Humboldt Supervisors Eliminate Cannabis Excise Tax reports Redheaded Blackbelt | Cannabis Law Report | How to order Skittles Moonrock online

Learn how to buy CBD Vape online. TOP QUALITY GRADE A++

Cannabyss Inc. is the best place online to buy top quality weed, cannabis, vape, marijuana and CBD products. Get your borderless orders delivered at the pickup spot with ease. Top Grade products for client satisfaction.

👉 Click here to Visit our shop! 🛒

Will other Californian counties go down the same route?

Redheaded Blackbelt

A local cannabis industry that’s been hammered by oversupply and plunging wholesale prices now has one less cost to pay with the repeal of Humboldt County’s Measure S county excise tax.

Measure S won voter support in the 2016 election and raising the tax would require another vote.

But the Board of Supervisors can reduce or remove it and they did so, minus Supervisor Michelle Bushnell who recused herself due to being a cannabis permit holder, at their Oct. 29 meeting.

Supervisors had suspended the tax for two years and the current tax year sets it at 10 percent of the original rate of $1 per square foot of outdoor cultivation, $2 for mixed light and $3 for indoor.

Measure S tax revenue has declined from a 2019 peak of $18 million to $570,000 last year.

Cannabis business owners and farmers from the eastern and southern areas of the county urged the tax repeal during a lengthy public comment period.

“Today in this market it’s hard enough to pay the tax at 10 percent of the previous rate and if the county continues to impose this tax, it’s only going to create more delinquent farms,” said Colin Adams of the Bigfoot Cannabis Company in Willow Creek. “So obviously I urge you to please repeal Measure S – don’t spend more time and money on this dead tax, the money is not there.”

Also, during public comment, Southern Humboldt farmer Dylan Mattole said “things have changed dramatically and they’re not going to change back” while Thomas Mulder, also a SoHum farmer, described Measure S as “a broken tax.”

Ross Gordon of the Humboldt County Growers Alliance said last year’s surveying found the average price for outdoor cannabis to be about $350 per pound and in the last six months it’s dropped to $250.

He said it’s likely that the county has lost half of its cannabis farms since 2021 and “I’m sure that we’re going to continue to lose more and the money simply is not there in terms of alternative tax options.”

And supervisors didn’t discuss them.

Supervisor Mike Wilson said the cannabis industry’s former business model, based on illegality, is now obsolete and “the market has completely crashed for this commodity.”

Cannabis farming in Humboldt is now based on a “fairly inefficient methodology” that’s “highly regulated and in impacted watersheds in many cases,” he continued. “I do not envy anyone trying to be in this business – It’s very, very hard, I have good friends who’ve suffered through this immensely.”

Unlike Measure S itself, back tax debts haven’t been zeroed out, and they total $11.5 million.

After a series of extensions, supervisors had set the end of this year as a payment deadline.

Supervisor Steve Madrone said the deadline must be firm.

“Because we’ve been so lenient on continuing to provide extensions and changes and even allow growing with a suspended license, people are out there making choices,” he continued, with tax debt to the county mounting because “hardly anybody’s gonna be able to pay all of their bills.”

Madrone noted that a written staff report names December 31, 2025, as “the final deadline to pay back taxes and there will be no extensions.”

“The expectation is still that back taxes are paid – that’s not being changed,” said Planning Director John Ford.

Wilson was set to vote against the tax repeal due to uncertainty about how those who voted for Measure S might feel about it. But his mind was changed when legal staff said Measure S can be reinstated by board action in the future.

Hearing that, Wilson joined the vote directing county staff to prepare and return with a future agenda item repealing Measure S.

Source