The drone hovered low, whirring like a giant bug above the lush, green northern California fields. Its camera was trained on the curved roof of an aging dome home. Inside, Keni Meyer, a petite, ponytailed 54-year-old, didn’t know her property was under surveillance again. But the Sonoma County authorities were taking another step in a harassment campaign, ostensibly aimed at unpermitted cannabis grows.
Drone photos of the property spurred the county to allege a series of building code violations. Those citations drew Meyer into a doomed six-year fight to save her property, as Sonoma’s covert cannabis surveillance operation warped into an attack on less affluent residents. For dozens if not hundreds of people, a crackdown on unlicensed cannabis crops has led to six-figure fines, foreclosures, and evictions. The result has been tears and devastation—even for folks, such as Meyer, who did not grow cannabis at all.
“I pretty much lost everything,” says Keni Meyer. Authorities didn’t find marijuana on her property but they fined her hundreds of thousands of dollars and eventually evicted her over alleged building code violations. pic.twitter.com/qFa5wgCD4R
— reason (@reason) September 9, 2025
In June, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit on behalf of three other Sonoma County residents. The suit says the authorities’ “runaway spying operation” violates constitutional protections against unlawful searches. Officials, the lawsuit charges, deployed a fleet of high-powered drones that could hover at 50 feet and capture high-quality video footage with precision zoom cameras, all while concealing the surveillance from residents, the media, and local oversight bodies.
To the ACLU, this isn’t ultimately about codes, or even cannabis. It’s about the right to privacy.
“We all have the right to live a private life at home without having to worry about a government drone flying overhead and watching us without a warrant or our knowledge,” says Matt Cagle, an attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. “Sonoma County’s drone program demonstrates how technology further disrupts the power balance between governments and people, making it easy for agencies to warrantlessly sift through people’s private affairs at scale and levy charges and fines that upend lives and livelihoods. At the same time, the county has hidden these unlawful searches from the people they have spied on, the community, and the media.”
The lawsuit adds: “Never before has the government been able to deploy, at its convenience, an inexpensive and unobtrusive floating camera, controlled from afar, to surreptitiously monitor and record scenes from above a person’s private property.”
Drive around Sonoma today, and you’ll see plenty of housing that’s ramshackle and almost certainly unpermitted, with many egregious apparent violations. Many residents continue to erect out-buildings without permits, partly because the process is expensive and partly because many of them resent having to deal with Permit Sonoma as a point of principle: It violates their DIY ethos and their sense of rugged frontier freedom.
In July, I met with a dozen Sonoma residents who might lose their home—or already have—because of these drone operations. They all insist their violations, if any, are minor and don’t justify severe punishment.
“They’re completely out of control,” says Meyer. “This is about Sonoma County code enforcement making as much money off of people [as possible], probably people who are in a lower tax bracket.”
After the first of half a dozen warrantless drone flights, former narcotics detective Todd Hoffman, now an officer with Code Enforcement Sonoma (CES), led an inspection of Meyer’s property in June 2019. The authorities found no cannabis but did claim to find a bevy of code violations, including an incline around the septic area, people living in trailers, an unpermitted garden staircase, a fence too close to the road, and an unpermitted portion of the south side of the unorthodox 1980 dome home.
Meyer insisted that some of the accusations were not true. Aside from an upstairs deck constructed without a permit by the previous owner, she said, the house was fully permitted. No one was actually living in the trailers, she added. And she felt she should have been left to address the other county complaints before being hit with crushing financial punishments.
Officials also claimed Meyer was running a commercial dog training facility. She says she was merely providing an animal sanctuary—she had dogs, horses, four goats, and three cats—which she operated while taking care of her aging father. Her dad ultimately died of natural causes at her house in 2023, while she was in the depths of her fight with the government. “I deeply wish it would have been a less chaotic time,” she says. “I did not tell him exactly how bad things were, but he had an idea. The county was serving me or leaving notes on my gate weekly. Try as I may, I could not clear the code violations. It was a nightmare.”
