Homeless in Arizona

From the article in the November 29, 2018 issue of the Phoenix New Times by Joseph Flaherty it sounds like Phoenix Mayor Thelda Williams paid the Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona to create the tax.

In reality I suspect that it was a collaboration between the Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona and Phoenix Mayor Thelda Williams to either 1) create an outrageous tax on medical marijuana, which would be used to fund the Phoenix Police and Phoenix Fire Department, or 2) create an outrageously high tax which would effectively make medical marijuana illegal in Phoenix.

One of the taxes was a $280 a square foot tax every year on any business that sells medical marijuana.

That tax would have cost a small business the size of a Circle K or 7/11 slightly under $1 million a year, or about $19,000 a week, or $2,700 a day.

I suspect that tax would have put most medical marijuana dispensaries out of businesses.

The other tax was a $50 a square foot tax on any business that grows medical marijuana.

At the Phoenix City Council meeting JP Holyoak said that $50 a square foot tax on business that grow medical marijuana could cost him $2 million a year and put him out of business.

And not, just because the outrageous medical marijuana tax failed at the last Phoenix City Council meeting, I suspect it will be back again, either as an attempt to outlaw medical marijuana in Phoenix, or shake down medical marijuana users for huge sums of $$$ money $$$, which will go to the Phoenix Police and Phoenix Fire Department.

I suspect they will lower the tax from a super outrageously high tax to just and outrageously high tax.

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Source Also see: ^{1 2 3 4}

Phoenix Paid Firefighters Union Boss $68K for Plan to Tax Medical Pot Businesses

JOSEPH FLAHERTY | NOVEMBER 26, 2018 | 7:30AM

The city of Phoenix paid more than $68,000 for the head of the firefighters' association to work on a medical marijuana dispensary tax intended to fund police and fire while he served as chief of staff to interim Mayor Thelda Williams, Phoenix New Times has learned.

A proposal to fund police and fire ended up being led by the head of the Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona from within the mayor's office. Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona President Bryan Jeffries worked in the mayor's office for less than five months, but the city paid him a salary that was close to the pay ceiling for the position.

Jeffries resigned as chief of staff just a few weeks after the proposed medical marijuana tax failed unanimously in a vote of the Phoenix City Council on October 2.

The proposal from the mayor would have levied taxes in the realm of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, or more, on each medical marijuana retail location and cultivation site.

The nature of the medical marijuana occupational licensing tax was more than a little incestuous, metaphorically speaking. Because Jeffries was working for the city, a proposal to fund city police and fire ended up being led by the head of a firefighters union from within the mayor's office.

A captain in the Mesa Fire and Medical Department, Jeffries worked in the Phoenix mayor's office from June until he resigned unexpectedly on October 15.

According to public records obtained by New Times, the city set Jeffries' base annual salary at $125,721.60, near the top of the salary range for a Phoenix chief of staff. That salary was more than Jeffries' base salary of $88,760 as a Mesa city employee, so the City of Phoenix relied on a contract with a temporary staffing agency to cover the difference of $36,961.60.

On June 27, the Phoenix City Council approved an "executive on loan" item that allowed Phoenix to reimburse Mesa for Jeffries' time.

By the time he left the mayor's office in October, the city had paid a total of $68,118.40 to Jeffries, according to information obtained by New Times through a records request.

A spokesperson for Williams, Raquel Estupinan, acknowledged that Phoenix brought Jeffries to work on the failed marijuana tax, among other things.

"Bryan was brought on primarily to work on special projects, including public safety resources and the medical marijuana proposal," Estupinan wrote in an email. "The marijuana proposal is not moving forward and, as a result, Bryan has chosen to return to his job as captain in the Mesa Fire Department."

When asked about other projects that Jeffries worked on besides the marijuana tax, Estupinan said, "Jeffries helped get the conversation started on a potential bond program for 2019 for public safety resources. He also contributed to advising the mayor on a number of issues."

However, Williams already had a chief of staff during this period, making it seem more likely that Jeffries' sole purpose was to shepherd a marijuana tax through the City Council.

Jeffries reportedly served in a co-chief-of-staff role alongside Seth Scott, the chief of staff to former mayor Greg Stanton. Scott, who makes $137,925 per year, stayed on in the mayor's office after Williams was selected by her City Council peers to be interim mayor when Stanton resigned to run for Congress on May 29.

Other recent mayors have relied on co-chiefs of staff from time to time, Estupinan said, including Stanton and former mayor Phil Gordon.

As it happens, Jeffries is a former Phoenix City Council member. He briefly represented District 2 after he was appointed in 2011 to replace another council member who resigned, and ran unsuccessfully to hold the position, losing to Councilman Jim Waring.

New Times contacted Jeffries for comment and later received an email from local public relations and consulting operative David Leibowitz, who said that he was responding on behalf of Jeffries. Leibowitz explained that he is more well-versed in dealing with the media than the union president and ex-politician, whom he described as a friend.

