Rancho Cordova, CA (MPG) - If you are among the thousands of individuals across the county looking for a permit to establish a commercial pot operation, you can pass the city of Rancho Cordova by.

The Rancho Cordova city council on Dec.4 voted in favor of keeping in place its moratorium on recreational marijuana, adding itself to the list of local municipalities and counties across the state that have said “NO” to the cultivation and sale of outdoor, commercial cannabis for recreational purposes within their boundary lines.

In a vote of 3-2 in favor of the ban, the city joins the county, as well as Citrus Heights, Folsom and Elk Grove in banning permits for the purposes of recreational pot cultivation, primarily due to issues linked to crime, community image and the murky process for handling product distribution and the complications of what is currently a cash-flow industry.

Mayor Donald Terry and Councilman Garrett Gatewood voted in favor of lifting the ban, but were outvoted by Mayor Linda Budge and councilmembers Robert McGarvey and David Sander.

“There are really three reasons we voted against lifting the ban we have in place and at the top of the list is public safety, then city image and community reinvestment.” said Mayor Budge speaking after the vote. 

Budge said with crime down 30 percent in Rancho Cordova, the risks of an uptick in crime related to the predominantly cash business, coupled with what is projected to be a complicated process for identifying and extracting tax dollars from the proceeds on the sale of recreational marijuana, are simply not worth the headaches.

“We’ve been watching the news reports and staying on top of what’s happening in the City of Sacramento where it is legal, among other cities, and we just don’t want to go through what they are going through, especially with the issues concerning crime,” Budge said. 

Mayor Terry and Councilman Gatewood both declined to comment for this story or expand on their positions.

Buying, using and even selling marijuana for medicinal purposes has been legal in California since 1996 under passage of the Medicinal Marijuana laws, which lead to the legal build out of so-called “pot dispensaries” across the county and state.  Many city and law enforcement officials across the county and region, including District Attorney Anna Marie Shubert, however, have drawn a straight line from the uptick in crime within their jurisdictions to the arrival of the pot dispensaries.  To cement local positions on recreational marijuana cultivation, including large-scale, outdoor growing operations, many municipalities, Rancho Cordova included, quickly established ordinances to define their laws concerning and voted to keep grow houses and commercial operations at bay.

Then, with the passage of Proposition 64 in 2016, which legalized the recreational use of marijuana with some limits, the door swung wide open for the distribution of permits for commercial licensing for large-scale, outdoor pot cultivation operations.  In response, the state merged medicinal and recreational requirements under one law, the Medical and Adult-Use Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act (MAUCRSA).  With recreational use of marijuana still considered illegal under federal law, cities and counties have been faced with the option of adopting ordinances to allow for the coming of a commercial growth industry and its potentially massive tax benefits, or keeping their commercial/recreational pot moratoriums in place.

Budge said the city is highly invested in keeping momentum going with respect to economic growth and that allowing for the licensing of recreational pot operations in the city, she said, would have put the city’s long-fought efforts to successfully incorporate in jeopardy.

“We haven’t been getting our fair share of reinvestment dollars from the county, and now that we are an incorporated city, we want to do everything we can to protect the work we are doing to reinvest in our communities,” Budge said.  “We want our city image to remain positive.  We don’t want it tarnished by the issues linked to the recreational pot industry.”

Although the commercial pot industry touts tax dollars and economic prosperity through the addition of local jobs, Budge said she and her fellow councilmembers who joined her in opposing the lifting of the ban, say the benefits simply do not pencil out.

“These are not farms,” Budge said.  In many cases there are only two or three people running an entire commercial grow house, so where are the jobs?  The tax benefits are misleading.”

Budge said the city has spent too long trying to regain economic viability and the expenses linked to the processes for a legal recreational pot industry are too high.  The costs of creating a system for handling the cash revenues from the industry, coupled with the implementation of a staffing structure for oversight and collection of taxes, would not have been worth the potentially millions of dollars at stake.

“This is a cash business right now,” Budge said. “So we would have to figure out how to handle just that aspect of it, for starters.  What bank would we put the money in? And, as far as the tax benefits from the sale, it doesn’t weigh out.  The price tag on the products themselves would have to be very high in order for the city to justify it.  There is also an excise tax to consider and how to weigh out what the city’s chunk of that should be.  It’s just too complicated.”

Finally, Budge said there was another side effect linked to commercial pot operations that the city doesn’t want to deal with either: the smell.

“It’s a really big issue,” Budge said.  “We don’t want to have to deal with the smell from the grow houses.  It’s very strong and we are seeing other cities where the commercial grow houses are having to address public issues of concern about this.”