The fence and the deck were bona fide code violations, Meyer conceded. But she could not quickly obtain a demolition permit, as the fines were going up swiftly by the day, so she paid contractors $20,000 to take the fence down and move it without the permit. The fines, including for the demolished fence which officials would not remove the code violation for, racked up by more than $1,000 a week, and a protracted legal battle ensued. The stress took a serious toll on Meyer, who noticed the drone buzzing above her home on about half the occasions it was deployed. Behind the scenes, emails obtained by the ACLU show, officials called the woman whose life they were ruining “a complete scatter brain.”
In a March 25, 2022, ruling a judge ordered Meyer to pay $106,800 for the two “occupied” trailers, $67,200 for unpermitted grading, $57,600 for the fence, $52,860 for the “unpermitted K-9 training facility,” $50,000 for substandard sewage, and $43,200 for an unpermitted staircase deck. Most of these fines, totaling more than $375,000, would continue to accumulate at $235 per day until the alleged violations were officially corrected.
Meyer, unable to take out a loan at a reasonable rate to bring her property into compliance, took out a high-interest loan to cover her mounting fines and legal fees. “I got it to take care of all the things the county was accusing me of,” she says, shaking her head. “But then what the county does is they put a lis pendens [the first step in a suit for foreclosure] on your property and made it impossible for me, as it tied up my equity.” She paid $120,000 for a grading permit and $100,000 in lawyer fees, along with the fence, but was not able to clear the violations. She is still struggling to repay the loan.
On the morning of June 26, police officers handcuffed and manhandled Meyer, accusing her of possessing stolen weapons. (She inherited the weapons from her father, whom she says owned them legally.) She spent the night in jail. Meyer’s animals were left disoriented by the raid, and an elderly goat died.
The goat “couldn’t deal with the stress,” Meyer recalls, her sunburnt face slack with exhaustion, standing outside the rural home near Sebastopol. Her possessions, heirlooms, and furniture had been dumped in the driveway, and her computer had been destroyed. The home she had lived in for years had been sold off to strangers waiting on the roadside to move in, all because she hadn’t been able to rectify the code violations.
“They threw all my stuff out,” Meyer says, “I pretty much lost everything. I had to beg to come back in and get my dogs.” She now lives in a trailer park as her home’s new owners begin remodeling.
Mike Castagnola, 75, served for 39 years in the San Francisco Fire Department. Following his first citation on September 7, 2017—after a drone uncovered an allegedly unpermitted greenhouse on his property—he racked up more than $360,000 in fines. In January of this year, the county evicted him from his forested property outside Occidental.
“I was inspected three times and never had any cannabis plants in the greenhouses,” he says outside the front gate of the now unoccupied property, recounting an eight-year battle that is subsuming his retirement. “It’s all a trumped-up false accusation.”
Castagnola was always open about the 18 cannabis plants growing legally for medicinal purposes outside the home where he’d lived since 1987. But as with Meyer, county officials slammed him for a set of partly unpermitted, and occupied, out-buildings and yurts under the tall redwoods where Castagnola and his tenants—they lived together in a commune-like fashion—grew fruit and vegetables.
“I did a few things without permits,” he says, “but said, ‘OK, fine, I’ll fix it.'”
In 2021, Deputy County Counsel Diana Gomez petitioned a Sonoma County judge to appoint a receiver to oversee the changes authorities said were required to make Castagnola’s property safe. Mark Adams and his clean-up company, the California Receivership Group, were appointed and in July 2023 oversaw the demolition of four dwellings. (That year, a series of Los Angeles Times investigations accused Adams of overcharging and underperformance.)
Adams insisted the unpermitted, electrified buildings posed a substantial fire risk, and so Castagnola was unable to secure the permits, even after he hired consultants. The county, Castagnola says, then turned off his water and electricity, disconnecting the power lines completely.
When the diggers came in in 2022, the Castagnolas and their tenants were forced to watch as two yurts and two outbuildings were destroyed, prior to the eviction this year. At the end of a complex process usually reserved for unowned or abandoned properties, Adams’ own company assumed control of Castagnola’s property after Castagnola defaulted and was forced to sell under a deed of trust in July 2024.
