Pubdate: Wed, 17 Jul 2013
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 2013 The Denver Post Corp
Contact:  http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Vincent Carroll

DENVER'S WISH LIST FOR MARIJUANA TAXES

Winding down the war on drugs in Denver will require hiring 26 
additional police officers, according to city officials.

More enforcement police. More vice officers. More traffic cops.

Who would have thought that legalizing a recreational drug might 
provoke so much more illegal activity? Why, you'd almost suspect city 
officials were hunkering down at the milking stool to get their hands 
on a potential cash cow-or a pot industry that is being portrayed as such.

But perish that unworthy thought. As one police official explained to 
a city council committee last week, his department processes 3,200 
DUIs annually and about 100 of those are DUIDs-or driving under the 
influence of drugs. And the department anticipates DUIDs will climb 
by 5 percent once recreational retail marijuana outlets take off.

So that's an additional five arrests. Can you begin to appreciate the 
looming crush of new work? No doubt the six new officers slated for 
assignment to traffic and DUIs should be able to give those cases the 
attention they deserve.

(It's conceivable he meant a 5 percent boost in total DUIs, but that 
would amount to a leap in DUIDs of 160 percent. What?)

Another official assured council members that "drug investigations 
are becoming more complex" as Colorado loosens restrictions on pot. 
And those complex investigations will only increase, he said.

Not every council member nodded dutifully at such estimates. Robin 
Kniech pointed out that "it's not as if no one used marijuana 
yesterday and now they're all using it." And yet the city, she added, 
is proposing quadrupling the number of officers assigned to pot-related duties.

"Are we trying to recover the new costs [through a proposed pot sales 
tax] or is our goal to cover all of the uncovered marijuana costs, 
most of which pre-existed Amendment 64?" she wondered. Only new 
costs, she was assured. Now, some of us voted to wind down the war on 
drugs in part because we thought it might save public money along the 
way in enforcement and court expenses, but that hope was apparently 
naive. Indeed, Mayor Michael Hancock's administration is proposing a 
city sales tax on pot of 5 percent that could be hiked to 10 percent 
not only to fund more police but also additional staff and resources 
for the planning and legal departments, Excise and Licensing, the 
parks department, Denver Health, and Environmental Health. Denver 
Cares would get a new van to ferry drug-addled patients, although no 
one has any idea-none, really-whether consumption will actually spike.

Proper regulation of cannabis shops will of course cost money 
(although the state is the leading regulatory player), and the 
industry should pay for it through fees and taxes. But it wasn't 
always possible to tell from the presentation to the council which of 
the regulatory services used to justify a city tax were novel to 
cannabis and which, such as fire inspections, would apply to other 
new businesses, too.

The worry here is not so much that a 5 percent city tax on top of 
existing sales taxes plus a proposed 10 percent state sales tax 
(which local governments would share) and a 15 percent state excise 
tax will push consumers to the cheaper black market, although that 
dynamic will surely kick in at some point if the taxes keep rising. 
But it's unseemly for government to target a new category of 
enterprises-one explicitly approved by voters- as funding sources for 
speculative needs.

Council members Jeanne Faatz and Charlie Brown appeared most eager to 
spread pot taxes far and wide, with Faatz claiming voters wanted pot 
taxes for basic services and to "enrich the general fund."

"They said legalize it, but tax the hell out of it," she added.

They did? How exactly did voters communicate that desire? Amendment 
64 called for an excise tax for schools that will be on the ballot 
this fall, but proponents never sold it as a budgetary cure-all at 
the local level.

We won't know for a couple of years what the full effects of pot 
sales will be, one official sensibly predicted. Maybe politicians 
should keep their funding ambitions in check until then as well.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom