A lawsuit challenging Humboldt County’s tax on commercial cannabis farming has been ruled successful on multiple counts by a judge, one of the litigating attorneys announced Wednesday.
The presiding judge ruled that the county’s Board of Supervisors should not have adjusted the tax’s language in 2017 the way it did after the tax had already been approved by voters. Alderpoint-based attorney Eugene Denson and attorney Fred Fletcher challenged the county’s tax in early 2018 on behalf of cannabis farmer Karen Silva.
“(The county) did broaden and extend the tax measure in ways that are inconsistent with the language passed by voters, and this cannot be done absent voter approval,” Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Kelly Neel wrote in a decision issued last week.
The board of supervisors’ tweaks to Measure S, the cannabis tax approved by voters in 2016, included shifting the tax burden from the grower to the property owner; expanding the taxable area from the actual cultivation to the permitted area at large; and taxing permitted growers whether they cultivate cannabis or not.
In the decision, Neel finds that the board could not have made those changes without first obtaining voter approval. “What is clear is that the drafters of Measure S, as well-meaning as they were, created issues that Board of Supervisors tried to resolve by molding the language to be consistent with the permitting process as a whole,” Neel wrote.
Read more at times-standard.com
