A bill for an ordinance concerning the licensing of marijuana businesses, amending the Denver Retail Marijuana Code, Article V of Chapter 6, D.R.M.C. and the Denver Medical Marijuana Code, Art. XII of Chapter 24, D.R.M.C. by capping the total number of licensed locations where marijuana cultivation and sales may be permitted in the city, adopting new procedures for the issuance of retail marijuana cultivation and sales licenses, prohibiting the issuance of new medical marijuana cultivation and sales licenses, and adopted other related amendments. (Special Issues Marijuana Moratorium) Amends the Denver Revised Municipal Code relating to marijuana-related licenses and locations. 
Thank you. Council members. My name is Mike Elliott, executive director of the Marijuana Industry Group. With regards to the pending applications, we are encouraging you to please support these and let these go through. With regards to them, we are trying to find this right balance with the community. We I've certainly spent a number of times listening to other folks, stakeholders, neighborhood groups about finding that right balance, which is why we are supporting the CAPS but would like the pennies to go through because of the commitment that the city has made with the industry. But really, for for my time, I'd really like to focus on one issue that hasn't gotten a lot of attention this evening, and that would be the distance requirements that the new proposed distance requirements from grows to residential communities. Now, the piece of this is in these oversaturated neighborhoods. We need to come up with some clever ways of figuring out how to deal with that. And we're certainly open to talking to the community about maybe incentives and whatnot. But when it gets down to it, a thousand feet from residential and schools dramatically limits the ability of grow facilities to move to other places in the city that are not necessarily saturated. This piece about residential facilities well, I'll tell you, we're going to be at the Denver council meeting tomorrow. The committee meeting tomorrow talking about the odor ordinance. We've been working with the city the on this piece and trying to come up with solutions to that, which is really where a lot of the solution comes from here. But that thousand feet from residential communities, it limits the ability of people to move. And it's quite possibly be going it's quite possibly have people stuck in bad landlord relationships and unable to move. So moving it to 500 feet or getting rid of it altogether seems like a much better way to go. Thank you for your thoughtful deliberation, council members. Thank you, Mr. Elliott. Next, Angelina. Angelina in the room. When I started those stories, he said that our organization. Actually the one that we have trained, we have just. So it must get stranger. And there are trabajadores emotions. Yes. Para el mismo tiempo. Is that Estaban and Comunidades? We know that these businesses generate income and they generate earnings, but we know that they're also affecting our communities. LA Marijuana the battery workforce. Fair or not, I used to observe. Circle impact of. That marijuana will employ people. But there aren't very many studies in regards to the impact up in L.A.. PETROVA Hong Kong is the. Droga that people will will have the people that are employed by this drug. No cat and mouse canister of horribleness. Estén trabalhando being al vocalist Tanya Sosa lo. Issoufou We don't want our youth to be working with something that will damage their health and their future. Queremos Nuestro Nuestro. Seahorse. Continuing as to the end of it things I will Nakahara University area but I support anything we want our children to continue studying and to have a university degree for a better future. Guitars. Yes, thank you. Thank you. All right. We still have some time left that bekind speakers up individually next. Tiffany Goldman is Tiffany Goldman in the room? She left next. Benjamin Roldan. Benjamin Roldan. Please send after Benjamin. Amanda Gonzalez. Thanks you council members. My name is Benjamin. Or then I live in the city of Denver, two 3019 Avenue. And today I want to talk to a point and nobody has talked. And he's how will the environment affects the quality of life of those that live we need that have a masters in urban planning and everything that is taught these how their environment affects the environment that being of the person right and Denver is his training for that approach. He's putting better sidewalks, he's putting better trees, he's playing better roads. It's creating bike lanes in the grow in the neighborhoods of Coalville. Here is when we see the opposite. Right? These neighborhoods have been under desert for centuries. Under the smelters that they were put there, they contaminated their residents and the future of that community. Also, I-70 has been a great impact of this, putting these neighborhoods outside the scope of the city. We see a lack of sidewalks outside of public investment. Until now, we've been seeing a lot of investment, but these investment has been negative to these communities. First, prices in rent have been increasing, taking out the communities that are most vulnerable. Most of the marijuana impacts have damage the well-being of these communities. Just because he makes marijuana more accessible to the kids, they see it as some commodity that they should use. Maybe that happens in the whole city. But these neighborhoods are vulnerable, so maybe they don't have the opportunity to go to a place or go to swimming classes or take music lessons. These communities are working class and they don't have the capabilities economically, socially or culturally to fight for their future. So what I'm asking is for please consider this approach and do not damage longer the future of their residents. So please says yes to Ortega's proposals. Thank you. Thank you. Amanda Gonzalez. Good evening. My name is Amanda Gonzalez. I manage a business at 3937 West Colfax. Let's see. I know many of you from my previous work in the nonprofit sector. Prior to working with Southwest Alternative Care, I worked to better the lives of Latinos, working class people and middle class folks in Colorado with Claro and Sealife. Part of what I love about my current position is that I get to put a lot of the practices, a lot of the policies that I was advocating for in my previous position into action. At our business, we've never paid an employee minimum wage. Our non probationary wage for a most entry level employee is currently 1150 an hour plus tips. We also offer paid sick days and vacation time. Additionally, this team is the most diverse that I've ever worked with. 40% of our staff identify as people of color. 20% are out as LGBT at work. And an additional 20% of our staff live in the same zip codes as our shop and are able to walk to work. Although this industry is not always portrayed in a flattering light, we are good employers. In fact, we're the kind of small businesses where coworkers feel like family, and we work hard every day to create the kind of jobs, work, environment and communities that will make our employees and our city proud. The cost of doing all of this is tremendous. Updates to buildings can cost millions of dollars and licenses can cost tens of thousands more. Once a business is open, we pay our retail employees out of our profits. Because of IRS Code 280, which limits what we can deduct as business expenses while our business does not have a pending application. I'm standing in solidarity with my fellow CEOs, business owners and business owners who invested thousands, if not millions of dollars in reliance on a city process that has traditionally license business, that has followed the rules. As business owners and business leaders, we are doing our very best to improve our communities. Preventing is preventing pending business applications from being approved could be devastating for