session and that number is one three four six two four eight seven seven nine nine the webinar idea of nine to zero three without further ado i'd like to ask the clerk to please call r springsteen here questions came in throughout last week and early in today so i know that was super helpful hopefully that helped with tonight you know as challenging as this might be it actually is somewhat simple we'll have a presentation and there's really just some direction we'll need to give staff as to if we want to move forward with any sort of ordinance which will then start the public hearing process so i will now turn it over to presentation for our chief and i think she'll have revenue manager discussion is a follow up to part of the discussion during the february first study session at that meeting there were five potential opportunities for revenue that were required a the council requested that we provide further information on three of the five items that were discussed these three iems are tax on marijuana tax on cigarets a nordman and i will be providing additional information requested in the very first study session nichole's there is also available to answer questions this information was reviewed by the budget not at board on march like to pursue these items further as you know it is a lengthy process for bringing an item a ballot so as much guidance you can provide tonight would be greatly appreciated and we'll be providing a lot of information but the information has been organized in a way that we believe will be easily digestible i will now turn it over to aaron nordman to start the presentation journey and a little bit more depth from what holly provided as she mentioned we started this process almost a year ago and in august two thousand and twenty we distributed some white papers identifying some opportunities for us to simplify taxation and generate some additional revenue and we are trying to do a comprehensive review of all revenue streams and so this was just a kickoff of those meetings we decided that we would hold off on anything related to marijuana until until the election occurred in november twenty twenty at that point in time the voters did approve recreational or what we call retail marijuana and so we are going to talk in great depth tonight about about that in december of twenty twenty the city council adopted our revised tax code and this really allowed us to standardize our terminology with other municipalities and align on some of the taxation principles it also gave us an opportunity to go through our entire tax code and reformat everything so that it was more business friendly and hopefully that will  result in some better compliance going forward in february and march the city council evaluated some other options to further simplify our taxation and align with other municipalities and that's when we chose to remove the three exemptions and we made some administrative changes at that time as well and so the topics we're going to go into greater detail on tonight's marijuana holly mentioned the taxation of that so we have special tax and excise tax we'll talk a bit about the legalization of delivery and whether or not  would like to pursue that and then we'll talk a little bit about license same with cigarets we're going to talk special tax and licensing and then we'll talk some taper options as well so our overall objective again is to i what you would like to explore further for the november twenty twenty one  so this is to recap those topics for you and try to wrap your mind around who is the authorizing party for these decisions the first three on the list are decisions that we believe the citizens should or could make the third one is a bit unique and we'll talk about that one in a little more detail in a moment that is something that we could choose to have the citizens take to vote for a city council could authorize that and then the last two items are something is intended to cover administrative costs and so i have only included those here so that we can have a comprehensive discussion it is not for the purpose of generating revenue as we go through each of those we're going to have some further discussion and and we've highlighted for you a question to help you  form to help us figure out how to create that ballot language and so i think you'll get a flavor for that as we move along so the first item that we're going to talk about is marijuana and here we've identified for you the thee options that we could take to vote for marijuana specifically the first one is related to a special tax rates currently we do have a base sales tax rate of three percent on marijuana but we have the opportunity to charge a special tax rate as well so we'll talk about that in a moment the second item is related to excise tax on cultivation so think about that as the grow operation and that happens with the transfer between cultivation and the retail operations and currently today we do not have an excise tax and then the third option as i mentioned previously this is something that could be adopted either by referendum which is by city council authorization and that one came about because of house bill nineteen one two three four and that allows us to create this permits to allow the delivery into our city and so that is relatively new it's only a few years into the process and there are only a few cities doing that today so bruce let's go to the next slide so now we're going to talk specifically about the marijuana special sales tax tax rate is three percent next column which is circled shows that we do not have a special city sales tax so that is that zero percent of the total city sales tax that we have on marijuana today is three percent when you add in the state county and district taxes of sixteen point six percent that gives you a total combined sales tax rate of nineteen point six percent we've included on this chart some benchmark cities and the area so that you can get a feel for what they are doing for special taxes so there's aurora older commerce city denver inglewood littleton ridge and news that we received so the way this chart is structured it shows you what the special city tax rate could be set at based on the ranges that i just provided you from other cities so that's a range from three to seven per city sales tax could be based on those percentages on the left so for example a three percent special city sales tax equates to a half a million dollars  to nine hundred thousand dollars the next column is just to show that there is a state special marijuana tax and we do receive a portion of share back from that so that is showing you the revenue we generate there and then that final column would show you the total retail marijuana tax revenue that could be received if we chose to implement a special sales tax rate on marijuana and again this is for fo retail locations we know we are up to five if you go to the next slide it will quantify that for you in terms of the maximum that we could receive we currently have ten medical marijuana facilities in good standing so of all of them chose to apply for a retail marijuana license and get approved this is what that revenue could look like so if we keep it as it is today i would be around one point nine million if we do a special tax rate of something like five percent that would take us to your revenue of four million and a seven percent would take us to four point nine million at this time i'd like to turn it over to the mayor to facilitate the discussion the question that we would like to have addressed is should a special tax rate be placed on retail and medical marijuana in the highlighted box we put in there a potential option the option that we put in there was a special tax rates of five percent on both retail and medical marijuana also who are committee members who have seen this and if we have any of our attendees if you're a member of the budget and audit committee could you raise your hand so i know you're here  if you're tuned in i don't see anybody all right counsel so let's see if there's consensus first around should we look at putting a special tax on retail medical  then we can look at baseline percentage and