COS leadership still can’t figure out weed tax

For many years, Colorado Springs leaders opposed the sale and taxation of marijuana for recreational purposes.

Why? The oft-repeated reason is that recreational weed - and not just medical, which we had approved - would scare away the military and their substantial economic benefit to the region. Fighter jets would fly away, never to return! Billions of dollars would migrate out of state! Thousands of jobs would evaporate overnight!

Of course, anyone with a foot in reality knew that wouldn't happen and so recreational weed is now finally legal to sell in Colorado Springs over 12 years after we voted to legalize it at the state level.

But a recent scuffle between city council and the mayor reveals a darker, dumber reason why we waited so long to legalize - our leadership has no clue how to spend our weed tax. Or they don't know how. What is weed again? Hello?

So here's the timeline: In November 2022, Colorado Springs voters declined to legalize recreational weed (Issue 300) but approved how to spend the weed tax if weed sales were to ever be legalized (Issue 301). And so how are we supposed to spend it, should that ever happen? Issue 301 says that our weed money would be specifically for "public safety programs, mental health services, and post-traumatic stress disorder treatment programs for veterans."

Two years later, we finally legalized recreational weed (a different Issue 300, which succeeded) in large part because our city council was also trying to permanently ban it on the same ballot (Issue 2D, which failed). There's a forgettable slew of things that council's more regressive members tried to pull off afterward to mitigate Issue 300's success, but they were thankfully all rebuffed.

Starting in April 2025, Colorado Springs finally had weed money coming in - forecasted to be $1.4 million per year - with very specific instructions on how it should be spent. Okay, so who was in charge of making sure that money was spent on those things?

City council said "city council," so they passed Ordinance 25-59 to say that they needed to vet nonprofits and issue grants to do those things with that money. Councilors Henjum, Donelson and Gold voted against it because they said the mayor's office was already in charge of doing that and we didn't need the extra bureaucratic process to figure out who to give our weed money to.

Mayor Yemi agreed and vetoed the ordinance. The mayor was in charge, he argued.

Then city council fought back with a press release implicating that the mayor was stirring up "political theater." They overrode the mayor's veto 6-3 with councilors Henjum, Donelson and Gold voting against it because ... well, you already know why.

So why all this drama? Well, it might be some stupid power play nonsense to decide who controls how the money is dispersed. City council says it's them, the mayor says it's him. But more likely it's because neither know and for some reason, they can't have a 20 minute conversation in good faith to figure it out.

For all the press releases and anguish after so many years, this could have seriously been an email.