The Fund — follow the money
WatchdogWhen New Mexico legalized adult-use cannabis, Las Cruces leaders talked about the excise tax as community money — for substance abuse and mental health, quality of life, and repairing the harms of prohibition. Four years in, that money flows into the city's general fund, unrestricted — no dedicated fund, no published accounting — and the newest proposals on the table would spend it on redevelopment districts and a police real-time surveillance center. Yesca tracks the gap between the promise and the ledger.
Estimated city share of the excise tax, by fiscal year
Yesca estimate = Las Cruces adult-use sales (state CCD data) × excise rate in effect × 33.33% municipal share. City-reported figures from council presentations shown for comparison.
Reported figures: ≈$87K (FY22) and ≈$847K (FY23) per city finance staff to council, Nov 2023 (Las Cruces Sun-News); ≈$1.5M cumulative as of March 2024 (Las Cruces Bulletin). Estimates run higher than early reported receipts because distributions lag sales by ~2 months and the state nets out refunds and admin costs. No newer official accounting has been published — that's part of the problem.
The promise: what leaders said this money was for
"I would like to see the cannabis tax revenue be used for substance abuse, mental health…" — Mayor Ken Miyagishima, June 2022 (KVIA)
"This unexpected tax revenue — I would really like to see it go toward quality of life." — Councilor Johana Bencomo, June 2022 (KVIA)
Councilor Becky Corran pressed for "an added lens of equity" — steering money toward the people disproportionately harmed by cannabis enforcement. Community options floated at the council's November 2023 work session: expungement help for old cannabis convictions, the Telshor Fund (health care for sick and indigent residents), workforce training, a fire inspector for dispensary safety, and DWI-recognition training.
The pivot: where the money is actually headed
By March 2024, with ≈$1.5 million banked, city finance staff put two "priority projects" in front of council for the cannabis money:
1. Metropolitan Redevelopment Areas (MRAs) — public infrastructure investment in the El Paseo/S. Solano and W. Picacho corridors. Defensible, but already a budget priority with its own tools (including a state MRA fund and the downtown grant program).
2. Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC) — an LCPD surveillance hub (≈$1.1M ask) wiring public cameras into a live monitoring center. Whatever you think of an RTCC, it is the opposite of what was pitched in 2021–2022: cannabis-prohibition-repair money spent on expanding police surveillance capacity.
Because the revenue is unrestricted, council can fund both with no further public process. No dedicated cannabis fund, spending policy, or annual public report exists as of August 2026.
Timeline of the fund
- Jul 2021City hosts cannabis town hall
Ahead of legalization, Las Cruces invites residents to weigh in on how cannabis and its revenue should work in the city (KRWG).
- Apr 2022Adult-use sales begin
Las Cruces is a top-3 state cannabis market from day one. First-month city sales: ≈$3.2M total.
- Jun 2022The promises
Mayor: substance abuse, mental health, homelessness. Councilors: quality of life, equity lens. Council decides to wait and watch the revenue grow.
- Nov 2023$900K on the table, community options listed
Finance staff report ≈$87K (FY22) + ≈$847K (FY23). Options discussed: Telshor Fund, a dedicated special-revenue fund by ordinance, expungement assistance, workforce training, safety inspections. No decision made; money keeps flowing to the general fund.
- Mar 2024The pivot to MRAs + police surveillance
With ≈$1.5M collected, staff present MRAs and the LCPD Real-Time Crime Center as the two priority uses. Council calls both "top priorities" — possible because the money is unrestricted.
- 2025–2026Quiet absorption
Cannabis excise tax appears in the FY27 budget only as a general-fund revenue line alongside GRT and franchise fees. Yesca's estimate of the city's cumulative share now exceeds $4.2M — with no dedicated fund and no public accounting of what it bought.
Protect the fund — what to demand, and how
1. A dedicated fund. Council can create a special-revenue fund by ordinance (an option its own staff described in 2023) so every cannabis dollar is tracked from receipt to spend.
2. An annual public accounting. One page, once a year: received, spent, on what. The state publishes its side monthly — the city should match it.
3. The community process that was promised. A public ranking of uses — expungement, behavioral health, the Telshor Fund, youth programs — before another dollar is committed.