that can also change on on second reading right if you want to just plug in five percent you know there was discussion to go higher or lower so we can we can do that from there lower your hand i thought i did yes i believe you said retail slash medical i thought we were only talking about raising the tax rate on retail are we talking about both are that's a good point of clarification i think as presented it would be both however that would be up to the council to decide if they wanted to have a different rate for medical and some communities certainly do that for for many different reasons tax on on girl operations and i believe as well as the retail marijuana well that was the recommendation of the board i was in favor of like mayor i think i agree with what i've heard from a lot of other people it seems to be some interest in putting this on the ballot and i would support that i would say though that it would be nice to figure out a way to tie this t medical and iv and go with the five percent on recreational but if we want to make up for the raising the tax on both then i would go seven percent on i think that statutory or constitutional potentially so we'll have to clarify so i think this should really be based on the record and i certainly support us going i support what mister libia said too and that was my only thing about maybe waiting a year is do we have enough time to try to really put kind of brackets around where these dollars could go if counsel wanted to specify say for homelessness or affordable housing or something like that so i don't know if we have enough time or if council wants to get that detailed at this point but that is something that i had actually thought about m very interesting most people and this this group is made up of a whole lot of fifty year old plus people there are a few under but fifty year old plus would be what i would categorize us as and typically are not as a rule real supportive of marijuana but what we heard from them is that they felt like it ought the same tax rate as other things in the city of lakewood and i found this very interesting because i would have my bottom dollar that they would have supported a much stronger tax base th just everything else they wanted i would say based on that input i think i would have to support no higher than five percent even though personally i would love to see two percent now i know when i say that we can't do that but that would be you know my druthers but hearing what they said at our meeting i felt like it was kind of a clear statement that they didn't feel like it was fair to have a higher tax rate than anything else so i leave that to you to figure out what you want to say dana you can take it from here that i really wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable going above five percent for that reason and then also just that competition concerns that councilor springsteen ra your i know that that can get to be kind of a long conversation so i'm not sure if we do have time to do that at this point ideally i would i think that is a really good way to go to the community so that we're really clear about what we're going to do i like the idea of you know just with this amount of dollars i don't know how far we would get with infrastructure but  marijuana regarding dui or other instances when it might be at least part of the picture or other cities do we have any data from other cities regarding legislation so if we're interested we can get that data on how many e r visits are soucy marijuana i think we really need to have factored into any decision we made what the impact are and the cost to the city and to the other entities like schools and our citizens thank you oh one other thing you were talking about medical several years ago i chaired the jefferson county medical marijuana task force and while i was chair we went and visited a marijuana facility it had both grown both medical and recreational and down the center of the counter was saline and if you stood o one side you were purchasing medical and if you stood on the other side you were  on the medical side they had gummy bears and brownies and i said to them what kind of issues are people coming into for medical and they said well they have a lot of you know muscle pain and that kind of thing and i said how do you know how to tell them how many gummy bears they should eat and in my world that is called writing a script on something and they said well you start out with the force of brownie and go from there we need to be realistic about what's really going on with this thank you thank you we can certainly try to get the dui data i think it's tracked through the state we can put that through the  service request system and see if we have anything or can go to one of our state agencies so just to do a check in is there consensus yes on and ask i've heard a couple sevens and i've heard of five and again i think this is just related to recreational because i don't think that medical can be so is there at some general consensus on that and starting out a five percent and then council can have that discussion if they want to go higher or lower moving forward so i'm getting a lot of thumbs up here it was also brought up on trying to tailor those dollars to certain needs is that's something that counsel wants to do and if so i would imagine that would take some more background to maybe get an understanding of what other communities have done and if so that would that come back then is a study session to see you know i don't think we could really do that on a second reading that could potentially changes so much and going back from the calendar i think mister owens said that we need to have these things in by i think mid august to be finalized for the ballot is that accurate as h just kind of help me figure out how would we move forward if we wanted to discuss further allocating these dollars somewhere yeah so it's really based on when the ballot language has to be approved by council in order for it to make it on the ballot and i'm so we would need to bring first reading to you by the the very latest the first meeting in july so that we can have a second reading in july and then we have thirty days following an approval if something is said that we would have first written in june june fifteen around june th and then the second reading at the end of june so that we could do a second round in july if we needed to staff recommendation is that we actually bring first reading to you in june to give you some time in case you want to make changes correct so massaging your hand i up i was thinking maybe the fourteenth for first thank you enough time well let me just test this before we go any further does counsel want to have a discussion about utilizing potential dollars for specific needs or just put it into the general fund so we'll start with the general fund ok do you want to do specific needs conversation just trying to give me a consensus getting no yes yes yes yes no yes i can't springsteen what what do you think ok so it looks like there's consensus to do kind of a special needs discussion so that would put us if we were going to do first reading on the fourt day are all of the sustainability activities so we have the recycling center the project and a sustainability division presentation overview mckinney brown could those do those dollars have to be specified by the voters or could the tax be specified by the voters the land council once that's done could have the discussion of where they want to see those you can that i've seen them written so that it's very general that these are intended for the general fund that will be targeted to sustainability or economic development or whatever it is it really we can write it in any way that we need to write it so if you give us if you give us your direction we will find a way to make that happen paul i think what i would want to understand is kind of the impacts of making those determined things change over time community desires and so would we be and i'm just throwing these  general questions we would be setting a time limit for these things and saying for the first five years this would be what would be