“Why can’t these fuckers stand people living in the way they want?” says Mike Castagnola. He was legally growing marijuana for medical purposes but the government still sent machinery to his commune-like property to demolish “unpermitted structures.” pic.twitter.com/XZDppdfLv0
— reason (@reason) September 9, 2025
Carly Castagnola, Mike’s daughter, was repeatedly stonewalled when she asked to see an eviction order. She describes the drawn-out demolition ordeal as “four days of death and destruction.”
“Look at the way they left my life,” she says in one video from that period, pointing to her belongings strewn all over the earth. Video footage shows one tenant having a PTSD response after he was told to leave his home for it to be destroyed.
“You’re just screwed when they start picking on you,” Mike Castagnola says, his face contorted with frustration. “They keep you tangled up in this web and never let you correct it. It’s definitely not a legal system that’s playing by the rules.” As in Meyer’s case, a lis pendens recorded against the property by the county prevented Castagnola from securing funds by refinancing his home.
Castagnola, a man who “saw some horrendous shit firefighting,” was affronted by the cavalier way he was treated as the fines escalated. “Why can’t these fuckers stand people living in the way they want?” he asks, standing in the quiet, idyllic street outside his old home. “I have friends that have had yurts for 30 years. My oldest yurt was 24 years old, with excellent electric safety and smoke detectors.”
Carly, who grew up in the property, adds: “You have a property for 40 years and they can just come, walk all over you, and take it and all your equity….For what? The whole thing felt like a modern-day witch hunt, targeting people who choose to live alternative lifestyles. They stole my future livelihood.”
In April, the Castagnolas alleged in a federal complaint to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that Adams, Permit Sonoma, and Sonoma County “have engaged in a seven year long scheme to defraud and take the homes of senior citizens in Sonoma under the color of law,” citing the cases of another five retirees fighting to save their homes from “predation.”
Adams told local media that about half of the $530,000 costs for the proposed improvements and administration work were his own fees and recorded as liens against the property, with the other half going toward repairing two tents, two containers, the barn, and the greenhouse. The suit raises questions about Adams’ borrowing, asking whether he did indeed improve the property through his role as the receiver.
Listed on Zillow for $899,000 through Adams’ company Receivership Financing LLC, the home is described as a “charming country fixer upper with endless potential” and “a rare opportunity to build equity in a tranquil, scenic setting.” Meanwhile, Castagnola must pay a $14,000 bill to access belongings removed from the property—plus an extra $230,000 charge to Adams for his services, even though Adams ended up owning the property.
“We were no nuisance to this neighborhood,” Castagnola says, standing on the lane to the side of his old home. “We put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this property to make it something.”
Adams declared in a statement that all of his work at the property had judicial authorization. “It goes without saying why [Castagnola’s] current allegations are not made under penalty of perjury,” he said. “Mr. Castagnola was found by the judge to be a ‘vexatious litigant’ which means he cannot even file pleadings without the court’s express permission.”
The zeal to find unpermitted cannabis grows has risked fatal consequences. On March 7, 2023, Esteban Diaz “had a heart attack in the courtroom,” he says. “I felt like I was going to die.” He spent four days in the hospital.
Before the ambulance whisked him to the hospital, Diaz signed an unfavorable agreement with the county. He did this, he claims, in a fugue state under pressure from County Counsel Diana Gomez. “They said, ‘Fine, we’ll just take the house'” if he didn’t sign, Diaz says, repeating claims he made in a June 3, 2023, sworn statement. “I signed it while I was sweating and shaking and couldn’t breathe.”
In the agreement, Diaz waived his right to sue Sonoma County and accepted a judgment against him of around $300,000 that he will have to struggle mightily to pay off fully—meaning he is still at risk of losing his residence due to nonpayment.
Diaz, a 64-year-old man with a gentle demeanor, has always insisted that he was growing chile peppers on his Santa Rosa property, not cannabis. Despite multiple drone flights, he says, CES never produced any evidence of illegal cannabis growing.
