California: AB-2243 Medical cannabis: taxation: cannabis production and environment mitigation

15 August 2016

AB-2243 Medical cannabis: taxation: cannabis production and environment mitigation

Last Amended 1 August 2016

Bill History http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB2243

California Growers Association Precis of Purpose of the Bill

http://www.calgrowersassociation.org/ab_2243

AB 2243

Imposes an excise tax on the propagation and cultivation of cannabis and the manufacture of cannabis products. The revenue raised by this tax is focused fixing the impacts created by two decades of unregulated agriculture. The tax measure provides a simple and affordable answer to the most important question: how can we afford to clean up the mess, put more patrols on rural roads and in neighborhoods, and prevent continued bad practices?

The California Growers Association supports this effort to generate revenue needed in order to address the acute environmental and public safety issues that communities throughout California have experienced due to trespass and illegal growing operations. The legislation achieves our organization’s co-equal goals supporting industry transition into a regulated marketplace while providing funding to address the societal and environmental impacts that a lack of cohesive rules has created.

We have proposed a “tiered excise tax rate” on medical cannabis flower reflecting small, medium and large-scale grower licenses that will be available by 2018.  As growers transition into a regulated marketplace we believe it is critically important to provide economic incentives to the smallest cultivators to reduce impacts to those farmers who will struggle most with the regulatory transition. This tiered tax rate will also ensure that the largest operations licensed pay their fair share of the costs associated with environmental remediation and protecting public safety.

Latest media commentary on the bill  (dated 12 August 2016) from CanaSOS

https://cannasos.com/blog/hot-news/california-authorities-reduce-to-tax-cannabis-farmers

The Senate Appropriations Committee did not approve AB2243 ahead of a deadline on Thursday.

Experts estimated that the bill by Democratic Assemblyman Jim Wood of Healdsburg would have raised at least $71 million annually for local police and environmental cleanup.

Wood says he’s not sure what happened since the bill previously had unanimous bipartisan support. He says he doesn’t know what got in the way of good policy.

Wood’s district includes prime land for growing marijuana. He says the money is needed to mitigate environmental damage from illegal cannabis grows.

Taxes on marijuana flowers which depending on the grower’s license would have ranged from $4.75 to $13.25 per ounce.

Some marijuana activists claims that the taxes as unreasonably high

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