happening are we saying into perpetuity would it have to go back to the voters in order to change that and then how does that impact our ability to be kind of nimble with regards to our budget we couldn't predict covid and in obviously we're grateful for the dollars that we've gotten but you know there's many of so we're concerned about the ballooning federal deficit now i guess we just want to understand it's the work we're doing has potential to have us preclude us from doing other things that putting it in the general fund would give us that f flexibility and then also to all of my counselors do you believe voters need to know where our dollars are going that maybe they don't trust the general fund in the same way they trust other dollars so that's more questions than answers direction i was going i would be in favor though just knowing the time frames et cetera putting this in the general fund but then i have no issues and then to be decided b counsel which i would like then the opportunity to make believe that in the general fund so it's more flexible or have some discussions with our community to about where they would like those funds to go because it may not end we don't know what we don't know and it may not be a lot of money to to definitely say infrastructure or this or that so we i'd like the flexibility i guess and also right i think there's four or five stores that have switched right now and there may be ten stores th us in the riht direction now on this discussion which is really do you really want to lock ourselves into one particular use of this potential revenue source for one thing we don't know what the impact this retail marijuana is going to be on the city and our services or is this going to put a additional demands on our police department and i mean we don't know and so i think this is something and why do we want to tie the hands of future councils there may like we say we don't know what's coming down the pike another a pandemic or other issues and i think you want to leave leave that open to the people are going to be especially concerned about having it tied to something i mean i think it's a good idea i think councilman idea is a good one i just i'm just saying i'm not sure it needs to be part of the thank you ditto to what mike just said i do you swayed me i believe it probably needs to be in the general fund however i think also in terms of a ballot language people like hearing if it's going to go a specific issue they would feel more comfortable voting on it but i think you're right i think i like to have it go into the general fund thank you community community can look at and ask themselves whether or not they're getting the sort of extra value for this special tax that they supported because they tought they were going to get some additional benefit from denver kind of as a good example on this  you can go look at denver's breakdown of the marijuana tax and it's very clear they show you how much they give to policing for the sort of overhead costs and administrative they show you that they give a specific allotment percentage to affordable housing and they also do i believe it's like a flat twenty five percent to capital improvement projects and they do all of that and it's it's malleable you could change it so i don't know if we want to talk about creating a special fund for us like we did th table one but you could just put it in another pot and have it sort of isolated and more transparent that way and have a certain and the council can move the administrative direction every year if they wanted to ten percent fifteen percent or twenty percent whatever the need was to be more nimble and you could also have a specific amount for capital improvement or whatever so i'm just saying maybe the best way to do or say hey we kind of want to get some community wins here what does staff think about how to sort of design that maybe they have some ideas i don't know i'm just throwing that out there but i imagine we probably are going to have a hard time figuring out as committee it'd be nice to isolate the money again we do not know what the impacts are particularly if all ten stores decide to go with retail we need some data regarding our police the crime the device that's an important factor if you're going to start to notice a certain percentage to a certain pot and i do have a quick question for staff as i was reading through all of the information i i'm not sure that this is correct and you please correct me but the meta license fee in boulder was thirty five hundred is that correct because it seems like that would that's what i saw and i don't know if that's yearly or a one time fee does anybody know about that one because that does seem inordinately high but i'm sure that that was the number that was on the so we'll get to that because council needs to weigh in on the licensing fees so that will come later in the presentation  thank you you know i really appreciate the conversation about flexible lighting and i think that what we've seen after the taper question really kind of puts us into a real life example where we had covid happen we had a recession happen afterwards and then all of those dollars have very very strict guardrails on where they can be used and so they couldn't go into other places where we frankly really needed it over the last year that said i also want we don't know if that would have passed in the first place if we hadn't had those guardrails because i think a lot of people that kind of comfort and trust issue that someone raised people want to know where the dollars are going when they're voting i  really think that we saw that be very successful with the tapert so i think that it's worthwhile to have this discussion and then perhaps we do just put it in the general fund and and let the  so i'll do another check and i actually i've been swayed by my colleagues i do think considering what we've seen there needs to be as as mr frank said a nimbleness and further conversation things can change from year to year so i'm happy with just seeing it go forward and then councilor can have those discussions as to if those things want to happen especially in light of the time that we have because we would be looking at  so i looks like there is consensus all right cool thank you all very much for that now we'll move on to  ahead and go to the next libres so excise tax is a tax on the first sale or a transfer of marijuana from the grow operation to the store or a facility that manufactures marijuana and again we're going to follow the same methodology on the table the first row is lakewood we do not currently have an excise tax rates on cultivation and we've shown here or benchmark cities so this is a quick topic in terms of overview and then the next slide provides for you the question we need to ask so should an excise tax be placed on cultivation the potential option that we've facilities i think we will only have four cultivation facilities because it was only allowed existing cultivation was only allowed to switch if that's accurate so that would just ok the misko i'm sorry one follow up do we have an idea estimate revenue reason i'm just asking is because we could potentially was going to say you can also tonight direct staff to work up the language and then during the second reading if you decide you don't like like how many questions on the ballot or whatever you can delete it at that point so at least we're prepared  the next topic that we have is related to marijuana delivery legalization you can advance to the next slide as i mentioned this is one of those topics that council could decide to move forward with say for example if someone typically drives into denver to get their marijuana but now they're choosing to have it delivered a taxation would be based on the point of delivery so we would get that taxation at that point in time so again the table follows the same methodology the first row is lakewood and we do not currently authorize marijuana delivery but we've identified for you here six cities or municipalities that do and as you can see from the dates this is all pretty recent and there was a so the discussion on the table if you'd like to