The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
More cash from pot than tolls? Crazy talk
Here’s a head-scratcher for those of us who like to keep an eye on state money. It’s about taxes, not spending. Very controversial taxes.
Heading into next week’s start of the 2020 legislative session, we’re looking at Democratic proposals for Connecticut to establish highway tolls and to allow retail marijuana sales to all adults. Both have a strong chance of passing.
The estimate for tolls under the proposal likely to go to a vote next week, before Wednesday’s the start of the regular session: $150 million to $175 million a year, all of it from trucks.
The official guess for the state’s take on marijuana sales: $166 million a year just for sales to Connecticut residents.
That’s wacky. We’re really looking at collecting as much from pot as from tolls? How did it come to this?
A sober accounting should yield $350 million a year for tolls and pot, as the Democrats’ proposals suggest. But if we’re counting correctly and doing things right, it should total at least $300 million from tollpayers and about $50 million from tokers.
I favor both reforms and both reforms are long overdue, especially tolls.
We need tolls not for the extra money to pay for roads and bridges, but for the share of money from interstate trucks and out-ofstate motorists. The trucksonly plan adds a hefty pertruck annual total to the industry that moves goods through Connecticut. We may find that a reasonable fee per gantry — currently contemplated at $6 to $13, levying large trucks only — yields less than the estimate.
To get to that $300 million figure, we’d have $230 million from cars and other passenger vehicles, and from delivery trucks. And we’d have $70 million from Interstate trucks. That would give us a cool $100 million, maybe more, from outside the state. And it would equitably charge people using Connecticut highways for, well, using Connecticut highways.
We could cut our own taxes by $200 million in the form of property tax credits, and still come out $100 million ahead without fighting the trucking industry in court for the next five years.
That’s not going to happen, though, because Democrats didn’t have the guts to make it happen in a nonelection year. Republicans think user fees for highways are economic suicide even though every single state on the east coast already does it. And Gov. Ned Lamont, well-meaning but new on the job last year, didn’t have the political skills to make it happen.
As for marijuana revenues, that’s a financial debate, not a policy issue. The $166 million figure comes from the Marijuana Policy Project, which advocates and researches state reforms. In fact, said Karen O’Keefe, director of state policies for MPP, it’s a conservative estimate.
Consider that Colorado, granddaddy of the dozen or so legalized marijuana states, had about $1.5 billion in sales in 2018. Adjusting for population and for the numbers of people with medical marijuana permits, that translates to taxable annual pot sales of $735 million in Connecticut. At 25 percent, the tax Connecticut is looking at imposing, that would yield $183 million.
Of course, Connecticut can’t possibly have the same proportion number of stoners as Colorado. If we did, we’d be way ahead of where we are in technology development. Plus we’ll never be the marijuana tourism magnet of Boulder and Denver.
O’Keefe points to Oregon, and calculates Connecticut would harvest $170 million a year if we copped our herb at the same rate as that state. And if that’s not convincing enough, she looks at federal data on marijuana consumption and reaches a similar total.
I remain skeptical and here’s why. If we assume 12 percent of adults consume pot regularly, meaning at least once a month, that’s about 250,000 adults in Connecticut. If each one gets high 100 times a year — yeah, there are outliers who do it twice a day except on Christmas — then that comes out to about $40 million a year, more or less, based on the typical cost of a gram.
You can’t follow this if you’re already stoned but trust me, I did all the math.
I don’t see how O’Keefe can be right, and neither can Rep. Josh Elliott, DHamden,
arguably the General Assembly’s leading advocate for legalized sales.
“I would be astonished if we were ever to pull in over $30 million,” Elliott said. “That’s what I would say because I want to be conservative with our estimates.”
Elliott and other advocates insist we shouldn’t use revenues as even the slightest reason to justify legalization. It’s about justice and equity and, as his House colleague Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, cochairman of the finance committee, puts it, “It is equity, it is criminal justice, it is righting a historic legacy of wrongs. And if we can make extra money off it, that’s great too.”
Elliott noted, “There are advocates who want to find and use every argument under the sun and one of those arguments is the fiscal argument, and you want to make it as sexy as possible.”
Is O’Keefe one of those people? I don’t know. She seems scientific in her approach.
I hope shes right and Elliott and I are wrong. Meanwhile, there’s something wrong with this picture when the state is heading toward two large-scale reforms with an eye toward more cash from marijuana than from tolls.