“It was just chiles, all over,” says Diaz, a successful businessman who owns a tile flooring company and has lived in the United States for 40 years after moving from Mexico aged 14. “There were 800 chile plants.” It was Diaz’s first crop, and he intended to sell the heritage diablo and habanero peppers to restaurants as well as sharing them with friends and family.
When officials came to search for cannabis in July 2019, Diaz was more than two hours away and managing a job involving wet concrete. So they presumed him guilty of unpermitted cannabis cultivation and issued a first-offense fine of $10,000 a day because he was not able to facilitate the inspection, which was considered tantamount to being out of compliance. Diaz went to the Permit Sonoma office to discuss the matter and was informed by Harrington that “hoop houses” that were built earlier on his property by a tenant and briefly had been used to grow cannabis indicated to the county that he was currently growing cannabis. When Diaz insisted the plants were only chiles, he claims the office of inspectors broke out in laughter.
County officials conducted the inspection the next day, by which time the fine stood at $56,000. No cannabis was found. As with Meyer and Castagnola, officials issued a deluge of other citations for code violations observed in the course of the cannabis search. Diaz was cited for a “non-operating vehicle storage yard,” “junkyard conditions,” a “non-permitted contractors storage yard,” landscape materials, two electrical violations, and a loose cover on a groundwater well pressure switch.
Diaz insists all his vehicles were operable, and he paid for demolition permits to remove the “hoop houses” along with a subsequent county inspection to ensure it was removed. But he was unable to appease the inspectors—among them Kelley Aboudara, who is now facing trial for using her position with the city of Santa Rosa to pressure an elderly couple into selling their home to a real estate agent she had dated.
It all led up to the court hearing where he had his heart attack. “The patient presented after passing out in court while talking with lawyer,” read the clinical notes from Providence Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. “He was under a lot of stress, felt like he could not breath, hyperventilated, had some mild chest pressure in the left upper chest, and hit the table in front of him while trying to stand up with his leg, and then passed out.”
“I felt like I was going to die,” says Esteban Diaz. He had a heart attack in the courtroom from the stress brought on by trying to fight off cannabis fines for his chili pepper growing operation. pic.twitter.com/5zmZ9YpEEr
— reason (@reason) September 9, 2025
Diaz, who already had a high blood pressure condition for which he was taking medication, is now suing the county for “grievous acts of extrinsic fraud, duress, and undue influence to extort [and] deceive” backed up by the threat of losing his home.
This part of California has long been a battleground between the authorities and individuals seeking radical autonomy. Cannabis has often been a key part of the battles.
After World War II, artists and veterans started homesteading off the grid in the area, crafting new ways of life. In the ’60s and ’70s, hippies joined them. Some of the settlers grew marijuana to get by, and it was considered the best in the country. “California sensimilla” came to represent more than half of all cannabis consumed across the U.S.
“Growing some cannabis on your homestead provided a source of medicine, entertainment, and a crop that, because of the prohibition, had an incredibly high market value,” says David Bienenstock, a former West Coast editor of High Times. “We now all accept it is a very beneficial medicinal plant, but the government responded with a completely unhinged militaristic campaign to go after these people.”
In 1983, the federal government launched a huge cannabis eradication program, Operation CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting). Before drones were around, this paramilitary operation against civilian growers saw helicopters rumbling overhead every summer, dropping armed agents into the woods to cut cannabis plants and arrest cultivators. In 1990, the Army’s Seventh Infantry joined the eradication efforts. Even after medicalization and then legalization in California, law enforcement kept inventing excuses to bedevil people they suspect of growing pot in unapproved ways.
“The war on drugs has created a modern American police state,” says Bienenstock. “The county is essentially picking a group of people they’ve traditionally been able to target for these tactics and using that as the foot in the door to create this program. When it starts to get turned on everyone else, that’s when society starts to see what’s going on. But by that time, it’s often too late.”
The California State Assembly is considering a bill that would allow local code enforcement to obtain judgments against properties without going in front of a judge. Meanwhile, other state and local agencies are using cannabis to expand the purview of their enforcement capacities across the board.