advance to the next one or two questions first should marijuana delivery be considered for lakewood and should the citizens or city council determine that legalization i would agree with the comment about needing for it to go to the citizens but would we also would there be a fee charged for delivery and if there is a fee charged it seems like it has to go to ballot anyway so  i have to go to ballot and nicole you can correct me if i'm wrong but i believe there is a one dollar delivery fee anyway based on state statu i guess i just want to understand this one because we certainly want to be respectful about the fact that there could be ballots of teege and folks starting to see a lot of things on the ballot so with regards to this one just make sure i'm connecting the dots this is it let's say a municipality let's just say maybe inglewood they have an operation that somebody has ordered from them and it's delivered into the city of lakewood and we're simply saying that just like other packages being delivered into our city that we're just capturing those sales tax associated with it so i just want to be sure because it seems like to me if that's the situation then we're just leveling the playing field for  well so for me i i would actually be more inclined for that to because we are leveling playing i'd be more in line with saying that council could maybe make that decision but certainly open to hearing from all the rest of you but that's just where i would be leaning given that that's just leveling the playing with other delivered packages thanks thank you ok so we've got a couple of folks that are certainly open to council making this decision and one mentioned having the voters so  where the dollar that we mentioned a moment ago the state and statutory is there a breakdown of who gets the pieces of that dollar for example how much does lakewood get out of that pie my understanding is that we i'd just like to agree that i think counsel can make this decision it's nothing different than any other package just delivered which we did make that agreement so rather than give too much to the voters when this is just i guess the verbiage was leveling the playing field i would be fine with supporting that council just moves forward on this looks like there's direction there's a consensus direction to draft an ordinance for council's approval and again that'll go through the public process so thank you she is er and she is here i can bring her over perfect thank you so next we will go into those options that we've identified four city council votes so these are not ballot specific items but things that city council could have authority over and these are specific to marijuana so you can go to the next slide please so the first item we've already discussed and align that city council will move forward with some language ordinance language on that one  no need to discuss that one further the second one was going to be specific to permit fees on delivery but as we benchmarked with other cities we found that there is a whole gamut of fees related to marijuana and i'll just reiterate fees are put in place to recover administration they're not there to generate revenue so i feel this is something that council should probably review in greater detail at a later point in time instead so now we will talk specifically about retail licensing we've left medical off the table you'll you'll get a better understanding for that in a moment but most municipalities have aligned their medical and retail licensing fees so we're just going to talk about it in terms of retail at this point in time i've highlighted for you where we stand from lakewood so when it was approved by the voters in november of twenty twenty it was approved for an application fee of two thousand dollars with a license fee of two thousand dollars renewed every two years we've included some benchmark cities the denver metro area and you can see how they rank if you think about application fees and operating fees these municipalities charge those two fees initially so that's an upfront one time cost and then if you think about the license fee that is something that happens with renewals so aurora's quite high in terms of operating be it fifteen thousand dollars and they do have an license renewal of fifteen thousand you can go through the list all of these have annual renewals and lakewood again is at every two years so that might be something for us to consider if you go to the next slide the discussion topic and the question to address is should application operating and licensing fees be implemented or changed so if you think about the table we just discussed we already have an application fee and we already have a licensing renewal fee we do not have an operating fee at this point in time so in terms of potential options you could change the application and the license fee to be twenty five hundred dollars and make that consistent for both medical and retail you could change the renewal to be annual at twenty five hundred dollars so again it's the same fee but the renewals annual same fee as the there and you could implement the operating fee of five thousand dollars which would be for retail only and if it would be helpful for you we can switch back to the previous slide or the  some variance here high on a low so how how did we figure out the amounts are they tied to what we so they are based on what we think our administrative costs would be in one component of that is the benchmarking with other municipalities you would expect us to be in line with them nor do i expect us to be on the high side could you clarify that for me please thank you nicole i don't want to put you on the spot but if you have the answer can you provide that otherwise we can come back to them on the over i i i just rejoined but the operation fee is essentially a fee so they can operate within the city and i believe that it covers some of the cost of   actual costs and so that's where my my question is about the operating fee and knowing where where that should be it's i think that we should probably be in line with some of these other cities but i don't understand where in longmont are kind of coming from maybe like the two thousand to five thousand seem more in line with what other things on this page so i'm just trying to understand why that's so do some frther research on operating fees if you would like this is new to the city so we don't have a lot of experience and  libya i don't know mr beattie did you want to weigh in on any of this as far as from the community's point of view or er i be glad to real quick the committee didn't make any recommendations as t with something in the middle say around five thousand for an operating fee you'd be kind of in you know in really on the lower end of the middle and then on the application fee we're pretty close looks like twenty five hundred almost standard so that would that would give us an indication to go with the application fee of twenty five hundred then on the license licensing fee again or the one that's way out of way out of bounds compared to what everybody kind of the sweet spot of where these numbers fall without actually doing averaging i mean i'm not doing the actual mathematical well thanks neal definitely for kind of standardizing to annual regarding the fees it'll be important for me to see what's covered under there what types of expenses you know obviously an application fee that makes sense you're checking all those things and and license kind goes hand in hand from a renewal standpoint et cetera operating i wasn't sure if that's where maybe like an enforcement mechanism we know with our maybe the liquor stores there's someone making sure that you know you're not selling to folks that are under age and the same thing with smoking in that type of thing so for me before i'm going to feel comfortable picking a number it's got to be tied to what is the service so i think if we can just kind of come back and say well here's the things that are kind of lumped into an application fee here's what what we do is a city that relates why we would own that to operating fee and the same with licensing i just need a little bit more