KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City, Missouri, leaders are reacting to the passage of Amendment 3, which will make recreational marijuana legal for purchase in the state by February.

“The statewide referendum allowed local governments to try to make sure that we were collecting tax revenues,” Mayor Quinton Lucas said in an interview with FOX4 Thursday.

Once recreational marijuana can be purchased, the state will collect 6% of the tax revenue, but cities can ask for 3% too, making a recreational marijuana purchase potentially 9% in the future in the city limits.

“That’s why we’ve targeted our funding to go towards neighborhoods, dumping pick up, trash removal. A lot of people have talked about the way our streets and highways have looked,” Lucas said.

He says the city’s taking over some of that trash work from the state, saying they haven’t necessarily met their obligations. Lucas says the tax revenue from recreational marijuana purchases would go to help pay for city staff to clean up the streets.

“This tax allows us to do so. I think it’s responsible and frankly it allows us to not just have good regulation of marijuana but also to make sure that we’re doing the enforcement necessary and fully funding our neighborhoods’ department,” Lucas said.

Even though marijuana’s still illegal at the federal level, Lucas says he’s not worried the federal government will go after them on their policy.

“Missouri’s not the first state to legalize recreational marijuana,” he continued. “We’ve had medicinal marijuana for some time now. In both of those situations, we have seen that there was not some sort of federal action that’s trying to limit our steps.”

In order for the city to collect the extra 3% tax, they’d have to ask residents to approve it. Lucas said this would go on the April 4 ballot for residents to consider.

The city council has to approve of this actually going on the ballot before that can happen though. They’d need to approve of this by the end of January.