Amends Chapter 24 and Chapter 32 of the Denver Revised Municipal Code (DRMC) to prohibit the sale of tobacco products to persons under twenty-one years of age and require a license to operate a retail tobacco store. The Committee approved filing this item at its meeting on 9-11-19.
Thank you, Councilman. All right. See no other comments. Madam Secretary, will you please put the next item on our screens? And, Councilman Flynn, you want to go ahead with your comments on 921? Yeah. Thank you, Mr. President. This is a bill that I think has the underlying purpose of prohibiting sales of tobacco products to persons under the age of 21, the raise the age from 18 to 21. And I think everybody up and down the dais, I don't want to I don't think I'm out of line saying that. I think it would pass here pretty easily when it came to committee. However, it had something that none of us had been briefed on or expected, and that was an entirely new policy area, which was to start. Putting distancing requirements between retailers from between retailers of 500 feet and from retailers to certain prohibited locations, including daycare establishments . I understand the reasoning behind putting a distancing requirement of 1000 feet from places where young people who are mobile and can go into stores and might be able to pass for 18 or 21. But a daycare center is not one of those sites. And daycare centers are things that we encourage more and more to be located in neighborhoods, and they can be licensed almost anywhere. You can find one coming in your neighborhood tomorrow. I hope I get some down in my district tomorrow if if I could encourage that. But this was an entirely new policy area we weren't prepared to to fully examine in the committee. So some of the members up here have I've put together an amendment and gotten support from some members here that would delete the distancing from daycare centers and then also delete the distancing between retailers, because the data show that was at 84% of all current licensees, 7-Eleven supermarkets, grocery stores, you know, little neighborhood markets that currently sell cigarets along with groceries and other things. 84% of them would be in violation of the distancing requirement, and they would be grandfathered, of course. But in the backup material we were sent, it was noted that, well, we want to do this because over time maybe some of them will forget and lapse and not apply, reapply every July for that license to preserve their grandfathering, and then they will have to stop selling cigarets. And while that's a laudable goal, the purpose of this ordinance was to prevent sales to people who are under 21. It wasn't to prevent sales to anyone at all from these locations. And so I think there needs to be a broader policy discussion on that aspect of it. But, Mr. President, I wanted to I had a lot of outreach today from the administration and from other backers of the amendment. And I decided that I will hold on to the amendment tonight and offer it next week if that's if that's the course that we decide to do. But I'll be talking with some of the agency folks over the next week and contacting my colleagues with the results. And and we'll see what happens next week at the is there a public hearing on this? Also, Mr. President. I'm looking at here, Madam Secretary. We do not have a public. Okay. We'll just we'll just have a call out then. Yet requested for this? No. I'm not requesting one. Okay. All right. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. Shaping up to be an exciting week for those of you who want to tune in next week for our next episode. All right. Seeing no other comments. That concludes the items to be called out this evening.