He maintained that Jeffries did not arrive at the city with a specific agenda of taxing medical marijuana.

"Everything he did was an attempt to improve public safety in the city of Phoenix," Leibowitz said.

In spite of the unexpected departure of Jeffries from the mayor's office, Leibowitz would not say that Williams fired Jeffries or asked him to resign. "My understanding is it was a mutual thing," Leibowitz said, adding, "Clearly, what happened with medical marijuana did not go as intended."

The tax proposal seemed like a stealth mission. Unlike more minor items, the tax plan did not go through subcommittees or public discussion and instead materialized at the last minute to a shocked and outraged pot industry.

The first the public knew of it was when Williams placed the item on the October 2 City Council policy session agenda just a few days before the meeting, with marijuana operators feeling targeted. Yet Jeffries was researching the potential for a medical marijuana tax over a year ago in his role with the Professional Fire Fighters, he told the Arizona Republic .

Dispensary operators were outraged when they learned that the city was pursuing a massive new tax on their businesses, and citizens showed up en masse to speak out against the tax at the City Council.

In his presentation to the City Council at the meeting, Jeffries defended the proposal as a forward-thinking approach. "This is not an attempt to try to single out patients or to single out the need for marijuana. But it's simply the real-life impacts to public safety," he said at the meeting, referring to the city of Denver as an example.

Colorado legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, and Jeffries said that officials in Denver told him their city was dealing with consequences from marijuana legalization related to homelessness and public safety response times.

There's no evidence to suggest that similar problems are happening here. In a recommendation that Phoenix allow dispensaries across the city to remain open until 10 p.m. instead of the current 7 p.m. cutoff, city staff wrote, "Based on the numerous reviews of existing non-profit medical marijuana dispensaries, there are not significant public safety issues or detrimental effects from these establishments."

Nevertheless, the tax seemed to come out of nowhere.

Leibowitz said he didn't know about Jeffries working on a medical marijuana tax a long time before he showed up to work for Williams this summer.

"With the advent of medical marijuana and its growing popularity, I’m sure that is something that a lot of people are looking at, not just firefighters," he said.

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Source

Phoenix looks to tax medical-marijuana industry $50 million per year to fund public safety

Jessica Boehm, Arizona Republic Published 6:00 a.m. MT Oct. 1, 2018 | Updated 10:52 a.m. MT Oct. 1, 2018

Phoenix is considering a massive tax on the medical-marijuana industry that could generate $40-50 million per year for the police and fire departments.

The tax, which would be charged to companies based on the size of each of their dispensary and cultivation sites, could cost some medical-marijuana distributors more than $1 million per year.

It would be the first tax of its kind in Arizona.

"We are desperate for money," Mayor Thelda Williams said. "I'm not about to touch food tax, sales tax or property tax, so I need a whole new source."

Phoenix has faced tough budget choices for the past several years, mostly due to ballooning public-safety pension costs. This year, the city must pay more than $225 million toward its pension debt.

The tight budget has limited the city's ability to hire additional police officers and firefighters. Additionally, both the police and fire chiefs have told the council their departments need hundreds of millions of dollars in updates to buildings and equipment.

Williams is proposing the tax plan in hopes that tapping into the multi-million-dollar medical-marijuana industry will allow the city to fill the budget gaps in the police and fire departments — and she isn't wasting any time in trying to push it through.

She is bringing the tax directly to the full council instead of the more common practice oftaking it to a council subcommittee first, leaving some in the industry blindsided and concerned about the potential financialhit.

"They're trying to balance the budget on the backs of our patients," said Bill Abbott, senior vice president of the southwest region for MPX Bioceutical Corporation.

Arizona voters legalized medical marijuana in 2010 and the industry has boomed ever since.

Phoenix will consider a handful of tax options, but the preferred option is crafted as an annual license tax based on the size of each marijuana cultivation site and dispensary.

The Arizona Republic requested a list of dispensaries, cultivation centers and their square footage, but officials in the mayor's office did not immediately provide the information.

The proposed tax rate is $50 per square foot for a cultivation and infusion site and $280 per square foot for a dispensary or lounge.

Phoenix caps dispensary size at 2,000 square feet, which means that the largest dispensaries would pay $560,000 per year.

Cultivation and infusion sites are traditionally much larger and couldbe required to pay $1 million or more based on the proposed tax model.

The money would be designated for public safety, but the council would decide specifically how the money should be spent during the budget process.

Abbott operates a 22,896-square-foot cultivation site in south Phoenix.

If the tax passes, his bill will be $1.14 million, plus another $560,000 for his north Phoenix dispensary.

He said the tax may put some dispensaries out of business, which will make it more difficult for patients to access legal marijuana.

"It will also decrease patient access, which could possibly increase black market activity. It's totally counterproductive," Abbott said.