detail especially since the war must exercise i want to end the mathematical average of always the first one two thousand for the application fee the operating fee is sixty seven fifty and the licensing fee is forty on sixty two so i agree with standard i think the amounts of fees annually i support an application fee of twenty five hundred an operating fee it's already been there's precedent set for fifteen thousand i'm not sure why we're straying away from that not as councilwoman franck's just we don't know really what the cost is going to be for us in terms of the police department i would go with ten and i would even go with fifteen and then the license fee i think should be twenty five hundred on an annual basis watson thank you i was just going to reiterate that if you if you agree that you do want to have some kind fee assessed with all three of these we can even just make placeholders for all three and then  before second hearing we can give you this additional due diligence that staff does to better understand what is behind these fees and the other organizations and then at second reading what everything written up except for those dollar amounts and you can kind of maneuver those based on need for the additional information that we were prepared in the event that you want to go forward with an application fee operation fee operating probably come at these fees a little bit different some on the high end some on the low and some in the middle i can't get the brady bunch look right now so i'm just going to try to go through here do we have kind of a benchmarked cities that we have on here range from five hundred up to forty five hundred and boulder and all of them have annual re so the question we're going to ask here and you can stay on the slide bruce if you'd like is again should the application operating and licensing fees be implemented or changed and the potential option that was identified was consistent with what we just spoke about so i don't know that we need to go into detail on that again but most cities choose to align their cultivation fees with their store licensing fees thank you i i would agree just like we did on i shouldn't say numbers but try to look those are ok all right all right we're good there too thank you so now we're ready to talk about cigarets are we good to continue on stuff ok so we're going to talk a bit about cigarets and other tobacco products you can go to the next sli so there are three items here that we're going to discuss the first two are related to a citizen vote and the third one is specific to licensing again so that is something with authorization by city council and again we're including licensing here so that we can have that comprehensive discussion it is not for the purpose of generating revenue so with that we will start with the option specific to a citizen vote and or other tobacco products currently our base sales tax rate applies and that is at three percent so what we're talking about here would be an incremental tax rate on top of the three so we've identified for you here some other municipalities the first row should be highlighted in yellow we don't have a special tax rate but these other municipalities have chosen to do so som of them have a tax rate her cigaret and most of them are fifteen to twenty cents for cigaret and other and so they have the cigaret tax and then they have a percentage tax on their other tobacco products and what they grouped into that pool for a forty percent it ranges based on municipality so i just want to draw your attention to that we feel that you could choose to do a percentage across the board and simplify that for retailers and we have shown that an estimated revenue of roughly thirty percent could generate more than six million dollars so this could be quite significant if you go to the next slide when we reviewed this what the budget not a board they asked that we put this together so they could see how all of the pieces fit together so the retail price per pack is eight dollars and ninety four ce lakewood is three percent and that's twenty seven so those items are all the same under both scenarios what comes into play is that special tax which is that an extra we put it in at thirty percent as an example here which is worth two dollars and sixty eight cents so the total price per pack currently without a special tax is nine dollars and fifty seven cents with a special tax rate of thirty percent it would be twelve dollars and twenty and again that was just an example using thirty percent you go to the next slide that's the discussion slide the question to address is should a special tax be placed on cigarets and other tobacco products so the potential option to explore here is whether or not thirty that i'll turn it over to the mayor for eight thank you can we go to the kind of brady bunch screen thank you so this one might be a little bit more controversial i think folks fall kind of all over the board and certainly there's a you know aggressiveness to this as well i think in some ways or at the personally so this is this one's a challenge and certainly would like to see what kind of direction we ca get mister beat up more pricing scenarios to help with other options for special tax rates for cigaret we had no recommendation by the board of those at this time because i don't think they had cities have any special taxes on their cigarets and and other products so we did survey all of the nearby denver metro areas to see if they had a special tax currently they do not however this is again something that's relatively new in terms of us being allowed to put a special tax on cigarets so many of them are considered doing it they just have not pursued it yet and then my next question is is if we put the special tax on we do not know what that will produce versus what we could possibly lose from our share of what the state collects do i understand that correctly a good choice to make that was the decision that was made so this has no impact at all on the apportion well i you know i wouldn't miss smoking either but the way i look at this is that this has a disparate effect to on low income people and people with already occurring health problems who are already financially difficult situation because these kind of addictions and so i find it somewhat discriminatory that i think it'll drive business out of lakewood and it'll have other unintended consequences like increasing pollution  and traffic because people are driving more to to go to a gas station across sheridan instead of on wadsworth or you know dui for instance because maybe people are drinking and want to go get a pack of smokes so i just i think we need to be careful about going too hi thank you i this is interesting i have never smoked i don't now but every time we look at tax increases we always are looking at those who are smoking in the retail stores and they have really been targeted and singled out for taxation all along and we say it's because we know that it's a medical problem i'm having a little trouble with us trying to always tell other people what vices they should have i remember when i was in the state legislature that the state had the tobacco litigation that was coming in and it was a real windfall at that point that money was supposed to go for tobacco ciss for education and also for the increased medical expenses but i strongly remember everybody advocating for it for everything else including education so not that much actually went to the to the cessation programs and if we taxes too much people will just go online i cannot go with a special tax on this one but i certainly feel that we should be taxing the other non tobacco products like the vaping pieces thank you  mayor i do think this is a really really complicated issue actually and so i appreciate the discussion and we had a really robust discussion about this at our board meeting as property taxes it's just it's a less regressive model all of that said you know i think that from our work on vaping a couple of years ago one thing that we really learned is that this does have a really big impact on discouraging kids from vaping and smoking and so i think it s i would