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| It's on peoples' minds |
Former Sierra Madre Mayor Joe Mosca, who abruptly vacated a City Council seat halfway through his second term here a few years back, recently resumed his political career in the City of Encinitas. Now an appointed member of the City Council there, today he sits on a subcommittee tasked with bringing marijuana into their revenue mix. Faced with a massive $154 million in (euphemism alert) "unfunded market pension debt" (link), obviously no stone (or stoner) is being left unturned.
Here how Councilmember Mosca describes his efforts in the most recent edition of his weekly newsletter (link).
Sub-Committee on the Adult Use of Marijuana Act (“AUMA”) – In November of 2017, the California voters passed Proposition 64, which legalized marijuana in California. If cities throughout the State intend on regulating or banning the adult use of marijuana within its boundaries, then it must due (sic) so before a certain date. In response, our City formed a sub-committee to look more closely at the matter of cultivation of marijuana. Deputy Mayor Tony Kranz and I were selected to be on this sub-committee. We held our first meeting of the sub-committee last week. The meeting was held in City Council Chambers. We had about two hours of public comment and received multiple correspondences before and after the meeting. We will hold another meeting soon in which we will review model regulations and take pubic (sic) comment.
Awkward typos aside (maybe Joe was doing a field study?), this wasn't quite as dry and abstract an affair as the Councilmember's newsletter made it out to be. Crucial local newser The Coast News reports a meeting that was far more robust (link).
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We will keep an anxious eye on the Encinitas variant for any further developments.
Is Pasadena chasing its own green rainbow to a pot of gold?
The City of Pasadena, which is currently carrying over $1.5 billion dollars in unaccounted for employee pension debt, is also looking to get in on the big green gold rush. Here is how a recent article from the cutting edge on-line news site Pasadena Now breaks it down for us (link).
Nearly six months after the voters of California passed Proposition 64, which allows adults aged 21 years or older to possess and use marijuana for recreational purposes, the City of Pasadena still does not officially allow marijuana dispensaries, nor formulated a city-wide plan for its use, possession or sale.
To that end, officials are holding a series of public meetings to help formulate a public policy.
“The voters of California have spoken, and the US Attorney General has spoken with another voice, and we increasingly find ourselves in California at odds with the Federal government. But, Pasadena has never allowed marijuana dispensaries, not even medical marijuana, when it was legal,” Mayor Terry Tornek said Monday.
Tornek said that the City now needs to develop some type of land use regulations that would permit the opening of legal dispensaries.
‘We’re going to have to regulate them carefully, because I think they threaten to be like liquor stores, which have been nuisances in some locations,” he said. Tornek added that the process could be “controversial and troublesome, but that’s the reason for having these public meetings.”
Councilmember Margaret McAustin said Monday that regulation is now more important than ever in controlling what could become a sudden proliferation of dispensaries.
“If we regulate them,” she said, “we will have the opportunity to shut down the bad operators quickly, which is something we don’t have now. Without regulation, they have more control. They can just pop open and get shut down, and then more somewhere else.”
All well and good, I suppose. But certainly you do know that when Councilmember McAustin talks about "regulation," she's actually more concerned about collecting tax money and selling business licenses, right?
Sierra Madre's recently hired City Manager, the visionary Gabe Engeland, helped enable one of the most successful municipal marijuana tax raising efforts in this country to date. In a story that ran on the CNN website ('Did pot money save small town from 'abyss of nothingness'? - link), this is how our new dude Gabe describes the way it all got done in Trinidad, Colorado.
In November 2014 the first recreational retail pot shop opened in Trinidad. Then, the money started flowing beyond expectations.
The $800,000 in tax revenue from marijuana sales in one year makes up just about 10% of the town's general fund, City Manager Gabe Engeland says. Mattie says they anticipated about $200,000.
And so began the transformation of the town. With the marijuana tax money, the city spent $70,000 on a new fire engine, a pumper truck. Some of the money has allowed the city to expedite replacing old water pipes.
"About 60% of our water pipes were installed between 1890 and 1950,"Engeland says. "They're edging towards catastrophic failure."
