Good Shepherd Media Investigations · Part 2
Thirty-Nine Days, One Expired Permit, and a $487,299 City Manager Who Opened the Complaint Himself
The City of Santa Clarita produced its entire permit file for the cannabis billboard on Newhall Avenue. It contains one permit: two small, unlit wall panels reading “Ferguson Plumbing Supplies,” issued in 2015, never finaled, stamped EXPIRED. The lit dispensary billboard on that property matches none of it. The City read our complaint the day it arrived and has not written a word back.
By D. Collins and I. Martinez | October 29, 2026 | Santa Clarita, CA
The sign
It stands on the Ferguson Plumbing Supply property at the corner of Newhall Avenue, Pine Street and Arch Street, one block from the Newhall Metrolink station. It is lit at night. It reads “GREEN LIGHT — Daily Deals on Top Brands,” names cannabis brands (Oakfruitland, Camino, CLSICS), and tells drivers to take the Roxford exit off the 5 to Greenlight Discount Pharmacy in Sylmar, in the City of Los Angeles. Greenlight holds an active state license, C12-0000080-LIC, to sell cannabis at 15507 Cobalt Street. That license lets it sell in Sylmar. It does not license a billboard in Santa Clarita; that is governed by Santa Clarita’s sign code. And state law requires the license number on every cannabis advertisement. In our photographs there is none.
The laws that apply
Two things the law does not say, so we will not say them either. The state’s freeway billboard ban (§ 26152(d)) covers signs located on an interstate or a border-crossing state highway; Newhall Avenue is a city street. And the 71.6-percent adult-audience rule applies to broadcast, print and digital ads, not a static sign.
The First Amendment is not the City’s excuse. In Cocroft v. Graham (5th Cir. 2024) the court upheld Mississippi’s near-total ban on cannabis advertising because the product remains illegal under federal law; the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case on May 5, 2025.
What the City’s own file shows
On September 20, Good Shepherd Media asked the City Clerk for every permit, owner record, operator record and nonconforming-use determination for any sign at 23950 Newhall Avenue (Request #11111903). The City produced records on October 1 and October 5 and closed the request. Here is what the City holds.
Building Permit BLD15-01435, issued May 21, 2015, to Nite Lite Signs Inc. of Chatsworth, applicant Warren O. Due, for a parcel the City listed as “23950 Newhall Avenue Vacant Lot,” APN 2831-025-025. Description of work: “INSTALL (2) 3′ X 7′ NON-ILLUMINATED WALL PANEL SIGNS @ COM’L LOCATION.” Forty-two square feet. Valuation $2,000. Fees $119.30. The “Finaled By” and “Finaled Date” lines are blank. The City’s own file name for it is “PERMIT EXPIRED.”
The approved plans, stamped by Building and Safety and by Planning on the same day, show what those panels were: two blue-and-white “FERGUSON Plumbing Supplies” signs on the company’s own wall. The company’s own name, on its own building. An on-site sign. The file the City labeled “Correspondence / Legal Docs” is the two-page permit application for the same panels. There is no code-enforcement case in it, no billboard agreement, no nonconforming-use determination.
The City’s only permit for this cannabis billboard is for two plumbing-store wall panels. Expired.
The sign in our photographs is not two 3×7 wall panels. It is a freestanding, internally lit billboard carrying an off-site advertisement for a business in another city. Nothing in the file the City produced permits it. Four additional permit documents the City emailed on October 1 (one numbered 30028978 and three marked “NA”) are under review; if any of them is a lawful pre-1990 billboard permit for this structure, we will report it. The City was asked on September 20, and again on October 29, whether this structure holds a valid permit or is a legal nonconforming billboard. It has not answered.
39 days after City Manager Ken Striplin opened the complaint, the sign is still lit. The City’s own file shows why it shouldn’t be.
What the City did with the complaint
The September 20 letter was three things: a formal code-enforcement complaint, six press questions, and the records request. It went to Community Preservation, the City Attorney, the City Clerk, the City Manager and every councilmember, with timestamped, GPS-tagged photographs attached.
We know who opened it. Read receipts came back from City Manager Ken Striplin at 5:44 p.m. that evening, from Communications Manager Carrie Lujan at 5:35 p.m., from a third City Hall recipient at 5:19 p.m., and from Councilmember Jason Gibbs the next morning. Councilmember Marsha McLean opened the companion records request.
The records side of City Hall worked and worked on time. Two other things did not happen. The six press questions drew no written answer by the October 5 deadline or since. And the complaint was never treated as a complaint. The City Clerk’s October 1 email closed with this sentence: “To report a code enforcement violation, please contact the Community Preservation main line at (661) 286-4076.” A signed complaint with photographs, citing the code sections, addressed to the Community Preservation Division and personally opened by the City Manager, was answered with the phone number for filing a complaint. No case number. No inspection date. No citation. Not even a sentence saying the sign is legal.