Bill Gibbs is the co-owner of Urban Greenhouse, a 2,000-square-foot dispensary in Phoenix, which would also face a $560,000 tax.

He said businesses could be forced to raise prices for customers to make up the cost, possibly pricing some customers out of the legal medical-marijuana market.

His cultivation center is in El Mirage, but he said that if Phoenix succeeds with the tax, every city in the state will do something similar.

"There will be no place to hide. All patients will be affected," Gibbs said.

Why marijuana?

Why is the city choosing to tax medical-marijuana facilities to support public safety? That depends on who you ask.

Bryan Jeffries, the mayor's chief of staff and president of the statewide firefighter union, said the Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona has researched the impacts of medical and recreational marijuana in Denver and believes that the industry could put a drain on public-safety resources.

He said officials in Denver have seen a rise in burglaries, homelessness, fires and children mistakenly consuming marijuana.

He did not have data showing similar trends in Arizona — where recreational marijuana is not legal but pointed to some individual issues, including a fire at a dispensary earlier this year.

"We haven't been in this business very long, so we don't have years of data. But we're starting to see an uptick in these issues," Jeffries said.

For Williams, it's less about the safety concern and more about revenue potential.

She said she has a cousin in Denver who told her how much the city was bringing in through taxes on marijuana dispensaries.

"I thought... why not Phoenix?" Williams said.

Denver has a 3.5 percent special sales tax for customers who buy recreational marijuana. It does not have an extra tax on medical marijuana.

Rushed process

Jeffries said he met with several people in the industry in the past few months to discuss the tax.

But many dispensary owners and operators said they only began hearing rumblings about the tax in the past week and didn't know any details until the city posted the Oct. 2 council agenda online late Thursday.

"I really think the city needs to dust off the old transparency playbook and do things the right way," Abbott said. "It's like a surprise attack."

Abbott said he is a member of the Arizona Dispensary Association and several of his fellow operators were also blindsided by the announcement.

"This is an ambush to try to ramrod this thing through so that nobody knows about it and then all of a sudden it's just law," Gibbs said.

Traditionally, a proposed policy change would go to a council subcommittee for a public discussion and review before it would come before the full council.

Williams said she felt the change could go straight to the full council for discussion. She said Tuesday's vote will start a 60-day notice process. She said she plans to have a public hearing about the tax before the Dec. 11 final vote.

"My time is very limited as mayor. It could be over in a month and I am moving as fast as I can with my priorities," Williams said. "Anybody that knows me knows I like to stir the pot and get things done."

Williams is the interim Phoenix mayor. The mayoral election is in November, but a March runoff is expected.

An Arizona Supreme Court ruling overturned a 2012 law passed by the Legislature that barred cardholders from possessing and using marijuana on public college campuses Isabel Greenblatt, The Republic | azcentral.com

Yearlong process

The research into this proposed tax began long before Williams took over as interim mayor at the end of May.

Jeffries began working on the tax about a year ago with the Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona.

They commissioned a public-opinion poll on the topic earlier this year that showed 60 percent of likely Phoenix voters were in favor of taxing medical marijuana facilities for public safety, according to pollster Mike Noble of OH Predictive Insights.

The firefighter group also worked with outside law firms and policy researchers to craft the new tax structure that is now going before the council.

Jeffries said the union was motivated to research the funding idea because it is concerned about officer and firefighter shortages and response times to emergency calls in Phoenix.

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Board of Adjustment issues

One of those outside law firms that helped craft the tax proposal was Snell & Wilmer, a prominent Phoenix firm that has also represented medical-marijuana dispensaries.

Nick Wood, who works for the firm, has represented dispensaries in the past. But earlier this year, he represented multiple individuals who claimed to be opposed to medical marijuana facilities locating in their neighborhoods.

Wood represented these individuals in cases that came before Phoenix's Board of Adjustment — a volunteer board that hears disputes about zoning cases. Jeffries was a member of that board until June.

Attorneys opposing Wood's clients alleged that elements of his cases were fraudulent and attempted to help certain dispensaries while keeping others from opening. The city launched an investigation but has not yet publicly released any findings.

Jeffries said Wood hasn't been "heavily involved" in crafting the tax strategy but "he's given some advice." Jeffries said he mostly worked with a different attorney at Snell & Wilmer.

Another person involved in the Board of Adjustment turmoil earlier this year — lobbyist Joe Villasenor — also talked to Jeffries about the tax plan before it was publicly released, though Jeffries said Villasenor was not involved in crafting it.

"Because he knows about the industry, I've asked him some questions," Jeffries said. "He's kind of helped me understand who the players are."

Jeffries said there was no connection between the Board of Adjustment allegations and the tax plan.

"There's just no there, there," Jeffries said.

Williams said that if Villasenor or Wood have been involved, she has not been party to the conversations.