A Colorado City Is Using Tax Money from Weed to Help the Homeless
Overall, marijuana legalization has been a huge success for Colorado. Legal weed has been bringing the state big bucks since 2014, and it's even helped keep the parks clean.
Now, the city of Aurora, Colorado, has found a positive way to put some of its new pot cash to good use by channeling $1.5 million of tax revenue from cannabis sales toward helping the homeless, Huffington Post reports.
Earlier this month, the Aurora City Council announced a series of nonprofit organizations that would receive portions of the $1.5 million—a third of the $4.5 million the city expects to receive from marijuana sales taxes over the next two years.
Colfax Community Network, an organization that works with low-income and homeless families temporarily living in motels, will receive $200,000. Other chunks of the money will be used to supply nonprofits with vans to assist in "metro-wide homeless outreach" and more.
"We wanted to be able to show citizens that we are having a positive impact on the community," Bob Roth—city councilman and former chairman of Aurora's legal weed committee—told the Denver Post last October, back when the idea to funnel marijuana tax revenue toward combatting homelessness was originally presented.