many local Denver residents and businesses, causing people who live and work to lose the money they invest, they've invested and causing our employees to lose their jobs. It would also make it even harder for us to create the kinds of jobs in the communities that we would like to thank you for your consideration. Thank you. All right. We that is hour one hour, courtesy of public hearing, as well as the allotment for the Spanish translation. So thank you to all our speakers and our apologies for those that did not have the opportunity to speak. We are moving on to questions, and I would just like to say that counsel, we have questions. We have seven amendments and then we have the actual bill to discuss. So if there is any way we could follow the premise of less is more, that would be fantastic. So we'll start with questions. I'm scrolling down towards the bottom. I see. Councilwoman Ortega. Thank you, Mr. President. I want to move to amend Council Bill 16 to 64. In the following particulars. They're just two in question. But, Councilwoman, hold on before. This is what I. This is what I do. Any questions for speakers? I'll go questions first, and then we're going to go. Amendments. The same order that we gave the presentation. So if if there's any way we can just go in that order. That would be great. You will absolutely get your opportunity for the amendment. I just think that would be easier for the floor. I want to make sure we get through questions first for council members, haven't any speakers or to Councilwoman Canete or to David Broadwell about any bill or amendment, if we could just do those questions first and then we'll come to the amendment if that's okay with you. Questions of some of the speakers. Okay. Thank you. The first one is Rita. I can't pronounce the last name, too, Lasky. I don't know if she's still here. I. Will you come to the microphone? So you talked about that. You. You have had a lease for five years and a location. I signed the lease for five years. You signed it for five years? How long ago did you sign that lease? Signed it in November. Okay. I thought the way you had explained that. You said you had a lease for five. Sorry. Okay. I signed it. So, do you have an existing operating business? No. I'm waiting for licenses, but, you know, I am kind of open. That's all I need to know. I have a number of questions, and we're all going to be asking questions. Thank you very much. The next person is. Nick Lovullo. I'm not asking you to come up. I just want to. You made a comment about we should be staying out of regulating this industry. We should just leave it as a free market. If you if you are going to come up and I know Councilman Ortega asked you that if you're going to rebut, I would please ask that you come. I'm not asking for a rebuttal. Okay. So. So I'm just I'm just making reference to, you know, a comment. I want I want to be fair to the people. If we can't, we're not to comment, period right now. So I would just ask if if you have a question, go. So but I find it unfair to to have some I stand up, give a comment and not allow them to rebut. If we're not in the comment period, if we're not in the comment, if we're in a comment period, feel free to say whatever you want. But at this point. For this one until the comment. Okay, thank you. All right. Let's see the the next one. And Michael Liebowitz. Rabinowitz. But if you can come forward, I do have a question for you. The location on West 38th Avenue is was the issue that it was within a thousand feet of a school? Is that why you were being told that you couldn't? Yes, but it was approved as a thousand feet within the pedestrian walkway. So when I went forward with it, it was initially approved. So I think. So. So were you told that when you made application that part of your responsibility was to look and make sure that there was no school? Because the school provision has been in place for quite some time. It absolutely has. In fact, it's 0.4 miles on Google Maps. The issue is not to get too much in my detail, but it's like a corner yard of the school to like the back. Part of my house, the property line. Feet. But yeah, as the straight line goes, it ends up being 990 something feet. So. Thank you. I think that's it for right now. Go ahead. Thank you, Councilwoman Councilman Flynn. Well, thanks to President Pro Tem Rita Chadwick, is she you're still here. I want to ask you just one question, if you could come up. Thank you. And Patrick O'Malley also. Rita, where is your business? 1136 Yuma. It's zip code to zero four. Okay. And you live in Greenwood Village? I live in Greenwood Village and have a lot of businesses in Denver. Okay. And does Greenwood Village allow marijuana businesses? No. Have you ever gone to the Greenwood Village City Council and ask them to change that? No. But they have applied this Greenwood Village. Okay. But you haven't lobbied your own city to allow these businesses. No. Okay. And Mr. O'Malley, same question. You live in Longmont. I know there are some some some shops around outside the city limits, but the city of Longmont, my understanding is, does not permit recreational marijuana either. You're 100% correct. Have you ever asked Longmont to accept these means? As I know, in Littleton, for instance, there's a drive to open up Littleton. I don't know if they've done it yet or not. Well, well, certainly, Major. Just being one small businessman, that would be probably a gargantuan task. But I did view Denver as being basically the Silicon Valley of marijuana and, quite frankly, the optimal place to build such a business. Mm hmm. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Mr. President, for a time, I'll defer my other question. I just wanted to ask Mr. Park. Maybe I'll see him later, but I just was curious when Denver stopped being cool in the first place. But I'll ask you later. I said it was cool again. I didn't know. I didn't know he had stopped. But thank you. Makes Councilman Flynn, Councilwoman Black. Thank you, Mr. President. Is Gregory Wright still here? All right. Well, if he's not here, I don't have a question for you. Thank you, Councilman Clark. Thank you, Mr. President. Am I right? Go ahead, Councilman. Before you go ahead. Oh, am I right in that I can ask questions of Councilwoman Kennedy as the as the one who proposed this at this time? Oh. Mr. President. I'm sorry. Yeah. Any questions of council member? You can do as well. So as we've been going through this, there's a lot in here with a lot of amendments that take it in a lot of different directions. I kind of break it into three areas. There's the proposal on the table. Councilwoman can with the caps, how do we grow? How do we handle locations moving forward? We also have how do we handle pending applications, applications that are in the queue right now? And then how do we look at protecting neighborhoods, especially neighborhoods that are I can't remember the word that we're using now, oversaturated. I'll stick with that until I can find out one. So, Councilman, can you could you just speak briefly to the pending side? I know there are a lot of amendments that get to the protection for neighborhoods to meet. I feel of what you've proposed is the caps and how we move forward in total. I personally think, you know, it might be useful if we looked at all three of these and almost voted on all three of these separately. Could you speak a little bit to what's in yours just on pending and what it would take to kind of vote separately on that? Thank you. Councilman Clark. So, in fact, I think we did in committee go through and vote on each of these types of issues through straw polling. So in part, I mean, I say that it's ironic that my name is on this bill because mostly I added things to the bill based on all of the feedback from the community as well as from the council. So, you know, each of the things that got added came from those straw polls. So the bill has the two protections for