Kane County officials this week revealed, for the first time, how much the county collects from local dispensaries since instituting a marijuana sales tax in 2019.
The county imposes a 3.75% tax on adult-use cannabis sales, the highest allowed by state law. Since April, when the fifth dispensary opened — Consume Cannabis in St. Charles — tax collections averaged about $120,000 every month through the end of the year. The county also gets a cut of the state tax on cannabis operations, amounting to about $7,000 per month.
If those totals endure for an entire year, the county would receive $1.5 million annually in cannabis tax revenue. In comparison, state cannabis tax collections on retail sales totaled $1.3 billion through October.
State law initially blocked the county from disclosing tax data because there were fewer than five dispensaries operating there, which could make it easy to tie specific tax collections to a single business. That could make a dispensary showing particularly high volumes of business an attractive crime target.
In addition to Consume Cannabis in St. Charles, Kane County’s other dispensaries include Zen Leaf in St. Charles, Verilife in North Aurora, and nuEra and