Adult Use Marijuana Sales Bring Pavement To Streets of Lowell

 In case you haven’t heard, the City of Lowell received $282,267.20 from the State of Michigan for our portion of State collected excise tax from adult use marijuana sales. This represents about nine percent of our annual general fund budget and the unanticipated high dollar amount was rightly labeled “huge” by City Manager Mike Burns. The total amount received has gone into the local streets fund to help pay for much needed road improvements. Please read that last sentence enough times to commit it to memory. As promised by Burns and the City Council, marijuana revenues are being used for our streets.

Please indulge me as we look at a bit of pot history in Lowell. In 2017, the Council considered the question of allowing a medical marijuana facility to open here. Since I had benefitted considerably from edible marijuana following my treatment for throat cancer, I addressed the council as an advocate. They denied the application, citing the upcoming vote on Proposition 18-1 which was the state wide measure that legalized adult use marijuana. Their decision made sense to me, even though I was advocating for acceptance.

Proposal 18-1 won a clear victory state-wide and passed in Lowell by a decisive margin of 58-42%. The City Council respected the will of the voters and adopted rules and regulations in order to allow adult use sales in the City. At the time, Lowell was one of the few communities in West Michigan that actually followed the will of the voters in allowing pot to be sold. Frankly, I did not understand why so many elected officials took it upon themselves to IGNORE the clearly expressed wishes of voters and “opt out”. One of my main complaints about Lansing and DC is that the elected bodies there pay little or no attention to the will of the people and instead vote at the beck and call of lobbyists - political mercenaries who are paid to thwart the voters’ wishes. But that is another story.

By the time I was voted to Council, the pot ball was rolling with a good deal of negative feedback from the 42% who were on the defeated side of the issue. Dickinson Wright, the law firm that represents the City had an attorney who specialized in examining marijuana laws; Jessica Wood. (Following the retirement of Dick Wendt, Jessica is now our City Attorney.) She advised us to be very careful in any attempt to limit the number of facilities that could open in Lowell. She cited numerous examples of municipalities in other states who attempted methods like lotteries or picking applicants randomly being sued. She actually told me that her goal in advising us was to keep us from being sued by anyone. If you think about that, she was actually counseling us to take action that would make less money for her firm and potentially herself. In my 63 years, I have not met many attorneys who try to save money for their clients at a cost to themselves.

There have been many detractors of this legal strategy. Believe me, I have met many of them who took the time to stop in our store and let me know their opinions. While I certainly respect those with a less tolerant view of marijuana than my own, following Jessica’s advice has saved Lowell thousands of dollars to say nothing of untold wasted man hours. There are some very large corporate entities behind adult use pot and they take any attempt to limit the free market approach to pot sales very seriously - with their own lawyers. Spend a few minutes doing an online search and you will easily find a list of Michigan municipalities who have been or are being sued because they attempted to limit pot sales. Here is a partial list I found this morning: Port Huron, Menominee, Traverse City, Westland, Alpena, and Mt. Pleasant.

While I am on the subject, I must mention that our Police Department has been monitoring activity in Lowell and to date have not reported any amount of nefarious behavior at any of the businesses we have allowed to open. No crime wave has hit our town on the heels of pot shops being here. On the contrary, several business locations have been greatly improved with hundreds of thousands of dollars of construction, parking lot creation and landscaping. If not all of the shops survive, then at a bare minimum we have several commercial properties that have had major improvements made to them and M-21 is looking better and better from East to West.

Which brings me back around to the recent influx of over a quarter of a million dollars that we can use to make our local streets better? Having worked with him through several budget cycles, I can attest to Mike Burns’ ability to crunch numbers and set and maintain a budget. One of the frustrations of funding in a small town like Lowell is that the State of Michigan has balanced its budget by limiting the shared funding that used to get distributed to us. We do not have much room to grow in our borders - Burns calculated that in order to equal the $282,267.20 we received from pot tax, we would have had to have a construction boom to the tune of 36 million dollars to create an amount of property tax equal to the tax income from pot sales. Short of building a sky scraper somewhere, that simply would not happen.

Like it or not, adult use marijuana sales are here to stay. I applaud the City Council for following the will of the voters. I am grateful for the money and hassle saving advice of our attorney and I am really excited to see how we can best put that $282,267.20 to use in fixing our streets