Do it yourself: IPRA-request the cannabis excise-tax receipts and expenditure detail from the City Clerk (records@lascruces.gov); speak at council (1st & 3rd Mondays, 1:00 pm, City Hall, 700 N Main); and watch the budget book's "cannabis excise tax" line each May.
New Mexico — every city, every check
State distribution recordsThe state publishes what it actually wires to every local government each month — buried in 50 spreadsheets on the Tax & Revenue site. Yesca read all of them. This is the real cannabis money map: $55M distributed to 93 cities, towns, villages, and counties since 2022 — and under §7-1-6.68 NMSA, every dollar lands in an unrestricted general fund with no earmark requirement anywhere in the state. The Las Cruces story is the statewide default: your town almost certainly has this money, and almost certainly has never itemized it.
Las Cruces: the number the city never said out loud
Yesca's statute estimate vs. what the state actually wired (TRD distribution detail), by fiscal year. Solid = actual wire. Outlined = the estimate from reported sales.
Who got what — the top of the money map
All-time actual distributions (net of admin), per state records. Hover for detail.
Every local government, searchable
Click a row for its monthly checks and links. "Per resident" uses 2020 Census / city-dataset population where known. Town Square links open that community's board on this platform — the place to start asking where its money went.
Months are the report periods on TRD's files; cash arrives ~2 months after the sales accrue. "Net" subtracts the state's admin fee. Source: TRD CAN Distribution Detail by Location.
The Record — what they said in the room
Mined from our archiveYesca searched 840+ archived meetings of the Las Cruces City Council and Doña Ana County Commission — every transcript in our video collection — for cannabis, the excise tax, the Telshor Fund, expungement, and the Real-Time Crime Center. This is the public paper trail of the fund debate, with a link to the tape for every quote. (Council emails aren't public-posted — that's what the IPRA request is for.)
The Mention-o-Meter: talk vs. money
Green bars: how many times cannabis came up in meetings each quarter. Ink line: Yesca's estimate of the excise-tax dollars accumulating in the general fund. Watch the talk fade while the money keeps climbing.
Evidence reel
Auto-captioned excerpts (verbatim, unedited) around every money-relevant cannabis mention. Filter by thread, search, and click through to the video — each link notes roughly how far into the meeting the moment lands.
Meetings that talked about it most
Cannabis-family mentions per meeting, top of the archive. These are the tapes worth watching end to end.
The Instrument Panel
Ten gauges, one storyEvery gauge below is drawn live from the baked-in public data — hover anything for exact numbers. Built for visual people, including the numbers kind.
💰 Fund thermometer — the pile nobody itemizes
Cumulative estimated city share of the excise tax, month by month. Flags mark the only three times the city has said a number out loud.
🗓 Sales heat calendar
Every month since legalization, shaded by total sales. Darker = bigger. Spot the Aprils (4/20) and Decembers.
🪜 The tax staircase
The excise rate climbs one point every July until 18% in 2030. Each step shows the extra city revenue a point is worth at current volume.
🏁 Per-capita race
Trailing-12-month sales per resident (2020 Census). Same scale on every panel — that's the point.
🥧 Las Cruces' slice of the state
LC's share of statewide cannabis sales, monthly. A steady slice of a growing pie.
🧾 The shrinking basket
Average spend per transaction in Las Cruces. Falling prices are the quiet story under the steady totals.
🩺 The medical fade
Medical share of Las Cruces sales. Patients didn't vanish — they became customers, and their purchases became taxable… except medical stays excise-exempt.
🌌 Dispensary constellation
Every cannabis business registration, plotted where it sits in the city. Shade = year first licensed (light → early, dark → recent). Hover a star for its name.
🏢 Who owns the green rush
Operators ranked by number of registered locations — the chain-vs-local picture.
🌱 Green-rush survival
Registrations by the year they first appeared, and how many of each class kept renewing. The 2022 land rush had casualties.
▸ Data table (every month, all metrics — for the spreadsheet people)
Sales & Stats
CCD reported dataStraight from the state Cannabis Control Division's reporting portal (CROP) — every dispensary reports every sale. Las Cruces has been a top-3 New Mexico cannabis market since legal sales began in April 2022, trading the #2 spot with the border boomtown of Sunland Park.