The fine the City is not collecting
The Council resolutions the City produced (August 24, 2004 and March 25, 2008) set the schedule: $100, $200, then $500 for each additional offense within a year. The Code makes each day a separate offense. If the structure is unpermitted, then from the day the City Manager opened the complaint to the day this was published is 39 days: $100 + $200 + 37 × $500 = $18,800 the City could have assessed against the advertiser, the sign operator and the property owner. It has assessed, so far as any record shows, $0.
For contrast, Los Angeles County’s 2022 nuisance ordinance for unpermitted cannabis operations in unincorporated areas carries penalties of up to $30,000 a day.
Minors and the thousand-foot rule
State law draws a 1,000-foot line around daycares, K–12 schools, playgrounds and youth centers. Measured from the sign’s coordinates, the listed entrance points of William S. Hart Park are roughly 762 and 842 feet away. The statute says “playground,” not “park,” and the City’s own amenities page for Hart Park lists barbecues, not play equipment. Little Shepherd’s Nursery School sits at 24317 Newhall Avenue; whether it is licensed and within the line is a measurement the City has the tools to make in an afternoon. We asked the City Attorney on October 29 to make it, and to say whether he will use § 26152.2 if the answer is yes. The question is open. We will print the answer.
The policy behind the line is not in doubt. The RAND Corporation’s D’Amico, Miles and Tucker (2015) found that adolescents with greater exposure to medical-marijuana advertising were significantly more likely to use marijuana a year later. Baltimore’s ban on alcohol billboards where children walk to school was upheld by the Fourth Circuit in 1996. California bars alcohol advertising aimed at minors (Bus. & Prof. Code § 25664). Santa Clarita’s cannabis ban was adopted in 2018 on the same reasoning. The City has the law. What it has not shown is the will.
The man at the top
Ken Striplin has run the City of Santa Clarita since 2012 and worked for it since 1996. According to State Controller payroll data published by Transparent California, his 2024 compensation was $354,328 in regular pay, $29,355 in other pay and $103,616 in benefits: $487,299 in total pay and benefits. His pay is set by the five-member City Council, and under the Municipal Code it takes four of the five to remove him.
On October 19, Good Shepherd Media sent all five councilmembers and the City Attorney a press inquiry and records request on how that pay is set and justified. The City Clerk has twice asked us to narrow one item; we have. The councilmembers’ written answers are due October 30. We will print them, or print that none came.
The City Manager is not the officer who writes the ticket. He is the person every code officer answers to, and the person who decides whether a corridor gets inspected or gets a phone number. He opened this complaint himself on a Sunday evening. The sign is still lit.
Video: “Ken Striplin is paid $487,000 and does not care about Santa Clarita Laws.” Good Shepherd Media.
Meanwhile, in Sand Canyon
Three properties in Sand Canyon run commercial wedding venues. The City has open zoning cases on two of them, Villa de Palma on Josel Drive (CE-26-1755) and Oasis Ranch House on Triumph Avenue (CE-26-1754). The third is The Barn at Rancho Deluxe, 26075 Sand Canyon Road: an 8,750-square-foot barn built in 2019 on a 200-acre movie ranch, marketed as “Santa Clarita’s premier event venue” with all-inclusive weddings, a “historic Saloon Bar,” catering packages and DJs. It has no City case. It is listed under “Special Event Venues” on Visit Santa Clarita, the City’s own tourism website.
On its road fence hang two banners: “Jason Gibbs for Congress” and “Bill Cooper for Water Board.” Councilmember Gibbs is running for the 27th Congressional District on November 3. Director Cooper is on the same ballot for the SCV Water Agency board.
Federal Election Commission records show that on September 29, 2025, Stephen H. Arklin (employer: Rancho Deluxe) and Diane Arklin each gave $3,500 to Jason Gibbs for Congress — $7,000, the legal maximum for the primary. The Arklins own Rancho Deluxe. Councilmember Gibbs opened our cannabis-billboard complaint on the morning of September 21.
Two things need saying plainly. Political signs on private property are protected speech, and the Arklins’ contributions are legal and publicly reported. Nothing in this article says otherwise. The question is not the banners. The question is why the City’s tourism office promotes a venue the City’s code office has never examined, while two neighbors on residential parcels carry open cases for doing the same thing.
The City’s likely answer is that Rancho Deluxe sits in the Movie Ranch Overlay Zone, which permits “incidental temporary community activities and social events.” The same ordinance says all non-film uses “shall be subject to the requirements of the base zone.” Whether a year-round, separately branded wedding business with its own venue manager, bar and catering menu is “incidental” to filmmaking is the question Good Shepherd Media has put to the City in writing, along with these: Was the site, parking and traffic plan the overlay requires ever filed? What occupancy classification is on the 2019 barn’s building permit? What did the ranch’s owners tell the City about event use when they asked to be annexed in 2011–2013? And why does one City department advertise what another would cite anywhere else?
