The Steel Town That Funded College on Cannabis Tax

Colorado became the first state in the country to open a legal recreational cannabis market on January first, two thousand fourteen. Amendment sixty-four, which voters had approved in two thousand twelve, allowed licensed retail sales and taxed them. Every county and city in Colorado then faced a local choice: embrace the industry and the tax revenue, or zone it out.

Pueblo County chose to embrace it.

Pueblo in two thousand fourteen was post-industrial, high-unemployment, and not wealthy. The Colorado Fuel and Iron mill had been closing in stages for decades. The manufacturing base that had sustained the Bessemer neighborhood and the broader city for a century was gone. What Pueblo had left was geography, a willing workforce, and the legal authority to say yes to something that richer Colorado communities were saying no to.

Wealthier communities along the Front Range, Boulder suburbs, Colorado Springs municipalities with strong evangelical political cultures, pushed cannabis businesses out. Pueblo didn't. The tax revenue that followed went, by local decision, into a scholarship fund for Pueblo students. By two thousand twenty, the fund was paying for college for students who could not otherwise afford it.

The story of the Pueblo cannabis scholarship is sometimes told as an economic oddity, the post-industrial steel town that discovered a new industry. It is also a story about who gets to decide what happens on their land, and what communities do with the decision when they get it. Pueblo made a bet on itself with a product that its wealthier neighbors declined to touch, and it used the proceeds to send its kids to school.