ST. LOUIS — The City of St. Louis is potentially out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue since October.
The city failed to file paperwork with the state in time to collect sales tax on recreational marijuana. In April 2023, a proposition was passed to add an additional 3% sales tax in St. Louis City.
It was meant to go into effect on Oct. 1, 2023.
Yet, the St. Louis mayor's office says that the proper notification to marijuana purveyors and the required documentation to the State of Missouri's Department of Revenue weren't submitted in time.
"Frustrated is an understatement," 8th Ward Alderwoman Cara Spencer said. "We just came through a very tough budget cycle. We're looking at some very stark figures here."
Initial estimates show about $500,000 lost due to administrative oversight.
"Which is a very significant amount of money for a city that needs every penny it can get," Spencer said.
City staff finally filed the necessary paperwork last week.
A statement from the office of St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones reads:
"While state law does not specifically define who is responsible for submitting the required documents to the Department of Revenue, the bottom line is that St. Louis will be precluded from collecting the additional 3% sales tax on cannabis products. That is unacceptable."
"It's totally within their discretion how to spend their 3% of sales tax revenue," Dan Viets, a Columbia attorney with the Missouri Affiliate of the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws, said. "Whereas the 6% statewide sales tax is specifically allocated to three purposes. That is the funding of addiction treatment, the funding of veteran services, and the funding of the state public defender system."
The owner of Star Buds dispensary, Chris Chesley, in University City says an average order is about $50 to $70.
"Missouri enjoys their cannabis so they may have missed out for a couple of months but they will be getting their money once everything gets in order," Chesley said.
The Missouri Department of Revenue has filed a special waiver to begin collecting revenue on Jan. 1, 2024.
"This is absolutely a preventable misstep," Spencer said. "I'm hoping that we can get to the bottom of this in our budget committee. We can get to the bottom of exactly what happened here, and what went wrong so we can make sure that we have clearly defined roles in our city departments that can prevent something like this from ever happening again."
The St. Louis Budget Committee will be meeting next week on Wednesday, Nov. 29 at 9:30 a.m.-10:30 a.m. at St. Louis City Hall.
They'll be discussing staffing shortages and how that may have impacted this lack of filing paperwork for the city's new marijuana sales tax.