Santa Barbara County’s tax revenue from cannabis operations took a big jump in the fourth quarter of the 2019-20 fiscal year, totaling more than twice as much as revenues from the fourth quarter last fiscal year, according to a report to be delivered Tuesday to the Board of Supervisors.
In fact, taxes from the just-ended fourth quarter, from April 1 to June 30, 2020, were only 12% less than the total cannabis taxes collected for all four quarters of the 2018-19 fiscal year.
The report attributes the sharp increase in tax revenue, in part and indirectly, to the COVID-19 pandemic. But at the same time, the report says, the pandemic has limited the county’s ability to investigate illegal cannabis operations.
“Since the stay-at-home mandate was imposed, the cannabis industry has experienced a sharp increase in consumer demand at the retail level, which in turn impacts the supply chain, creating an increased demand for product supplied by growers,” says the report, authored by fiscal and policy analysts Reese Ellestad and Steven Yee.
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