support going to the ballot with a question i think forty percent seems it just seems pretty high so i don't know  mayor there are some very good points made here and there is as much as social issues is anything and it's complicated i think all things considered though i'm going to support the recommendations concerns i had for the last one i think it has to be for something and if we can put something on the ballot then i think we should be looking at a special fund set aside as well within our ability to do so it's twelve point six and the charter talks about creating a special fund i think would be appropriate to take a look at these special taxes being in that special fund so we can look at then how best to allocate the dollars   so it looks like there's sounds like there's consensus and you know i still it'll go forward i think whether or not i where i'm at on this because it seems like we have consensus but i do worry about certainly the number then of thirty percent that's that's way out of whack or not considering other communities on the line so that's something we can discuss so i think that there is consensus to move this forward and then that number can be discussed  second reading nineteen ten thirty three it also authorize cities to impose fees or licenses on the retailers currently we only have licensing for non cigaret tobacco retailers are licensing fees are relatively low with the application fee of one hundred dollars an an annual licensing fee of three hundred dollars so the option to discuss tonight is whether or not we extend that licensing to retailers of cigarets as well as all of those that provide those non cigaret tobacco option so if you go to the next slide this is where lakewood stands in relation to those other benchmark cities again we're at a hundred dollars for that application fee and that is  you can see it ranges aurora's relatively low on this one there are fifty dollars and then on the high side would be boulter  we go to the next slide there's these are the topics for discussion so the questions are should licensing be expanded to include cigaret retailers the ones that were provided on the slide before all include cigaret retailers whereas we do not and then should the application fee and license fee be revised so the potential option we've identified here is to explore an application fee of three hundred dollars on the licensing of tobacco thank you i just wanted to confirm when we're looking at  the page that shows all the different rates for application fees it shows the applicant fee being a hundred an annual licensing fee being three hundred shouldn't that be the other way around three hundred for the application fee and one hundred for the licensing because it looks like everybody else it goes effect other than denver well no i guess that's not  it just seems backwards to me for some reason because because in prior things we were doing a higher application and fee and then the annual fee was a little less so that's what my thinking was doing so never retail license there was a lot of discussion about what the fee cover being able to have periodic checks and all of that from the police department then we had covid so i don't even know how we don't have that information for you tonight but that's definitely something we can shake out and some of them are very substantial it will filter down to us so that's happening on the federal and we're all going to be taxed gorlitz we need to understand that so on the lower end on the because we are all going to be hit here pretty quickly folks thank you ok is there a consensus to look at these fees and to add the actual tobacco retailers i'm getting some franks i'm certainly in favor of looking at the fees but i'm wondering if we can also look at since we don't have the same urgency and some of these topics are more we kind of splitting them off in kind of addressing the ones completely separately because i think the other discussions are going to get into where we have a lot of questions and concerns and possibly a lot of public feedback as well  again i'm fine moving this one forward but just want to see if there's some agreement that maybe we leave the two things apart from a meeting sta fees so with that it looks like there is consensus to address these like we did with the licensing mj and cultivation we're getting all right moving along a little thing called tabor i'm actually going to turn this one over to holly she wanted an opportunity to talk more so i'm going to turn it over to her so this is our tabor restricted need to go to the voters unless it has a de minimus financial impact second the revenue that is under the table restriction have a maximum cap based on consumer price index and local growth any revenue collected above this cap would need to be returned or credited to the taxpayer in the case of lakewood we do have a temporary hold on these restrictions and any funds that are above the cap are moved to the tabor fund and are used for projects and primarily may not be used for operating costs the third item to note is the ratcheting down  we are expecting the tavor limited revenue to be lower in twenty twenty versus twenty nineteen which we talked about before and it impacts the base revenue and the amount of growth through twenty twenty are currently estimating it will take at least through twenty twenty three to bring the base back up to the twenty nineteen the intent of the discussion today is not  to do a deep dove into different scenarios but instead to discuss which end of the spectrum should staff focus on for creating scenarios if that's something you want to  example in the middle the first one is to do nothing the financial impact in the short term would be what we discussed on the last slide of the shift from  right thank you distributor do you want to weigh in on any feedback first taxpayers did the voters did make a decision a couple of years ago that they wanted to do a partial exemption from from tabor and that's what that  was two years ago a partial exemption and that exemption included taking the the excess over the limit and putting it in the three in the three buckets and spending it that way that's what they told  of the three buckets well we don't want you to do that anymore we think we think you ought to let the state keep it and i think it's a confusing message i think it's hard for us than for anybody to really make that very it's really sort of a difference without a distinction because whether we put it in the in the general fund or we put that money back in the three buckets we're still going to be going to pretty much the same things  that we want to spend our money on it's just what we're not going to have quite as much control over a little bit of it but in the end it's all going to the same place same places to me it's a waste of time waste of exemption on tabor and i think we ought to just leave that in place leave it alone and move on that's my opinion that's not the board that's me that's all  you i just think based on the previous decision to go bring tabor to the ballot i think doing a full repeal right now would be challenging especially without a convincing argument of how and where we're going to spend money infrastructure or what you know how we're going to use those dollars tht being said the twenty nineteen ratchet thing i would support that i think it's too technical and wonky and i think i think that's something that the voters wouldn't mind helping us there was aso a lot of confusion it's really complicated and it's really complicated to try and explain why we have the refund and then now there's this ratchet and i think that councilor bita kind of made some good points about that i think this is something i'm very concerned about the ratchet impact on our city in the long run because we are going to  be where we're really going to be set back after the recession and but i don't think this is the right to address this i think it's going to require a lot of communication a lot of education  and i think that we just went to the ballot on a tabor issue i don't think it's a good idea to bring it back this year i think we will need to continue talking about this