City Officials Want to Sanction & Tax Indoor Marijuana Growers in Oakland, CA to Offset Budget Debt
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on May 28, 2010
While growing and selling pot is still illegal per federal laws, Oakland, California wants to tax indoor marijuana growers so as to raise needed revenue to offset its deficit budget.
Only in California…
From ABC News, Oakland to License, Tax Indoor Marijuana Growers:
Local governments in California and other Western states have tried to clamp down on medical marijuana, but Oakland has taken a different approach.
If you can’t beat ‘em, tax ‘em.
After becoming the first U.S. city to impose a special tax on medical marijuana dispensaries, Oakland soon could become the first to sanction and tax commercial pot growing operations. Selling and growing marijuana remain illegal under federal law.
Two City Council members are preparing legislation, expected to be introduced next month, that would allow at least three industrial-scale growing operations.
One of the authors, Councilman Larry Reid, said the proposal is more of an effort to bring in money than an endorsement of legalizing marijuana use — although the council has unanimously supported that, too.
The city is facing a $42 million budget shortfall. The tax voters approved last summer on the four medical marijuana clubs allowed under Oakland law is expected to contribute $1 million to its coffers in the first year, Reid said. A tax on growers’ sales to the clubs could bring in substantially more, he said.
“Looking at the economic analysis, we will generate a considerable amount of additional revenues, and that will certainly help us weather the hard economic times that all urban areas are having to deal with,” Reid said.
How much money is at stake isn’t clear because the tax rate and the number of facilities the law would allow haven’t been decided. A report prepared for AgraMed Inc., one of the companies planning to seek a grower’s license, said its proposed 100,000-square-foot-project near the Oakland Coliseum would produce more than $2 million in city taxes each year.
Given their likely locations in empty warehouses in industrial neighborhoods, the marijuana nurseries under consideration would have more in common with factories than rural pot farms.
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How is it okay for California to flout Federal law in regard to Marijuana (actually embracing yet another activity – in addition to illegal immigration – that’s a clear violation of Federal law), yet it’s the end of the world when Arizona actually creates a law that does no more than reaffirm Federal laws that are already in place?
I don’t get it.