MARQUETTE, Mich. (WZMQ) – Michigan municipalities, counties, and tribes are receiving around $100,000,000 this year from Michigan’s Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act. Of that, Marquette is getting just under $300,000 for its general fund, which covers services like police, fire department, road maintenance and more. “It’s per license distribution, and we have five and the per-license distribution is just over $58,000, which is a slight decrease from the prior year of $59,000. So we will be receiving a total of about $291,000,” said Marquette City Manager Karen Kovacs. “As more municipalities are participating and more licenses are out there, the pool is getting spread among a larger number of municipalities, so our distribution is starting to see a little bit of a decline.”
Kovacs said as of now they are unsure if the downward trend will continue. “As we look to the future there’s many different paths this could go down,” said Kovacs. “This could be one where things just start leveling out and we just look at it as this is part of the market and we don’t have a prediction but again, we are budgeting conservatively.”
Whether the funding decreases or not, Kovacs said the dispensaries benefit the city in other ways as well. “If you look at the buildings that some of these establishments are coming into, they are improving a building that was not necessarily useable or improved,” said Kovacs. “So there’s some benefits to this as well, and then there’s others that we see with the money coming in.”
Beyond the counties, municipalities, and tribes, $116,000,000 from the tax was given to the Michigan Transportation Fund and School Aid for K-12 education.
