Coming off last spring’s intriguing mayoral election, this April’s municipal election season might struggle to get attention. That is, save the school board race, which is more attention-getting than ever, but more on that in a couple weeks.
Anybody who has glanced upon city hall with half an eye realizes the City Council has a pretty far left tilt. It’s a fact of life. Of the seven members, the southwestern Fifth Ward, with its suburban, above-average income residents contains the least leftist voting block, and thus has consistently provided the often lone dissident voice on votes — the slightest tug toward centrism our fair city can collectively muster.
Retiring Matt Pitzer has held that post, as did the petite powerhouse Laura Nauser, previously. Don Waterman might be assumed to be passed that baton, though thoughtful, concerned citizen Gregg Bush offers voters an option.
This is less than First Ward voters have ended up with after incumbent Pat Fowler ended her candidacy, leaving Nick Knoth unofficially uncontested.
Waterman would surely maintain his ward’s voice of realism, for example: in that the die has been cast on the new homeless Taj Mahal, but, um, who’s gonna foot the bill to maintain this edifice once ARPA bucks dry up in a few years?
Gregg Bush leads with social justice warm fuzzies. Public leaders are smart to tout their personal and professional life experience, and Bush offers quality comparisons he might bring to city issues. The first or second analogy was valuable, but after the fifth or six, when does “when I was a nurse” become a broken record?
After Karl Skala was edged out in a recount election last spring, Fowler perhaps received the baton as most hard-left ideologue. Knoth is no right-winger, but is sure closer to center than the incumbent, so gained warm support even before being left to fly solo.
But with Fowler stepping back, there’s some air sucked out of Knoth’s campaign, as happens to an unopposed candidate. Candidate forums might give you a couple minutes intro, but no full speaking time, as there’s competition in other wards. News coverage becomes secondary, so all the ideas he had planned go somewhat muted to public communications. Winning by default is less inspiring, and makes it hard to claim a mandate on any initiative.
Other than the menagerie of school board hopefuls, there’s the marijuana tax, or rather taxes. With the deeply flawed Amendment 3 slipping by happy voters last fall, comes a payoff to municipal officials — a new taxing opportunity.
So the city and county both will put to voters a 3% sales tax on just adult use (aka recreational) marijuana that is not to apply to medicinal cannabis purchases.
As usual, the government officials whose organization would collect this payday are all for it, even if unable to coherently articulate what related benefits the public will receive from the new windfall.
They’re unsure how much to estimate they’ll bring in, but likely quite a bit. County Commissioner Kip Kendrick offered the most competent purpose of paying for expungement of non-violent offenders’ marijuana-related convictions. This is a very good thing but the constitutional amendment mandates an unrealistically aggressive timeline to get it done.
So after that expensive rush project, how to allocate this ongoing tax revenue stream? Snarky critics accuse a slush fund, probably only a slight exaggeration, for social services and whatever runaway train activists can imagine.
Like with alcohol and tobacco taxes, some of the revenue should go toward those related costs to society: mental health, prevention programs or at least other drug addiction programs. Maybe it could be used for police training on how to detect high drivers, but certainly not to crack down on marijuana-related enforcement of peaceful people still behaving outside the new distorted legal regime.
There’s pending confusion brewing about whether the county would just collect tax from outside municipalities that passed their own excise, or would double up in-town purchases, another ambiguous feature to haunt us from Amendment 3.
We also have a bit of a “taxation without representation” issue in that all voters will decide this tax, but a pretty small minority of people will pay it. Not very nice.
Three percent is not a lot, but the more taxes and regulations, like the established supplier cartel, the more the vibrant a black market will still linger out there, as has been observed in California and New York City. It would become an incentive to retain a medicinal card as an effective partial tax exemption card. Or it could bump consumers who seek desired attributes toward alternatives such as opioids and harder street drugs. No public cost occurs in a vacuum.
Steve Spellman, a lifelong Columbia-area resident and political observer, writes twice monthly for the Missourian.
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