Ordinarily, the more workers a business has, there's en economy of scale and costs should drop. MV is following the State's lead where the largest or most profitable pay more. It sure sounds like Measure P would discourage businesses from adding additional workers.

Why should pot be charged an additional surcharge? It's a blatant revenue grab from the city.

No on P and Q.

What is the city's percentage tax on alcohol and tobacco sales in Mountain View? I would expect it to be the same 9% proposed for cannabis. If it's different, please explain why.

Seems a bit premature to start taxing cannabis when there is not even a single open dispensary. One of the primary benefits of legalizing pot, for those who won't be consuming it, is to have it displace the illegal trade. While availability will play some role in doing that, PRICE is going to be the key driver. Do you see a new, competing business ever open up and succeed without starting off by being price competitive? No. They start off cheaper, grow, drive out the established businesses, then bring their prices up later.
Throughout the state, the uptake on marijuana sales and tax revenue have lagged as much as 50% behind projections. Greedy government needs to pace themselves and wait until the market has grown before tapping into it.

The benefit of Measure P is that it allows the city to acquire financing for improvements now. Google donates a lot to the city, but you cannot take a loan without a guaranteed source of supporting revenue.

There are federal taxes on tobacco products. Cannabis is illegal on federal level, so there is no pot taxes. I personally do not mind the local marijuana tax.

I personally don't like to have pot dispensaries in my neighborhood. At least the city should make money from them, so Q sounds like a good idea. P sounds bad in theory (anti growth) but good in practice given the realities of google traffic. So yes on both Q and P seems like the way to go.

There are actually BALLOT ARGUMENTS against these measures. The Voice must have missed them - being in Palo Alto!

A yes vote on Q sends the clear message MV supports dispensaries as long as they benefit the city.

Vote YES on MV dispensaries, Vote YES on Q!

I agree, and I'm voting Yes on P and Q!

Our City Council worked hard on these measures to make them fair and economically sound, not onerous business-killers.

It's obvious that our current flat business licensing fee isn't fair to small businesses.

More general funds will mean more of what we love about Mountain View.

The one thing we must be vigilant of is that future City Councils might go back to the pre-2014 attitude of zoning for more commercial development than residential and worsening our jobs-housing imbalance. Even with this new small revenue source from employers, we must continue to build housing to have a sustainable, stable, diverse community.

Jeremy Hoffman wrote:

>The one thing we must be vigilant of is that future City Councils might go back to the pre-2014 attitude of zoning for more commercial development than residential and worsening our jobs-housing imbalance.<

The only way to make things better is to be able to house more people closer to their jobs. Regular contributors to Townsquare ALWAYS say no to candidates who are in office because people in office do things that change Mountain View from whatever fantasy world they would like to see. Unless you want more office buildings with more commuter traffic, you must vote for the two incumbents and Lucas Ramirez. Kamei is a shill for Abe-Koga, Hicks is a wild-card (seems to have good planning skills though, so that's cool) and Inks never saw a commercial building project he didn't like.

Yes on Measure P & Q to augment Mountain View's choices for self governance in the future.