communities are the caps and the distancing requirements. And just to review the districts, the thousand foot residential buffer zone eliminates 60% of the locations for grows. The schools limitation of a thousand feet eliminates about 10% of the locations for growth. Now, some of those are hit twice. So what I generally say to folks is it will limit between 60 and 70% of locations for transfers of locations or for new locations. So that is the that is the neighborhood protection piece. And then the pending applications. The bill has a safety clause at the end of it. And we did we voted on this in committee two times at least. So to your to your request, it it was it would not be here if it had not survived two committee votes already of a committee of the whole. And I know that you were absent for some of those meetings because of family obligations. But but we had we had voted on it twice. And that's why that that provision is still in the bill. And I think that had to do with the very far distance that those businesses had gone, that 90% of the pending were in the building phase. They were not just having their paperwork reviewed. They were actually in the construction phase of building, permitting, etc.. So, so so that was the the reason why that provision is still in the bill. We'll get to vote on it again with Councilwoman Ortega's amendment number two. So there will be a vote on that issue in this in this next round. I hope that answers your question. Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. President. Undue concentration was the word I was looking for. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman Clarke. Councilman Espinosa. Questions. Maybe you should have been concentrating for Nick, what you did say. And go ahead and if you can come up here. Is. We are several standard deviations away from what people care about. What do people. Said were several standard deviations away from the largest problem facing the city when Denver when marijuana is 0.03% of all crime in Denver. Yes, that's what I said. I don't know. I'm still not understanding what that means. It means you're focusing your focus for the last five months on the tiniest quintile. Something that shouldn't have been really a priority. That's what I'm saying. And so what should be our priorities? Around this business. Well, it. What should be your priority as far as as far as marijuana and regulating dispensaries is concerned? Your top priority should be agreeing with what you have already decided to do, which is fulfilling the laws of the past and allowing everybody whose applications are pending through that should be number one priority. I don't even know I'm put on the spot. I look, I'm happy to. You know. No, I was asking because I don't I. I misunderstood. I understood it the way I wrote it. So thank you. Okay. And then so that was my only question, actually. Thank you. Councilman Espinosa. Councilman Brooks. Okay. Yeah. Thank you, Mr. President. I have a just a couple of folks I want to hear from from the community. Is Nancy Grace Jones in here from Globeville? Can I ask you a quick question? Come to the mike. Yeah. I can't hear you from there. You can come around. And Nola, if you would. Come on up and follow her as well. Appreciate it. So. You know, we've heard a lot from the industry. We heard from a few community folks about some of the concerns. I think it's really interesting that there's business individuals you represent one of them in the community that are are really concerned about the concentration, the saturation in this area. And so just love for for you to talk about your concern specifically for a couple of seconds. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman Brooks and the other council members for hearing me. Yes, I'm a business owner in Globeville, and I got involved with. Globeville as. Part of my my moral compass. About being a good corporate citizen. I got involved with the Globeville planning process. And here. We have the Globeville. Plan. Which has. Extensive information in it about land use. For the Globeville neighborhood. We have the Health Impact Assessment, which also talks about for the Globeville, O'Leary, Swansea and Neighborhoods. And we've created. A vision which Mayor Hancock. Has uplifted. The neighborhood plan. Says one of the six priorities in the North Denver Cornerstone Collaborative because it has been a neglected area. And we have a promise here from the. City about what we can't, how. We can transform a neglected and abused neighborhood. And you know what? This process has set up an adverse. Adversarial nature between the marijuana. Businesses. And the community members, which I think is very unfair. I'm a business owner. Council members have said. I've heard them say unintended consequences. City Council did not. Create the saturation problem. Zoning and zoning and free market did. Well, guess what? I didn't create it either. It's not the. Residents faults there that are. Low income people. That have no other place to live. Unintended consequences of having these marijuana businesses. Yes, you acted in good faith, but guess what? Don't blame it on us. Either, because we want to protect children from the schools. Children in schools. And we have people who are living right next door to marijuana businesses. And probably you don't do that. Your children or grandchildren aren't in those situations. So again, it's a problem for city. Council to figure this. Out. Maybe there needs to be some deeper diving on those pending applications, but with. 441 locations Elyria, Swansea and Globeville have 25% with 2% of the population. It is not fair and balanced. City Council didn't intend for that to happen, but that's what it is. And adding more, even. Adding three more in Swansea, a three gross, I mean three marijuana businesses that will be now next to a city park. How is that fair and balanced? It's not okay for the neighborhoods to bear to carry that anymore. So anyway, I mean, I had lots more comments. Yeah, I think. Thank you so much. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity, Robert. And then I'm going to bring up Nola, who represents a nonprofit. Live well and a lot of neighbors there. What you know, the crux of the argument tonight is around pending the pending applications. You know, why are you all organizing against the pending applications, especially in Angie's? Well, we've looked at the specific locations of the pending locations within Elyria and Swansea in particular. There are three that are directly adjacent to. Denham Park, two. Cultivation and one retail. Which we're very concerned. One of the committee community members that wasn't able to speak tonight lives adjacent to that park. So there is residential. And a park. And there's already, you know, several blocks away. There's already a whole cluster of cultivation along York and Josephine there that's already giving the orders and so on. So it's cases like that that we really need to think about with these pending licenses. If these are responsible neighbor or businesses that care about the neighborhoods, would they want to go right into the middle of a residential neighborhood? Could could we do anything with circumstances like this where these pending licenses are really going to affect the quality of. Life in these neighborhoods? Could we look at some of these cases one by one? Right. Okay. Thank you. That's it, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilman Brooks. All right. We're going to a second round of questions. And once again, colleagues, if we could try to get them, move them through as fast as we can. Councilwoman Ortega, you're up. I have a question either for Marlee or for Stacie Loucks. And this is about the omnibus bill that we had adopted. It's my recollection that there were some provisions in there that had a direct impact on pending applications back then when that omnibus bill was adopted. I don't know which