Ventura County, CA Cannabis Regulations: Buffer Zones (2026)

Ordinance Code Section 2703(a) sets the county's core cannabis siting standard: the premises, as that term is defined in Section 2701, may not be located within a 1,200-foot radius of schools, day care centers, youth centers, drug rehabilitation centers, parks, or residential neighborhoods. The measurement method matters in practice. The 1,200 feet is the horizontal distance measured in a straight line from the premises to the property line of the protected parcel. Because the line runs to the property line rather than to any building, and cuts straight across rather than following roads, the buffer reaches farther than a door-to-door walk would suggest.

The snapshot date matters just as much. The buffer protects uses 'in existence on March 4, 2020,' so the ordinance measures against a fixed moment in time: a sensitive use established after that date does not generate a new exclusion zone around itself, and an operator cannot shrink an existing buffer by pointing to changes after that date either. The inclusion of residential neighborhoods, and not only schools and similar institutions, is what makes the standard so limiting. Even within the AE, M2, and M3 zones where the county allows commercial cannabis activity, a candidate parcel must still clear 1,200 feet from every qualifying neighborhood, which sharply narrows the map of eligible sites in the unincorporated county.