor’s house he noticed all our car doors open and the interior lights on. My husband and I sprang out of bed (my wallet was in the car with over $200 in it) to find that our car was ransacked. The thief stole many items: our roadside emergency kit worth about $200, our daughters’ DVD players worth $250, my husband’s GPS worth $500, our phone charger and adapter for listening to music on the radio, our cargo net and ratcheted tie downs, and they even took the girls’ sunglasses. It is so upsetting to know that random people just walk down our street (Oakland) and check for unlocked vehicles to steal from. We work hard for what we have and it is really disturbing to have some low life come and rip it away from us.”

My neighbor then told me that about a dozen break-ins have occurred in our neighborhood, but that she was the first person to report it to the police. Since my neighbors are so afraid of the police, they have decided to form a vigilante committee to catch the thieves and punish them.

Thanks to the misguided efforts of the City Council, we now have an epidemic of break-ins and the prospect of some teenage thieves getting beaten to a pulp. This is the scary and destructive outcome of local council members creating more hardship and dangers through the unintended consequences of creating bad laws.

The time has come to replace the terrible and unworkable current cultivation ordinance with one that actually helps reduce odor emissions and still protect our fellow citizens who rely upon the medical use of cannabis, under their physician’s supervision, as provided by California law.

This Friday, the South Lake Tahoe city attorney issued a “Title and Summary” for a new, citywide, voter initiative that will fix the current dangerous and unworkable SLT cultivation ordinance. That means that we can start gathering signatures for the new SLT voter initiative over the next week at local grocery store parking lots.

Until then, lock your cars and leave the outside lights on at night.

Steve Kubby, South Lake Tahoe