San Diego has filed its first lawsuit based on a failure to pay the city’s cannabis tax, a new stream of revenue that city officials expect to climb to nearly $30 million annually during the next five years.
The city filed suit against Grizzly Peak Farms for failure to pay tax on cannabis products the company delivered to dispensaries within the city from its cultivation facilities in Oakland between January 2018 and June 2019.
Dave Gash, a San Diego developer and the owner of Grizzly Peak, said Wednesday that failure to pay the tax was an oversight resulting from confusion, and that the company planned to pay its city tax bill immediately.
“It really kind of slipped through the cracks,” Gash said. “It’s legitimate, but it’s a weird city tax. We never heard about it, so it was weird to us.”