Santa Barbara County to add fee on Cannabis operators to pay for data access
Santa Barbara County Supervisors Pass First Reading of Cannabis Fee Addition Despite Dissent.
An ordinance amendment that will add another fee to cannabis operations was approved Tuesday on a first reading by the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors and will come back at the Aug. 29 meeting for final adoption.
The amendment was approved on a 4-1 vote, with 5th District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino dissenting, apparently over his objection to the cost of the service the new fee is designed to cover.
Under the new fee, cannabis operators who hold county business licenses would be charged 3% of the cost of renewing their state licenses, said Brittany Odermann, deputy county administrator who oversees cannabis regulations.
Proceeds from the fee would pay for the county’s participation in the California Cannabis Authority data analytics system, with cannabis operators to be charged starting in September for the second quarter of the fiscal year.
Odermann said the amount each operator pays will vary depending on the number and types of licenses held.
In May, when the board was considering changes to its cannabis business license fees, supervisors asked the staff to come up with a way for cannabis operators to pay for the county’s cost of participating in the data analytics platform.
The county joined the CCA data analytics program because the state had failed on its promise to provide counties with data from its Track-and-Trace system.
As an alternative, CCA collected the data, analyzed it and made it available to counties that subscribed to the system.
Santa Barbara County’s initial cost to join was $500,000 per year, and that fee was covered in the 2021-22 and 2022-23 years by the county’s cannabis taxes.
But that tax revenue has declined due to various factors primarily driven by a glut of cannabis on the market, which has driven down prices and forced some operators out of business.
Odermann said because of the reduction in data generated by the county, negotiations with CCA reduced the annual cost to $280,000, but the new fee would guarantee the industry would continue to pay for that annual subscription cost.
Lavagnino said he opposed the cost of joining CCA from the beginning because $500,000 was too much for the benefit received.
“I don’t think we get enough bang for the buck on this. I’m glad to see this might be the last year we’re doing this,” Lavagnino said, referring to a new state View Metrics function in its Track-and-Trace system that Odermann said would provide data to counties free of charge.