Backed by state grants and the fleet of drones, one of which includes thermal imaging capabilities, CES took over cannabis enforcement from the sheriff’s office in 2017. In their application for funding, local officials stated the flights would be focused on “remote cultivation sites.” But they then authorized officers to engage in “discretionary proactive investigations.” In 2023, a full 70 percent of flights searching for cannabis failed to uncover a violation.
CES supervisor Jesse Cablk once said in an email obtained by the ACLU: “When using a drone, we fly the property, post [a notice on] the property…and sometimes we never step foot on the parcel or meet the owner.” In another email he called the drone flights “warrant research.”
One victim of Sonoma’s harassment, Jeremy Freitas, an Air Force veteran turned cannabis cultivator, got trapped in a seemingly mundane contradiction between county and state cannabis cultivation laws.
Freitas’ $30,000 state license required him to perform a degree of “light manipulation,” which pertains to the magnification of sunlight to speed up the growing process. But that was not allowed under his county permit. While he was still awaiting his county mixed light permit amid long delays, he attached black tarpaulins to his hoop house structures without actually using them, which he was advised could be a viable workaround to harmonize the competing regulations. “We were stuck between Sonoma County and state guidelines,” he says. “The state inspector told us, ‘Just have some tarps there, you’ll be fine.'”
“My rights were violated—plain and simple,” says Jeremy Freitas. He was licensed to grow cannabis but was charged fines of $10,000 per day because the state required practices that were not allowed under his county permit. pic.twitter.com/cUHTKQSu3Z
— reason (@reason) September 9, 2025
The county disagreed, ticketing Freitas around $10,000 a day until he came into compliance. (Freitas is unsure whether drones were used in its investigation of him.) By the time he and his team had finished the grueling task of moving 1,500 individually tagged plants to an outdoor cultivation site up the hill, the total stood at $83,000 and his harvest was seriously disrupted.
Freitas is now on the verge of bankruptcy. “My rights were violated—plain and simple,” he says. “I’ve built this. I’ve got to fight for it.” The stress of it all took its toll at home: He and his wife separated, and he no longer lives with his children. “It was too much for all of us,” he says.
“The onus of proving that they are innocent falls on them and they have to shoulder the cost of it, with fines accruing day by day,” says Michael Polson, an anthropologist who directs the University of California, Berkeley’s Cannabis Research Center. “For any other land use, it would be widely seen as unconscionable.”
When some residents complained about the odors from cannabis farms, the county embarked on the aggressive civil enforcement program which locals say was partly justified by a string of grisly gang murders related largely to disputes over money in the illegal cannabis trade. Locals claim officials told them that the robust code enforcement regime would help address the violence, but the campaign did not stop at cannabis. At the same time, the county’s process for legal growers to obtain permits was cumbersome and slow, and at times not in harmony with the state’s separate requirements.
The drones were soon hovering above backyard barbecues, pools, hot tubs, and children’s play areas. Records obtained by the ACLU show 5,600 photos taken during 700 drone flights over private properties since 2019 in Sonoma County, with hundreds above residential areas. The overwhelming focus has been on more built-up urban areas, where large cannabis grows would be improbable.
Sometimes the drones even peer through curtainless windows, interrupting birthday parties and catching people naked. They surely weren’t looking just for cannabis plants. “We were hanging out at the pool here for a friend’s 40th birthday party and the drone appeared between these trees and it sat there for five minutes filming everything,” says one Stony Point resident who wishes to remain anonymous, gesturing at the forested area where the drone flew. “It really put a downer on the vibe. Everyone was going, ‘Who the hell is this?’ We had no idea at the time. About half the 50 people here left after it happened. They didn’t feel comfortable.”
Just 20 of approximately 200 applicants had received final use cultivation permits by 2019, according to one lawyer, with most others stuck in a license limbo with temporary permits, or with their applications outright denied—even though some had gotten state approval.