one of you be able to address this. There were some provisions that the the the omnibus bill did affect existing pending applications. And I forget who addressed this, but that changed the distance measuring method from direct pedestrian access to straight line method, and it impacted medical centers only, not retail. They were already straight line and it affected medical centers distance from schools and also from daycare centers. And I just think it was important to remind the audience that we have done this in the past. And, you know, it's completely within our purview to be able to do this because this is still not a legal industry in the in the federal government. I so I think it was important to just clarify that. I want to just make a very brief comment, as we have heard. Councilwoman, I don't want to interrupt. This is important note, but it's a comment. If we. Have neighbors, if we are going. To have. A laugh, if we're. Going to. Have insulting. That is that is your prerogative when you get to the comment period. But I'm trying to get us to move through as efficiently as possible so we could just get to questions. We'll go to the amendments. I just I want to get this through without people going on tangents. And so if we could just things. For residents that have been given to the industry people. So I would. Perfect. Thank you. And any other questions, Councilor want to take? No. All right. Thank you. Councilman, questions were still on. Councilman Espinosa. My question was on one of the amendments. I'll defer. Councilman Flint. Thank you, Mr. President. Is the gentleman still here who had the shop on West Colfax that the inspector came into? So we're. Here? Yeah. He's. He's gone. Okay. I was just looking for a clarification on what happened there. Is Mali, could you answer another question for me in the draft bill? There is a clause that talks about one of the. Or David? Either one. There's a clause. There's a section in the bill that talks about the director of excise and license coming up with procedures during the blind lottery so that an entrant would have better odds of winning a license by proposing a location other than in the, whatever we're calling them, neighborhoods now. Do we have what what procedures do we have in mind? I'm a little uncomfortable voting yes or no without understanding what might have been discussed that that I'm not aware of. Does anybody know what procedures, excise and licenses discussed? David Broadwell, assistant city attorney, and I may defer to Councilwoman Canady to respond as well. But let me echo something she said a while ago, which is just bear in mind that if the Fifth Amendment, Councilman Clark is going to offer is adopted, it will strike that language. So it'll be a moot point. But if that language does remain in the bill, the sort of thing that was intended, it would be to say that if you've got an entrant in the lottery and they're proposing a location that's not in one of the more kind of concentrated neighborhoods, they might get their name in the hat twice as opposed to once, thus improving their chance of a draw. And if you're familiar, well, I won't use any analogies, but there are other lotteries that work like that, and that's the idea that was intended when that was originally drafted. Okay. Thank you. I believe that's all, Mr. President. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Flynn. We're still on questions, Councilwoman Black. Thank you. So there are three potential pending rows across from a park in Globeville. Larry and Swansea are the owners of those available to answer questions. I'm just curious if how far along they are in their construction. Now here. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman Black. Still on questions, Councilman Espinosa. Mr. President, if I may. Go ahead, Councilwoman. I don't know. We have a list of all the pending grows in front of us, and we have someone from from CPD here. So I'm going to. If it's okay with the president, I'd like to ask her to look and see if she can figure out which of these addresses are the ones. And then two to come back to answer. The question if we. Mr.. Mr. President, can I have them work with somebody from the neighborhood to just speed up so they can if. Someone from the community wants to come with Jill to make sure we're looking at the right addresses, that would be great. All right. Still on questions, Councilman Espinosa. Before Nola does that, Nola, I actually have a question for you. Sorry. The thousand foot requirement is roughly three blocks is just moving these businesses three blocks away from residences and schools. Is that enough? Or is is more need to be done? I think it would be huge. But we have a tenant that are existing in that thousand feet area over 30 within a year in Swansea. I think it would make it will make a huge difference to have them out. There's very. Clear industrial areas within Illyria in Swansea that are far, far away from residential, that, you know, there are a lot of businesses, marijuana businesses that don't bother the neighborhoods that are in those areas for sure. But it would also saturate those industrial areas with marijuana. So is oversaturation in a purely industrial neighborhood. The same thing is one that is a mix of industrial and residential. Well, you also see there's a lot less population overall. So you can look at percentiles as well. That should still work, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. Because in this one get to my question for council woman black man Joel on Clark later. Thanks. You get to, councilman? All right. Thank you. Still on questions, Councilman Cashman. Thank you, Mr. President. And Elizabeth, can I ask you. Didn't come up in in your presentation tonight but you have some ideas about incentivizing businesses to of their own relocate from areas of undue concentration. Can you speak to that for a minute? Sure. I appreciate the opportunity. This this goes to recognizing and respecting the investments that are pending on pending licenses. License applications have accrued in this unknown environment of risk, where this very unique problem has come about, which is very different from a saturation of restaurants. There's more sociological and environmental, economic, land use, neighborhood plan alignment, etc., issues with something like this. So I feel creatively it would be fair in the welfare of the well-being of neighborhoods for the city to recognize. That there have been. Unknown knowns and that those that have invested can somehow be worked with to relocate if, you know, within Denver. Or within another city in a way that creates a. Mechanism of financial compensation for this mis estimation of a new industry. And so I think it's something I myself would even support some of the taxes that were collected being returned to businesses to save the neighborhoods for a better diversity of businesses and environment. And that I appreciate the idea of the participatory budget ideas coming up for for some of this compensation, but we don't need to wait. The industry itself can become maybe more engaged. With the compensating the sociological. Impact within the neighborhoods around the businesses. So I think it's fair for the businesses that have invested to to have a mechanism. But I think we need to get really creative to to make that happen. