Storm flood: Can California aid those the feds exclude?
It was late Friday morning when muddy, brown water started rushing onto Michelle Hackett’s Salinas Valley farms. On one side of her family’s Riverview Farms cannabis business, a county-mandated retention pond overflowed. Next door, a farm abandoned by another grower — one of dozens of cannabis businesses to shut down in Monterey County in recent years — spawned another small river headed straight for Hackett and her skeleton crew. … Cannabis businesses like Hackett’s — along with thousands of undocumented farmworkers and the area’s unhoused residents — fear they’ll be left to fend for themselves as yet another winter storm batters California’s Central Coast, local officials and advocates say.