The city bought several rundown buildings in the heart of town with plans to convert them into live-work lofts and galleries, to attract artists and craftspeople to Trinidad. It's money that's making a difference for this struggling town and a trend being seen across the state.
Don't for one minute think other cities all over our blessed land haven't taken notice of Engeland's fiduciary achievement.
sierramadretattler.blogspot.com
Sub-Committee on the Adult Use of Marijuana Act (“AUMA”) – In November of 2017, the California voters passed Proposition 64, which legalized marijuana in California. If cities throughout the State intend on regulating or banning the adult use of marijuana within its boundaries, then it must due (sic) so before a certain date. In response, our City formed a sub-committee to look more closely at the matter of cultivation of marijuana. Deputy Mayor Tony Kranz and I were selected to be on this sub-committee. We held our first meeting of the sub-committee last week. The meeting was held in City Council Chambers. We had about two hours of public comment and received multiple correspondences before and after the meeting. We will hold another meeting soon in which we will review model regulations and take pubic (sic) comment.
Awkward typos aside (maybe Joe was doing a field study?), this wasn't quite as dry and abstract an affair as the Councilmember's newsletter made it out to be. Crucial local newser The Coast News reports a meeting that was far more robust (link).
We will keep an anxious eye on the Encinitas variant for any further developments.
Is Pasadena chasing its own green rainbow to a pot of gold?
The City of Pasadena, which is currently carrying over $1.5 billion dollars in unaccounted for employee pension debt, is also looking to get in on the big green gold rush. Here is how a recent article from the cutting edge on-line news site Pasadena Now breaks it down for us (link).
Nearly six months after the voters of California passed Proposition 64, which allows adults aged 21 years or older to possess and use marijuana for recreational purposes, the City of Pasadena still does not officially allow marijuana dispensaries, nor formulated a city-wide plan for its use, possession or sale.
To that end, officials are holding a series of public meetings to help formulate a public policy.
“The voters of California have spoken, and the US Attorney General has spoken with another voice, and we increasingly find ourselves in California at odds with the Federal government. But, Pasadena has never allowed marijuana dispensaries, not even medical marijuana, when it was legal,” Mayor Terry Tornek said Monday.
Tornek said that the City now needs to develop some type of land use regulations that would permit the opening of legal dispensaries.
‘We’re going to have to regulate them carefully, because I think they threaten to be like liquor stores, which have been nuisances in some locations,” he said. Tornek added that the process could be “controversial and troublesome, but that’s the reason for having these public meetings.”
Councilmember Margaret McAustin said Monday that regulation is now more important than ever in controlling what could become a sudden proliferation of dispensaries.
“If we regulate them,” she said, “we will have the opportunity to shut down the bad operators quickly, which is something we don’t have now. Without regulation, they have more control. They can just pop open and get shut down, and then more somewhere else.”
All well and good, I suppose. But certainly you do know that when Councilmember McAustin talks about "regulation," she's actually more concerned about collecting tax money and selling business licenses, right?
Sierra Madre's recently hired City Manager, the visionary Gabe Engeland, helped enable one of the most successful municipal marijuana tax raising efforts in this country to date. In a story that ran on the CNN website ('Did pot money save small town from 'abyss of nothingness'? - link), this is how our new dude Gabe describes the way it all got done in Trinidad, Colorado.
In November 2014 the first recreational retail pot shop opened in Trinidad. Then, the money started flowing beyond expectations.
The $800,000 in tax revenue from marijuana sales in one year makes up just about 10% of the town's general fund, City Manager Gabe Engeland says. Mattie says they anticipated about $200,000.
And so began the transformation of the town. With the marijuana tax money, the city spent $70,000 on a new fire engine, a pumper truck. Some of the money has allowed the city to expedite replacing old water pipes.
"About 60% of our water pipes were installed between 1890 and 1950,"Engeland says. "They're edging towards catastrophic failure."
The city bought several rundown buildings in the heart of town with plans to convert them into live-work lofts and galleries, to attract artists and craftspeople to Trinidad. It's money that's making a difference for this struggling town and a trend being seen across the state.
Don't for one minute think other cities all over our blessed land haven't taken notice of Engeland's fiduciary achievement.
sierramadretattler.blogspot.com