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilman Cashman. All right. Questions? Any other questions from members of council? Right. Thank you. We are moving along. So now the public hearings were canceled. Bill 264 is closed. Council members and audience, what we're going to do now, I'm going to have council members formally offer their amendments if they still choose to do so. We will start in the order we went earlier. Councilman Clark, please put your amendment on the floor. Thank you, Mr. President. I move to amend Council Bill 16 to 64 in the following particulars on page four, line 12, add the following definition 11 Statistical neighborhood means the geographical neighborhood boundaries established by the city and county of Denver in 1970, in conjunction with the Community Renewal Program, consisting of combinations of census tracts to which the city has assigned geographic place names corresponding to commonly used names of subdivisions and historical parts of the city. On page six, line 13 strike language after the word appeal, strike lines 14 through 20. On page seven, line 33, add the following Prior to the first annual open application process administered by the director. Under this section, the Director shall determine the number of license locations where medical marijuana centers, retail marijuana stores or both exist in each statistical neighborhood of the city. Likewise, the director shall determine the number of license locations where medical marijuana, optional premises, cultivation facilities, retail marijuana cultivation facilities or both exist in each statistical neighborhood of the city . The director shall then identify the five statistical neighborhoods where the highest number of licensed marijuana sales locations exist. And the five statistical neighborhoods were the highest number of licensed marijuana cultivation locations exist. The statistical neighborhoods, thus identified by the director, shall be considered neighborhoods of undue concentration of marijuana business licensing and shall be prohibited from further licensing as part of the annual open application process for the year in question. To the extent that there is a tie in the number of licensed location among two or more statistical neighborhoods with the fifth most licensed locations, then all such neighborhoods shall be treated as neighborhoods of undue licensing and shall be prohibited from further licensing as part of the annual open application process. Entry into the lottery for a retail marijuana store license shall be denied for any applicant proposing to locate a retail marijuana store in any statistical neighborhood determined by the director to be a neighborhood of undue concentration based upon the current number of locations of medical marijuana centers, retail marijuana stores, or both in the statistical neighborhood. Entry into the lottery for a retail marijuana cultivation facility license shall be denied for any applicant proposing to locate a retail marijuana cultivation facility in any statistical neighborhood determined by the director to be a neighborhood of undue concentration based upon the current number of locations of medical marijuana, optional premises, cultivation facilities, retail marijuana stores or both in the statistical neighborhood. Upon the completion of the first open first annual open application process, the Director shall report to the counsel regarding the implementation of this subsection, along with a recommendation about whether or not to continue to restrict licensing in identified statistical neighborhoods in future open application processes. Thank you, Mr. President. I was just I was just reading and I got lost in there. All right. That has been moved and seconded comments on this amendment. Council members, Councilman Espinosa, you chimed in twice. You have that much you want to say now. Go right ahead. More of a question, I think, for David on this use of the word undue concentration. You know, in the in the explanation, it says this makes it completely objective. But my understanding is that it's in tries to tie it into a calculation of a numerical definition. But undo would be more just a sort of a sense of reasonableness. How is undo defined here? The again, David Broadwell, assistant city attorney under concentration, is a term that's used in other laws and including liquor laws and it is so there's some case law around it and so on and so forth. There's no unique definition of it here other than functionally. What you get by doing it this way is you're doing a relative comparison of some statistical neighborhoods versus all statistical neighborhoods, and you're seeing which ones are at the top. Now, when it comes to cultivation, for example, there are about a dozen statistical neighborhoods of the city ranging from the north city city limits to the south, where there's industrial zoning. Therefore, plant husbandry is allowed where licenses could be for marijuana cultivation. But when when many of them are concentrated toward the top and fewer of them are concentrated toward the bottom of that list, then you don't have the ideal of fair and even dispersion over all the statistical neighborhoods where they could be. And so that's where Undue comes in. They've tended to mainly concentrate in a few of the industrial areas and not more generally dispersed over all of the industrial areas. And that's what the math leads you to in terms of what undue means is it's slanted toward some neighborhoods and not others as a result of the numbers. In part of this discussion came up from when we were using terms like saturation and oversaturation, and that was driven by largely by GSE and what's going on there. Oddly enough, in the calculation that is, you know, Globeville isn't one of the top five. And so my concern is, is that actually you mean Montebello is in the pending applications right now are all on 47th Avenue between Havana and and Peoria, which has zero or close to zero, I'm pretty sure it's zero residential units, which is largely different than the concentration, I mean, the situation we have in Globeville. So the my concern is, is is the intent of this amendment to address that the impacts on community? Or is it purely a numbers game? Because I would argue that in an area like that area between Havana and Peoria, you could capture a considerable amount of industry there because it's always been industrial, whereas we had a mix . I mean, it didn't grow around community. That was when we sort of had a different zoning. I mean, we specifically did that. Whereas, you know, Globeville historically grew in a different pattern. Um, so is the, is the intent to, to overlook a situation like Globeville in favor of a situation like Montebello? Because that's what this language does. Yeah. That's really. I mean, you're co-sponsor with with Stacy I mean because we're not actually addressing one of the hardest impact neighbors Hood's going forward in the in the lottery system this way. I again I'm reading this on behalf of Councilwoman Gilmore. I wasn't intimately involved with the drafting of it. And so there may be other people can answer this question better. I think that the problem that we grapple with is how do you define it? You know, how do you capture the nuances of zip codes have issues. There are certain parts of a zip code that might, you know, be exactly the area that could handle more in certain areas that aren't statistical. Neighborhoods fall in a similar category, I think in that as we start to try and offer protections for some of our neighborhoods, how do we define that? And so I think we have a couple of different options in front of us with these different amendments. You list out the ones that are currently impacted and then you said it in stone. And so a new neighborhood is more unduly concentrated down the road. This, you know, allows for an empirical way to look at it and say there are a certain number within these certain boundaries. But, you know, in that specific instance, you may have captured, you know, a loophole in the statistical neighborhood in the same way that there would be on zip codes. And and so I think this is an attempt to grapple with how do you provide protections but in a measurable way rather than a a list. But I don't know. I again, I was not as involved. And so maybe Mr. Broadwell can speak more to that than I can. Just briefly, I think that is a pretty good summary of the conversations I had with Councilwoman Gilmore. And the only other detail I'll add is note that