Medford, Ore.- The City of Medford has a big decision to make – how to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in marijuana tax.
The city met Thursday night to provide an update on how much money has been collected from marijuana taxes and how much more is expected to come in before the end of its potential projection run.
As of right now, the city has brought in more than $400,000 and is expected to generate a total of $800,000 by 2019.
City manger Brian Sjothun says, at this point it’s too early to say how the money will be spent.
“Most cities are now in the middle of their annual budget process,” he said. For us, we have the ability to wait because we prepare our budget for a two-year time period so we really aren’t in any time crunch to utilize this revenue.”
The city started collecting marijuana revenue in September. The budget committee and city councilors don’t plan to make a decision for several more months.
“It’s a good thing to wait because it’s still an unstable revenue source,” Sjothun said. “We don’t know if this is just a good chunk of change at the beginning of this budget collection or is it going to level out or go down. So we being very conservative is a great thing for us moving forward.”
© 2024 KOBI-TV NBC5. All rights reserved unless otherwise stated.