and i think we should but i just don't think this is the right year for that thank you isn't there something in tabor law that says that it can only be presented odd years not even years so just just so everybody on council understands if if i'm remembering correct everybody's concerns but i want us to all remember that if you decide as a council it would have to be in an odd year thank you very much the two thousand nineteen level i think if we go for a full tavor exemption forever we will be over shooting and asking for too much and we will lose any thing that we could have succeeded but to a lesser extent but revenues rise and fall once we got rid of gallagher the quote  being a little bit different right now i don't see the ratcheting effect as anything more than a covid caused a drop in revenues certainly that is latest federal government legislation so how how does that if we apply that money to our revenue shortfall where does that growth that that total is about fourteen million dollars and the amount that we expect that we would get  could identify that for soething else that answer your question another fund but it is earmarked for specific things can't be used or mostly cannot be used for general operations so that's about fourteen million dollars so we'd be getting  approximately twenty two point six million dollars and twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two from the american rescue what we do with th is if we choose to do use it for revenue replacement then we're using it for operations we use it for operations we're receiving the expense that we'd be taking from the general fund buckets are where the money is going to go so i would not be in favor of changing those three buck so again i don't want to overshoot and ask for a forever tabor exemption when we might get a lesser measure through but i'm not sure that i even terms o loss of going forward please keep in mind that we also made a reduction of seventeen million dollars in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one you're talking seventeen million dollars plus fourteen million dollars fourteen million we haven't experienced yet seventeen million we've already experienced as a loss a very good closure thank you very thank you i am also in favor of doing nothing as i'm looking at things here we reduce the budget by seventeen million we are going to be getting twenty t point six million although it's going to be in two years i understand that that makes us more than whole by six point six million number one number two we are going really get anywhere from seventeen to forty three million if i read all the slides correctly from marijuana taxes i believe that's on a yearly basis we haven't factored that in and number three lakewood will begin to get the belmarsh sales tax is after their friends out what twenty twenty five we haven't had an update on what their financial status is or how healthy that but by twenty five that's four years down the road they ought to be doing a little better certainly than they are now and the fourth thing is even though our sales tax have decreased i mean we are projecting that we are still going to get fourteen million from the temporary bruising in twenty twenty five i guess the question then i have to ask is how much is enough money for us  that marijuana money and the pif money do we start to say wait a minute let's start living within our own means in our budget again folks we are going to be facing taxes from the federal government what they're trying to do and you know i don't know if there has ever been any kind of a cost analysis on what it actually takes on a per capita basis to run a city and to adequately provide for our police parks and and streets again how much money how much is enough for us thank thank yo so i would say that exercise is probably done every year through our budget when we look at how much money we bring in versus kind of what we hear from the community what they expect their services to be and then we have to try to balance that ou we are a three percent city which astonishingly enough is one of the lowest ones in the metro and i think there is a lot merit to this conversation and tabor in deep relisting and and the the hybrid ratchet now with gallagher which is always even more confusing but what i worry about is the timing of it and because the complications and frankly you know if yu want these things to pass there needs to be a campaign run around it as well and for those of you who've run these in the past or worked on the deep bruising it's a lot of work to do this and there's already a lot of things on the ballot so i think that we should continue the conversation i think it's something that we should continue to look at and i think i would certainly support this going forward i just don't know if this is the year for for us to get on board with that especially considering we have a lot of other assets out there so that's where i'm at i want to keep this out there i want to keep talking to the community i'd love to take it up again because long term funding is the number one goal of this council for the last two years is the financial well being of our community for the next twenty thirty forty fifty years and it does take a lot of money especially as your infrastructure so it's kind of my two cents and i haven't heard from anybody who says yep let's take this right now i did hear you  on the ratchet but beyond that it sounds like something that we're not willing to do were removed could there still be a request that all tax increases be voted on that was something that they actually asked for and i because what they what i heard them is that they always wanted to say and what taxes were but they didn't know they weren't necessarily tied to always having the refund because they understand in their own personal finances that sometimes you need to  create kind of a savings account for future larger expenditures they get it but what they wanted was a voice in tax increases is that a possibility and i don't know if that would mean partially  you we might need more time to answer that question if that's ok i do agree now may not be the time to do this but i do think that these topics are weighty enough that we may want to look at having like some kind of a quarterly study session or something in which we we talk to the community is a huge price tag and so i think what happens is you know we have these discussions but then we don't have that good follow up to keep reminding folks that these things don't go away and if there's a way to i don't want st a ton of extra work to maintain something it's important to see some of these backlogs of projects are massive and they're only going to get done through something that is very very big very forward thinking and get that direction on what are the priorities you have if you look at these ten big things or five big things how do we get that conversation going around your sales tax taper and people are going to have very passionate views but i don't want to just see us come back when it's only time to talk about going to the ballot because mary mentioned it earlier to have a campaign going you need to be able to educate people on all the finer points and that requires a lot of data points that we just add i actually just wanted to agree with councilor franks about the need to keep this conversation going and specifically to talk about the needs in our community and with our ward but also of the council because ultimately you know we kind of had this conversation when we first started this but what is our big picture goal here is to be in it to address our seiberg needs is it to a cost it's not going to give us enough money to meet our infrastructure needs so i think that it is important to talk about this and i'll just throw it in again but you know i would love to i was just going to echo a similar point which is you know we keep having opportunities to sort of take some things off of our list and you know we have to make it a priority to do that and we we always have the opportunity to do it we pay off some debt last year we could have taken a look at moving some of those payments into paying some