the mechanics of this, the count and the determination of the five protected statistical neighborhoods would not occur until sometime in the future when we're going to actually have an open application process and a draw. So some some examples were given of what the type top five would be today, but we don't know exactly if any of those will change. And between now and when there's a first open application process. And and on that level, that reminds me an important detail from the the summary that Councilman Clark read earlier. The ordinance contemplates that the earliest there could be an open application process would be 2017, but it may not necessarily occur next year because you can only have the process if you have capacity under the caps. And until we see some shakeout, if this ordinance is adopted, we don't know exactly when that's going to be, but it won't necessarily be in 2017. And so the director would be would be directed by this amendment to basically do that count and determine the five highest neighborhoods at the time, whenever that's going to be, that we're going to have our first open application process. Counselor. That's those. Are you good? Yeah, mostly. But it still creates the potential for a situation. If it's. If it's truly arbitrary, it still creates the potential for us from excluding potentially places with high numbers of locations that actually are suitable for additional locations. Is that correct? Just because it focuses on these words like saturation and concentration by giving it a face, by defining that as where there are the most. Right. It doesn't look at the flip side of the coin that you're addressing now, whether even though there's a whole bunch, there's still other opportunities in that neighborhood. Now it is purely and simply defines concentration or saturation by how many there are, not how many others there could be in a particular neighborhood. So that's the logic of it, and that's why it's proposed the way it is. Okay. Thanks. Thank you. Councilman Espinosa. Councilwoman, can each. Thank you, Mr. President. I will be supporting this amendment today after some really careful consideration. And again, based on the input, the input that I've heard from Mr. Littlejohn community and from the Globeville area, Swansea community. I think that Councilman Espinosa hits on a point about why we don't want to rush into barring entire geographic areas that can be in some cases, including deeply industrial areas that are really far from community from from residential. If the idea is that you want to be able to have, you know, a gravitation over time as new folks come into deeply industrial areas to to turn off access to entire neighborhoods is not done lightly. But there's a couple of reasons why I can support this amendment. One is it does it it does it in a time limited fashion and and in purpose. We are going to be if we if we adopt an odor ordinance at the first time, this provision would be triggered, would be protecting neighborhoods. And then the second time, we would know we would be 18 months to two years into an order ordinance. And we would understand better whether or not there are or are not odor impacts from deeply industrial areas that gravitate. So if you have a grow facility in a deeply industrial area, your kids aren't walking by it every day to go to school. So they're not seeing it. It's not creating temptation. Or, you know, if there are enforcement issues, they are not right next to a neighborhood, but you could have odor. And that was the number one thing I heard from communities and with deeply industrial areas was we are still experiencing odor from these deeply industrial areas, even if we're more than a thousand feet away. And so my reason for supporting this amendment is it gives us time to see if that odor ordinance works or not. And then we can basically make a decision about if it is working. Then you have the deeply industrial areas and maybe you go ahead and you can act accordingly to make that deeply industrial area available while you protect and keep protecting with very high standards the residential buffer zone or the edge, if you will. So for those reasons, I'm very appreciative of the objectivity of using an objective metric of the ability to give these neighborhoods time to see if the order ordinance is working, and then it does not, as some of the later amendments do. You will see this includes the top five neighborhoods, other amendments that you have go as far as to 12 to 18 into that. And they basically do eliminate any new locations. So this allows some potential. We don't know if the cap will have capacity or not. But for those reasons, after, you know, really trying my best to try to find common ground and move towards the feedback from folks who would like us to go slower. I will be supporting this amendment tonight and I would encourage all of my colleagues to do so. Thank you. Thank you. Councilwoman Canady, Councilman Flynn. Thanks, Mr. President. The neighborhoods that are over, unduly concentrated, actually could have been foretold almost 150 years ago when there were the Denver Pacific and the and the Kansas Pacific laid their tracks. That's where the industrial areas have gone. It's not for any other reason than the fact that that's where we allow this activity to occur. So with Councilwoman Gilmore's proposal, I have a couple of issues that I'm trying to determine how I'm going to vote on this, because I don't know if I could favor this until I know what's going to happen down the line . And I'll tell you why. The thousand foot buffer zone from residential that we're talking about, I think, places an undue burden on the growth, on the cultivation licenses to find locations where they can go. So especially with the amendment that was going to that's going to be proposed, where we have even more statistical neighborhoods that are not included. We're giving no option with Councilwoman Gilmore as we're only leaving five out at a time. So that would leave approximately seven or so statistical neighborhoods. Although, as Councilman Espinosa pointed out, Stapleton, east of Havana and the warehouse district in MONDELLO, still has other some widely open areas. So I would like to know. Before. Before I decide whether to vote on this, whether there's an appetite to shorten too narrow that buffer zone to 500 feet rather than a thousand either right now before the lottery or in the future when we do the blind lottery so that applicants actually have a reasonable opportunity to relocate to better locations. And that would only apply to cultivation licenses. Not not the sales licenses. Mr. President, I don't know if there's a way to to determine if there's an appetite for that. Well, I would suggest, as councilman, for instance, this motion to amend is on the floor. Why not just vote on that? And so if it's voted down, for example, and I we hear that the reason might be because the People Council feels the distance is too great. I'll defer to you to do with the motion. With the smaller distance request. And maybe other folks could comment on that before they. Could or not. If they don't want to. It's certainly their choice. Tin Tin. Thank you. Thank you, Governor Vlad, appreciate that. This message with you. Councilman Brooks, I think you're up next. Yeah. Thank you, Mr. President. David, I just have a question about the. The authority that the executive director of Access and License has. So. They will recalibrate the count at the end of each year to figure out the next year of the top five statistical neighborhoods. Is that how I understand it. The way it's worded, it would be an obligation for the director to do it before conducting an open application process in 2017. Sometime in 2017, the director would have to make a determination if there's capacity under the CAP, the CAPS, to even be conducting an open application process and lottery. And if he determines there is capacity, then the