Las Cruces monthly cannabis sales
Adult-use (green) stacked on medical (marigold). Hover/tap points for exact figures.
City vs. city — all-time sales since April 2022
Total reported sales; per-resident column uses 2020 Census population. Sunland Park's wild per-capita number is the Texas border effect — El Paso shops here.
Statewide license counts (CCD)
Dispensary & License Directory
City GIS recordsEvery cannabis business registration the City of Las Cruces has issued, from the city's own GIS records — searchable. Multiple yearly registrations for the same business are collapsed; the renewal count is itself a signal of who has stayed in business.
Address shown is the registration's mailing address — for multi-state operators this can be an out-of-town HQ. Verify any state license at the RLD license lookup, or see the city's official map.
The Social Equity Record
Mission vs. realityLegal cannabis in New Mexico came with an explicit equity mandate. Yesca keeps the mission statement and the actual application data side by side.
The mission, in the state's own words
The Cannabis Regulation Act (2021) directs the state to "encourage and promote full participation in the cannabis industry" by three named groups: communities disproportionately harmed by cannabis-prohibition arrests, rural communities likely to be impacted by cannabis production, and agricultural producers from economically disadvantaged communities — including tribal, acequia, and land-grant communities.
The Cannabis Control Division's tools for that mandate: cut-rate microbusiness licenses, reduced plant fees, the "NM Micro Biz" label, required social & economic equity plans from every applicant, and a $5M state loan program for microbusinesses from impacted communities (NM Finance Authority, 2022).
Who actually holds the licenses
CCD-published demographics of 3,279 "controlling persons" on license applications (August 2024) — the application-file data behind the mission statement.
Doña Ana County is ~68% Hispanic (Census). Statewide, microbusiness licenses — the CRA's main equity vehicle — number 675 producers vs. 400 full producers, but no public dataset yet ties licenses to the three named equity groups. That gap is itself a transparency finding: the state measures sales daily and equity almost never.
What the community told the CCD (equity survey)
The division's own public survey behind its equity plan — top answers, rendered from the live CROP data feed.
Why this belongs next to the tax fund
Equity was the moral case for legalization — and for the tax. When cannabis revenue drifts to surveillance instead of expungement, the same communities the CRA names as beneficiaries end up funding their own policing. Watching the fund is watching the equity promise.
Primary documents: CCD Social Equity page · NM Social Equity Best Practices (PDF) · Cannabis Regulatory Advisory Committee equity memo (PDF)
Sources & Methods
Show your work- Sales & license data: NM RLD Cannabis Reporting Online Portal (CROP) — per-city monthly sales, statewide license counts, and the equity survey, pulled from the portal's public JSON feeds.
- Dispensary directory: City of Las Cruces GIS — Issued Cannabis Business Registrations (the layer behind the city's official map).
- Tax law: Cannabis Tax Act, §7-42 NMSA 1978 (rate schedule) and §7-1-6.68 NMSA (33.33% municipal distribution); NM Taxation & Revenue — Cannabis Excise Tax.
- The fund story: KRWG (Jul 2021 town hall) · KVIA (Jun 2022 promises) · Las Cruces Sun-News (Nov 2023, $900K options) · Las Cruces Bulletin (Mar 2024, MRA + RTCC pivot) · City budget recap (May 2026).
- Equity: CCD Social Equity (incl. Aug 2024 controlling-person demographics) · $5M microbusiness loan program.
Methodology & honest caveats
The excise estimates are estimates. Yesca computes: adult-use sales × the rate in effect that month × 33.33%. Actual monthly distributions differ because the state nets out refunds and up to 3% admin cost, distributions lag sales, and reporting-location errors happen. The city-reported figures are quoted wherever one exists — the whole point is that too few exist.
Medical sales are excise-exempt and excluded from tax estimates (they still appear in the sales charts). Cannabis purchases also pay regular gross receipts tax, which is not counted here. Data refreshes via scripts/yesca_refresh.py; the "as of" stamp in the header tells you how fresh the numbers are.
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YESCA · Perfect World Project · everythingisperfect.org
Lawful public oversight, not legal or financial advice. All data from public sources, cited above.
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