PORTLAND — There’s a bright spot in Portland’s annual budget: higher-than-anticipated revenue from cannabis taxes.
But three years after voters approved the 3 percent tax, the city council is still trying to agree on how to spend it.
The ballot initiative gave the city council authority to spend cannabis tax money on a few broadly defined priorities: drug and alcohol education and treatment; public safety and street safety including protecting the public from unsafe drivers; and support for small businesses and economic opportunity for communities impacted by cannabis prohibition.
Last year, the city council allocated the biggest chunk of ongoing revenue, $2.15 million, to the Portland Police Bureau’s traffic division — a move that’s sparked controversy.
As a report from the city auditor recently pointed out, that new funding didn’t put more traffic cops on the street. Instead, the council cut its general fund support for the traffic division and substituted the cannabis money.
The city’s general fund is the repository for most taxes, licensing fees and unrestricted revenue that funds core services such as police, the fire department, parks and planning.
Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, who voted to adopt that budget last year, said she hadn’t fully understood the substitution maneuver and believed that the cannabis dollars would be used to expand the city’s traffic safety work.
At a city council budget work session Tuesday, Eudaly asked a lieutenant with PPB’s traffic division to clarify how many new people they’d been able to hire. The answer: zero.
“I want to see an actual increase in enforcement, and I’m disappointed that these dollars didn’t deliver that,” she told her colleagues.
Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who led the council’s push to pass the cannabis tax in 2016, defended the decision to support the ongoing work of the traffic safety team. As the city’s costs grow, she said, it needs to find new ways to support general fund programs.
“The ballot measure specifically did not say that we could not backfill,” Fritz said. “We intentionally left it up to the council to decide that. Many other jurisdictions who passed the 3 percent tax just had the money all go to the general fund.”
