The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors is pretty unanimous in its dissatisfaction with the current system for taxing legal cannabis cultivation — too many operators are not paying their full freight — but when it comes to actually trying to fix it, the board voted to cut the baby in half as to whether they wanted to cut the baby in half. Translated into simpler English, the supervisors voted 4-to-1 to bring a new-and-improved "hybrid" tax system back for consideration on June 18.
But that politically daunting effort — a four-vote supermajority is required to put the matter on the November ballot so voters can decide — has already been upstaged by the far more likely prospect that the supervisors will ask voters to approve a 2 percent increase on the bed tax charged by hotels, motels, and vacation rentals instead.
In the probability charts hatched by political scientists, the likelihood voters would approve two local tax measures on the same ballot in the same election are strained at best. Preliminary indications suggest the bed tax could generate $3 million to $4 million a year at a time when the county coffers are running low.
Bed-tax increases are relatively painless propositions for voters actually casting the ballots — it's the visitors and tourists who ultimately bear the pain — so the chances of success are relatively good. Because the bed-tax idea — not yet officially proposed — was not on the agenda, the supervisors could only allude to it and note its likelihood without indicating how much they wanted to support it.
Read more at independent.com