ADELANTO — The Adelanto City Council this week adopted a $45.3-million budget through all of its municipal funds, just three years after it declared a fiscal emergency.
Within the last year, the municipality of 31,765 has moved to shore itself up financially by legalizing the cultivation of marijuana within licensed facilities located exclusively within the city’s industrial parks.
While the city is not out of the financial woods or the red just yet, city officials are holding on to the hope that, having laid the foundation of allowing the city to host large scale lucrative cannabis growing operations, the city will be able to tap into a newly-created revenue stream by taxing those operations. This November, the city is putting a citywide measure on the ballot calling for city residents to give City Hall the authority to levy a five percent excise tax on those growing what are contemplated to be, through the application of advance horticultural methods, continual bumper crops. Adelanto, perhaps because of its financial desperation, has gotten in on the ground floor of the marijuana production industry, and could realize upwards of $10 million yearly as growers in the city are aggressively capturing the corner on the market.
Though the city has to this point limited its marijuana-permissiveness to cultivation operations and yet prohibits medical marijuana clinics or dispensaries from operating anywhere within city limits, city officials are looking ahead to the possibility that a statewide initiative to allow cannabis to be used recreationally will pass, and the city intends to have a leg up on other cities by being ready to rake in proceeds from cultivation, manufacturing, business-to-business distribution and transportation, testing and dispensaries.
In the meantime, Adelanto is dealing with fiscal reality and for 2016-17 will need to dip into its reserves because planned-for expenditures will exceed income by roughly $800,000 over the next 12 months, as things currently stand. The $45.3 million figure covers all manner of city spending, including its general fund, enterprise funds, capital funds and special projects. The general fund will see $12.4 million in revenue coming in and $13.2 going out. The difference will be made up by drawing from reserves, which now stand at just over $4 million