of the projects that we have and also this this conversation didn't really start a year or even two years this conversation started before conversation and we had a whole list of projects and things that the police department needed or wanted things that parks and recs we're looking at as far as facilities and a whole lot of other needs in the city and i think that list is still around so i think we could dusted off and take a look at it could be pretty pretty easy to do that and that's how this funding conversation started again this year some of this was because the budget committee was talking hey we said we'd come back after tabor and take another look at that list and see how the funded i think covid sort of push that list off to the side a little bit and i think our focus has shifted a little just to revenue generally but i think we can get back to the broader conversation  waiting to get calls from the folks up and down colfax again if we take the mid range on marijuana that's about thirty million a year that's a sizable amount of money i have no idea what kind of projections are going to be made for belmar but that also needs to be factored in that could be a sizable amount as well thank you thank you and just to clarify it's not thirty million for marijuana i think  less than five million less than three million potentially so there's some discrepancy but we can get you that slide ok all right so let's go to public input so folks that are in the queue if you press star nine to request to speak with the clerk will read off the last four digits and you'll have three minutes if you give us your name in ward or name and address i will start your time and let you know when you have about thirty seconds and then you will hear the timer go off so mr clerk please yes we have zero one eight four   cigaret issue and how much of an impact that would make on somebody who has especially looking into even a limited income but even above that and while it's easy to talk about fifteen here i mean it's like a common tax increase speal that oh it's just pennies at the end of the day for rough figures what that would look like for somebody assuming they would smoke a pack a day and i think you deduct the fifteen cents per if you look at an annual basis what that amounts to is about eleven hundred dollars a year and what could eleven hundred dollars by that could be the difference between car insurance  or could amount to let's say you have one hundred dollars a week to spend on groceries you're speaking of over ten weeks of groceries that are now just going to a special tax and the problem is is that this is considered low hanging fruit and that is because of what seventy five percent of the population seventy percent of the population would not have any sympathy towards attacks like this stop i mean you're going to have it sounds like another discussion about whether you where are you going to go with some of the finer specific should you stop at cigaret or should you be going after the things that cause heart disease and other ways w who are a limited income and the fact that you're putting it up to the voters where the largest chunk the majority are smokers and would possibly vote for this so i don't know that it's in city council i don't know if that was the task that you were set to do in your job and if you are where does it stop so that's the of that i am glad to hear that issue will not at this moment be moving forward especially with the recent tax increases from the city of light and the sales tax exemptions which was ultimately a sales tax increase so i wanted to go on the record and make sure you knew that at least one person was speaking out and if more people knew about it there would be many others speaking out too i think the word five comments  about i think the word five comments hit the nail on the head why should there be such an excessive tax on something marijuana is smoking it's and that was a comment from  ok all right i think i have my comments on thank you thank you mr clark zero zero nine zero right zero zero nine zero give us your name and address may reward we'll get you started for the lakewood city police department and the medical costs and before you earmark it for other projects i know there's infrastructure and sidewalks and things but i would just like to say that it should just go in the general fund and then city council can decide where to put the the revenue raised i think there's going to be huge costs for people visiting the e r for drivers under the influence of marijuana i think it's going to be a huge cost the city of lakewood that you haven't even quantify yet and then the cigaret thing it's like if low income people if they need the money to  they need to choose between cigarets and and groceries i think they should choose groceries and their medications i'm sure that ah there are smokers that would rather smoke than take their medication they're  expensive but you can't i don't think that's an issue for the low income people i mean they shouldn't be smoking in the first place because of the health costs that society has to pay for  very serious and heart disease etc from cigarets so i'm all for a tax on cigarets and my mother smokes but so she would disagree with me  but i'm a non smoker i grew up with two parents that smoked so i have secondhand smoke through my whole childhood and that's all i've got to say i'm for the tax on cigarets and the marijuana thing that should just be left in the general on any revenues raised thank you city council's approach to the marijuana tax and an ordinance it's rare to honestly see a council approach the cannabis industry as a business and not just a cash cow and is really pleasantly impressed with the conversations right anybody else in the queue please raise your hand the public input and certainly appreciate everybody calling in and and again in regards to to the tax increases that will have a public hearing first and second reading public process so we certainly want to continue to hear from you and i thanks for bringing up the the consumption or the hospitality i think that's something that's really new and hasn't really been on our radar at all and if council's so chooses something like that i think it'd probably be br time when you were supposed to present and you kind of hung most of the night and could not but i thank you for that great information and i want to thank our budget audit committee and our citizen representatives for for all of their input  committee reports any of the chair chairs want to comment about their committees yes the housing policy commission for those of you on there you will be getting an email we want to have another meeting before july th meeting when we've discussed it as a council so look for that you our next legislative committee meeting will be this thursday mention the mile high flood district we passed a resolution so w're continuing to bank money for west colfax for north dry gulch and we just crested the ten million dollar mark so there's over ten million dollars in that account as you know design work is going on as we speak and at one point our project was estimated to be around twenty million maybe it'll be less maybe a little bit more but we're over halfway there so that's fantastic and i was excited about that there's been some transportation conversations continuing and the bill will be not dropped late last week it'll be coming out this week i'm sure cma will be a great resource going forward as well it's one hundred and twenty pages and there's certainly a lot to it a lot of different things for transportation funding going into the future  to be thinking about you'll be getting in a memo or email from our deputy city manager ben goldstein which outlines outlines those five different options some one is a hybrid for example one is everyone in the council chambers well using the right protocols et cetera ad and there's a whole bunch so please look for that email and we're going to have  about what your personally the most comfortable thanks that's it thank you very much well i appreciate everybody we will adjourn the meeting at nine fifteen and we'll see you next monday so thanks