By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
St. Joseph voters will decide Tuesday whether sales of recreational marijuana will be taxed in St. Joseph.
City Manager Bryan Carter says the city council at first passed on asking voters to impose the tax, but changed its mind after receiving additional information.
“That decision was made when we figured out that there were about 60 other communities, at least 60 other communities, that were running a tax in April,” Carter tells host Barry Birr on the KFEQ Hotline. “Plus, we were kind of in the midst of dealing with all the other changes we have to make related to marijuana.”
Carter says the city has had to make changes in its zoning code, criminal code, and employment policy with the legalization of marijuana in Missouri.
Carter says a number of factors made the city council hesitant to ask voters to approve a tax on recreational marijuana. The city manager says councilmembers worried voters would experience tax fatigue that could negatively affect future tax hike requests.
Then, councilmembers received more information and changed their minds.
“And frankly, as we begin to realize that we don’t know what the world of legalized marijuana is going to bring to us,” Carter says. “We don’t know what new expenses it will bring to us. We decided that all of those factors really kind of overrode the fact that we had a couple of other taxes that were running close in time.”
The city likely will soon ask voters to extend the Capital Improvement Program, or CIP, tax.
Carter says the city cannot be sure how much a three-percent tax on marijuana sales would generate.
“Ordinarily, when we run a tax we can say, this is what the outcome of this tax will be, this is an intended use of the money,” according to Carter. “We just can’t do that. There’s not a good historical data tracking for marijuana sales.”
St. Joseph receives between $13o-to-155,000 a year on the sales to medical marijuana.
If voters approve the tax, it will go into effect sometime in the third quarter of the year.