The state of Florida is preparing to increase the number of licenses available for medical marijuana treatment centers, according to a rule change released late Monday. 

The proposal would allow the state to issue up to 22 additional licenses, and license application fee will also be increased from $60,830 to $146,000, making each license more expensive. The Department of Health also increased the fee that businesses pay to renew their licenses from $60,000 to more than $1.3 million. 

Another key provision in the release revealed that the additional licenses would be released in a batch format, so an unknown number of licenses would be available in the first application run, with more batches to come — although the number of batches planned, or how many licenses would be available in each batch, are currently unknown. 

Florida is currently home to 22 licensed MMTC operators that were responsible for more than $1 billion in revenue for the first six months of 2022, according to Headset, a cannabis data analytics company. 

The rules came after some confusion in how licenses were granted in the state’s original 2017 law that provided for legalized medical marijuana sales. The law provided for additional licenses based on increased population, but didn’t outline a method for deciding how those licenses would be allocated. 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he believed the license fees should increase in August. 

“I mean, these are very valuable licenses,” DeSantis said at the time. “I would charge them an arm and a leg. I mean, everybody wants these licenses.” 

Also included in the rule change is a framework on how to address the original law’s requirement that officials give special preference to license applicants that “own one or more facilities that are, or were, used for the canning, concentration, or otherwise processing of citrus fruits or citrus molasses and will use or convert the facility for the processing of marijuana."