“They’re treating it like it’s plutonium laced with cyanide,” says Bill Panzer, an attorney who represents cannabis cultivators. “Every other zoning violation in California, you have the right to get notice and the opportunity to cure it yourself before the county comes in. The single exception is cannabis.”
According to an internal county fact sheet, enforcement has “greatly impacted” unpermitted operations. Within two years of legalization—when the county had 50 acres’ worth of permitted cannabis crops creating $122 million in value, behind only wine grapes and dairy—Sonoma authorities had shut down 863 cannabis cultivation sites they insisted were out of code. By October 2024, they had issued at least $3 million in civil cannabis fines in cases where it conducted warrantless surveillance, according to the ACLU.
This weeded smaller growers out of the county. Today there are about 10 acres of legal cannabis crops left, effectively consolidating the market for a few big players better prepared to operate in a hostile environment. They can give former narcotics officers like Todd Hoffman some of the thanks for their market position.
Hoffman, a bearded man with tattoos who often wears a black cowboy hat and a plaid shirt, was hired in November 2018 as a CES inspector. When one resident confronted Hoffmann for flying a drone over his property and asked if he had a warrant, he replied on video: “We don’t need to show you anything.” According to Meyer, she first encountered Hoffman when she was topless in her yard. “I said ‘Get off my property!’ He said, ‘Oh, I’m just starting to write you up.'”
“They’re cautious of the optics of who they are fucking around with,” a Sonoma source who requested anonymity says. “They’re targeting a certain class of people. You won’t see them over wealthy people’s places, because they have more political sway, and they’d be telling the supervisors straight away if there were drones going over their swimming pools.”
In 2022, a local journalist emailed CES a long list of questions, including “Does code enforcement…broadly use drones to look over properties for code violations or any other reason?” Rather than answering the question, the ACLU’s suit details, Cablk wrote to then-CES head Tyra Harrington that the “sticky one is the drone question and how you would like that presented to the press.”
According to the ACLU’s lawsuit, Harrington told Permit Sonoma’s communications staff to say: “Permit Sonoma Code Enforcement staff uses all tools legally available to them.” The press office staff gently objected, noting “the response as given could create suspicion or confusion, or both.” Harrington, another former cop, replied: “I talking [sic] with staff and County Counsel we thought it best not to be specific about drone use.”
“I’ve interviewed many people who called it the most traumatic experience of their lives,” says ACLU investigator Dylan Verner-Crist, who spoke with more than 50 Sonoma residents who say the county trampled their rights. “From the start, the drone flights weren’t focused on these big, bad, illegal pot growers with hundreds of plants. We saw a lot of flights concentrated on little stuff, even six plants grown in the wrong way.”
Today, Verner-Crist says, records suggest that around half of the drone flights are for run-of-the-mill code violations, such as people living in unpermitted structures or trailers or having a junkyard or old cars on their property. All of this arose, he says, from “a combination of hostility to cannabis and the use of invasive surveillance technology like drones that made it increasingly easy to investigate potential code violations in people’s backyards.”
Permit Sonoma’s top three officials—Harrington, Hoffman, and director Tennis Wick—left the organization this summer, as they faced increased scrutiny after being named in a series of lawsuits, including those from Meyer, Castagnola, and Diaz. The county appears to acknowledge that the use of drones has, at least, been inappropriate. In August, Sonoma County Counsel Robert Pittman also announced his retirement.
“Even before the ACLU served the lawsuit, the County has engaged the ACLU in discussions about what drone uses are appropriate,” a Sonoma County spokesperson says. “Regarding the specific Code Enforcement actions, in all of those matters, the property owners had the opportunity to be represented by counsel and were afforded all the due process allowed by law. In those cases, and in others, County Code Enforcement received favorable rulings requiring the property owners to clean up or abate the nuisances on their properties. Additionally, when challenged in both Federal and State court, the courts have held that Code Enforcement’s use of drones was lawful and constitutional.”
But the court challenges aren’t over yet. And as the ACLU’s lawsuit wends its way through the system, a question lingers with implications that go far beyond building codes or cannabis: What happens when your backyard is no longer private, and your life can be upended by a silent camera in the sky?