Under the Levine Act (Gov. Code § 84308), a councilmember who has received more than $500 from a party within the prior 12 months must step aside from that party’s permit or entitlement proceedings. Whether a federal campaign contribution triggers that rule is a question we have put to the Fair Political Practices Commission. We have also asked Councilmember Gibbs whether he will recuse from any Rancho Deluxe matter that reaches the Council before September 29, 2027.
What the pattern looks like from the street
A resident who paints a fence the wrong color in Santa Clarita gets a letter. A resident who leaves a trailer on the street too long gets a citation. A dispensary in another city puts a lit billboard at the gateway to Old Town Newhall, on a property whose only sign permit is for the plumbing company’s own name, in a city that banned both the business and the billboard, and gets 39 days and counting of silence from a government whose chief executive is paid $487,299 and personally opened the complaint. A movie ranch whose owners maxed out to a sitting councilmember’s congressional campaign runs a wedding business the City advertises for it.
That is not a legal conclusion. It is what the records show, laid side by side.
Publisher’s note
A city that will not enforce the laws it writes is asking its residents to decide which laws they will obey. The people who moved to Santa Clarita to raise their children away from what the 213 and the 818 sell did not vote for a cannabis ban so that it could be ignored for a plumbing yard’s rent check. Ken Striplin read this complaint, knew the issue, and did nothing; that is the proof, and it is why this publication says he does not care about Santa Clarita’s laws. The Council should order a proactive sweep of the Newhall Avenue and Railroad Avenue corridors, cite every off-site cannabis sign at the daily rate the Code already provides, record the assessments as liens against the parcels, direct the City Attorney to use § 26152.2, and adopt the property-owner liability Los Angeles has used since 2017. Then it should explain, in public session, how much it pays the man who let this sit. Drugs bring gangs, and gangs love drugs; Newhall, where the Sheriff’s gang unit served 13 search warrants on a generational street gang last year, knows that better than most. This note is signed by someone who smoked cannabis for years and quit this year. Minors should not see cannabis or alcohol advertising. It hurts our kids.
What we asked, and of whom
City of Santa Clarita (Community Preservation, City Attorney, City Manager, Council): the six questions of September 20, still unanswered; on October 29, the complaint’s case number, inspection date and any citation; whether the structure holds a valid permit or is a pre-1990 legal nonconforming billboard; whether it displays the required license number; whether the City has measured the 1,000-foot buffer; and whether the City Attorney will act under § 26152.2. Answers requested by November 4, 2026.
Councilmember Jason Gibbs: the Arklin contributions, communications with staff about Rancho Deluxe, and Levine Act recusal.
Director Bill Cooper: contributions or in-kind support from the Arklins or Rancho Deluxe entities, 2022 and 2026 cycles.
Rancho Deluxe / the Arklin family: the approval under which The Barn operates, the barn’s permitted occupancy, its ABC and health permits, and the 2011–2013 annexation representations.
Greenlight Discount Pharmacy, Nite Lite Signs and the owner of 23950 Newhall Avenue: who placed the ad, under what contract, under what permit, and whether it carries license number C12-0000080-LIC.
Responses will be published in full as they arrive. Complaints on the billboard have been filed with the Los Angeles Department of Cannabis Regulation (COM-117004-2026) and the California Department of Cannabis Control.
Sources: Santa Clarita Municipal Code §§ 17.51.005, 17.51.080(N) and (V), 17.26.100, 23.10.010, ch. 23.20; City of Santa Clarita Building Permit BLD15-01435 and application (May 21, 2015), plans stamped May 21, 2015, and Council Resolutions of Aug. 24, 2004 and Mar. 25, 2008, all produced under Public Records Request #11111903 (Oct. 1 and Oct. 5, 2026); Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 26151, 26152, 26152.2 (SB 1498, Stats. 2024 ch. 899), 25664; AB 2249 (2026); 4 Cal. Code Regs. § 15040; Department of Cannabis Control license C12-0000080-LIC (real.cannabis.ca.gov); Cocroft v. Graham, 122 F.4th 176 (5th Cir. 2024), cert. denied May 5, 2025; Anheuser-Busch v. Schmoke (4th Cir. 1996); D’Amico, Miles & Tucker, Psychology of Addictive Behaviors 29:613 (2015); Transparent California / State Controller payroll data, Santa Clarita 2014–2024; FEC Schedule A, Jason Gibbs for Congress; SCMC § 17.38.040 (Movie Ranch Overlay); visitsantaclarita.com; Gov. Code § 84308; LA County Board of Supervisors motion, 2022 (Barger–Kuehl); Good Shepherd Media photographs and correspondence, Sept. 11 – Oct. 29, 2026.