next step is going to be to fulfill this chore and find out if we're going to be accepting potential applications for new cultivation. First, I have to identify what the black hole statistical neighborhoods are going to be. So so it's kind of a sequential. You have to read this in the context with everything else about how that open application process will work, and that's essentially how it'll shake out step after step. Yeah. David, I'm assuming that all of that is, you know, I'm voting for this, assuming that all that is going to happen, right? That there is a black out does not occur and there is room in the market to do an open application. But once that happens, there's a recalibration of all the statistical neighborhoods and the director will take the top five statistical neighborhoods. And those could change is basically what I want to just make sure. To be very clear, the way the amendment is worded now, it's only mandatory for the first time. And then the director, after doing it once the first time we have an open application process, will report back to council and have a dialog about whether we're going to continue to use this system in the future. So it's not written to be self perpetuating forever. It's intended to be tried the one time with a report back to council. And that's that last sentence in there. Okay. Given given that explanation, I'm I'm going to support this. What I don't like about this is that it it leaves out one of the most in my mind the way that I would count these of the most saturated neighborhoods, which is Globeville and has the most area for. And I'd be for that saturation to continue over concentration, whatever the hell we're using tonight to continue. And so but I'm going to support that because I like that flexibility and I like that we as a council can revisit this. And I like that the director of Access and License will come back and have that conversation. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Brooks. Councilman Nu. And David. This mineral will still allow all the pending applications to go through. That's great. That's correct. This amendment doesn't touch the pending application issue at all. Some of the others who may discuss next. We do get into that, but this only looks forward to the time. We'll have an open application process in the future. Where the numbers that were calculated for the undue concentrated areas were there pending applications, including those numbers. In terms of the neighborhoods listed earlier. Yes. Yes. So so they were all included in there. So. But but but again, pending means pending. We don't know which ones are going to ultimately be issued and so forth. So it could change. There could be there could be some movement in some of the locations of some of these licensed premises over the next year or two. So so it could change. In the fall. So there will be the caps will be in place and the thousand feet will be in place if this goes through. Graham romney's bill. Right. Right. This doesn't affect anything else about the caps on the spacing requirements. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman new councilman Black. Thank you. I'm going to be supporting this. I think it's practical and not emotional. I think some of the other amendments that we're looking at are much more limiting. And an Elizabeth, to your great suggestion about maybe counseling cultivation facilities to move somewhere else. The other amendments will be so incredibly restrictive that there will not be any other locations available. This one is more flexible and hopefully will leave more available industrial buildings available for this. So I will be supporting it. Thanks. Thank you. Councilwoman Black. Councilman Clark. Thank you, Mr. President. I also want to voice my support for this amendment. There are a lot of amendments that we will be considering that talk to neighborhoods and protections for foreign neighborhoods. I think that this one provides, you know, the most concrete and measurable way to determine that. It doesn't determine that until a point at which we reach the need for a lottery, which could be five years, could be ten years away. And and I like that about it. And I have some concerns going through the other amendments, and it's hard to not have them all on the floor at the same time to compare with neighborhoods that I represent that are on these other lists that are on there when they're called out by names. And so. So I think that this one has a very clearcut explanation and a very fair way of determining what those are. Councilman Espinosa's point earlier, you know, I haven't seen a perfect way to measure that, but I think that this is the closest of anything that's been put in front of us to a really good way to measure where those undue concentrations are and which neighborhoods are most impacted. So I'll be supporting this. Thank you very much, Mr. President. Thank you. All right, Councilwoman Ortega. I wanted to ask Kelly if you have the flash drive that had the neighborhoods. I had asked Zach to provide that so we could put it up on the screen. It would. It shows is side by side the impacted neighborhoods, the top 12. And it shows the stores and then it shows the cultivations. She does not. Councilwoman, was it uploaded in desire? Yeah. He was supposed to have done that early today. You got it? Yeah. Okay, so it's on the sire system showing that I thought it would be important for you all to take a look at that so you could see that if we went with this just for senators, it'd be overland. Hilarious. One to you. Five points. Northeast Park Hill. And felt very for the cultivation. It would be Illyria Swans here, Overland Northeast Park Hill, Montebello and Val Verde. So all the other neighborhoods, including Globeville, are not included in the top five on either one of these. Are you talking about the top 12 cities? Yeah. If we're if we're going just with the top five, I wanted people to see what the top five would be. Just looking at these neighborhoods, based on what we have seen in terms of where that concentration has been across the city. Council members can click on documents and see a. Colleague, council colleagues. You have the opportunity to view that if on your on your computers in front of you council will take any of the comments. I just want to say part of my reason for not supporting this is because, first of all, it's it's going to protect five neighborhoods and it leaves everything else completely wide open in those other saturated neighborhoods. And I'll speak to my amendment when we get to it in a few minutes. But that did, in fact, leave other opportunities open in in other neighborhoods. And so I think just the fact that it completely takes some neighborhoods off line and doesn't really look at how we protect the other saturated neighborhoods is just concerning. Thank you, Councilwoman Ortega. Councilwoman Cohen, each year you back up or you don't. Thank you, Mr. President. This is where this evening is going to get interesting and in terms of procedurally having amendments that deal with overlapping issues. I'm going to encourage folks who are thinking that they want a stricter approach to thinking about supporting this amendment now, because you have the risk that the later amendments are not going to pass. Should you? So let me just play out a scenario for you. I would suggest you support this amendment now and then when we get to the more stringent or more expansive restrictions, you can also vote yes. And should any of those amendments pass, you could always move to reconsider the vote that was on this amendment to remove it. Or obviously we have maybe some drafting reconciliation that may need to be occur. But I would hate to see this amendment fail at this stage of the night and then have folks, you know, also fail on more stringent things that they want to see and have regret that they didn't take the first opportunity they have . So obviously, that's a very personal consideration in terms of your predictions and how the future votes are going to go. But it is not inconceivable that we could reconsider if someone feels like, hey, I went through the the least thing I got, the more thing, and now we can go there. So, so, so I'm going to ask folks to really think about that as as they vote on this amendment. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Clayton. Yes. Council members, depending on which amendments passed tonight, we will the city attorneys will certainly make sure whatever our final answer is tonight will make sense from an amendment standpoint. So that may require some massaging depending on which amendments pass or fail. That is the conversation that I've had with the city attorneys. And thank you, Councilwoman Canady, for bringing that forward. All right. We're still on the First Amendment. Councilman Lopez, comment to your question. I do have a question. Mr. BROWN. Well, if we approve this particular amendment and amend to 64 and to 64 fails to pass tonight. Does the amendment still stick or does it has to be reintroduced? Does the bill have to be refiled and reintroduced? And then another attempt, another crack at this amendment, even if it even passes? Mr. President, you want me to go ahead and talk about the nuclear. No. And actually, David. Correct, correct me if I am wrong for this. And I. I had this conversation with Councilwoman Canete during the break. So Councilman Lopez, should. Should we have an amendment added to to this bill and that final answer be up or down votes they voted down in this particular instance. Council member has the right to file a bill on the floor. And the question is, would that council member file the bill on the floor with the amendment? I would assume that he or she would. I don't want to speak for that council member, though, Councilman, can you just nodding your head? So that's how I imagine that would play out if an amendment is passed by a majority of council members and then the overall bill is defeated, I imagine a refile would include the amendment, but we certainly won't know until that happens. But that's that is certainly a possibility. Councilman. I no, I just I wanted to ask that question is, do you think. That the councilwoman can you want to comment before? I do. I because I wasn't a part of that conversation. There's there's all kinds of scenarios. You guys can have to take it step by step here tonight. But if but if the bill or the bill, as amended, does not garner seven votes for publication, then we'll have a conversation at that point about next steps. We do have an extra week, Bill ten. There's a possibility to file bills this week for consideration on the 18th and the 25th. But but we really do need to take the conversation systematically as we go. But but there will be options still for four filing of alternatives before the May 1st date that's looming out there. Okay. Mr. President, I do have a comment and I haven't ring in for questions or comments until now. I do feel like I you know, I want to give this amendment a shot because it does try to restrict and protect some of these neighborhoods. But it's just it's not enough. And we've had folks from Globeville area and Swansea come in here and participate every single hearing, every single step of the process yet. Their neighborhoods out of the picture. And the only way it is in the picture is if they have more licenses. And, you know, it's kind of a. It's kind of a juxtaposition there. And, you know, I have a little heartburn about it now. We're asked to approve this and move forward because it may be the only thing we get. And that may be the shot because we have one council member missing. And pending approval no matter what. Now, I know that we've based on the questions that we've we've asked in this whole process and the questions that we've asked on this dais and, you know, the participation that we've had in these chambers in our in our council meeting room down in 394 or five, any five. I would hope. That whatever happens with this bill that the sponsor and the supporters of this bill also seek to accommodate some of the some of the desires and the concerns that are at this dais and not leave it a split vote in the future. I would like to see this particular amendment that we're considering now go a little bit further and not just by random, say, okay, we'll just kind of randomly pick five. Right. And arbitrarily use the number five. Why not six? Why not? Seven. We have. Whole bunch of neighborhoods. You minus the 13. There's just 65 neighborhoods in the city. That's a lot to choose from. Right. And so I just hope we have that conversation. I hope we're opening an opportunity to to do some more fine tuning to this bill. So, I mean, I do want to support the amendment because, hey, I would like to see one amendment go through. But let's I mean, I just hope that in good faith that we're able to. Take it a little further based on the conversations that we're having tonight and this whole process leading up to tonight. And a lot of the folks that couldn't sit in these pews but were standing in the back and had to leave. All right. Thank you, Councilman Lopez. Councilman, new comment on the First Amendment. I still have issues, I guess, which is frustrating to know, to not have a great opportunity to discuss the issues thoroughly. These amendments, you know, that have come through and over this weekend, you know, I especially concerned about the saturated areas, but the pending applications being approved is something I think we need to see it. I really appreciate what Councilwoman Kennish has done and carrying out the pending applications. But as you look at that list, there's a lot of data missing from those pending applications until they exactly where they are and where they're located. And there's just a lot of information that's missing. So it's very I don't think I'll be supporting this this amendment and not because Councilman Gilmore didn't do a great job. It's just something that I think that we not addressing all the key issues. And I sort of agree with one of the spokespeople that we really need to talk about this a little bit further. Thank you. Councilman. There. All right. Any other comments on the First Amendment offered by Councilman Clark? All right, scene one. We're voting on the firsts First Amendment. For people in the audience. Amendments require seven council members to vote in. I. Madam Secretary, roll call. Clerk I. Espinosa No. Flynn, I. Cashman All right. Can each I. Lopez All right. New no. ORTEGA No. SUSSMAN All black. All right. Brooks. I. Mr. President. I. Madam Secretary, please cast your vote in and announce the results. 93 days. 93 days. The First Amendment offered has passed. All right, Councilwoman Ortega. Your motion to amend. All right. Let me pull up the one here. Tony. Okay, Mr. President, I move to amend Council Bill 264 in the following particulars on page four, line 12, add the following definition per in 11, statistical neighborhoods means geographical neighborhood boundaries established by the city and county of Denver in 1970, in conjunction with a community renewal program consisting of combinations of census tracts to which the city has assigned geographic place names corresponding to commonly used names of subdivision in historical parts of the city, and page 13 Line 43 strike any and insert except as provided here in any on page 14 after line four, insert the following any application pending on May one, 2016 for Medical Marijuana Center License, a retail marijuana store, a medical marijuana optional premise cultivation license or retail marijuana cultivation facility license shall not be approved by the director if the premise proposed for the license is located within any of the following statistical neighborhoods. O'Leary. Valencia. Overland. Northeast Park Hill. Montebello. Val Verde. College View. Lincoln Park. Well. Sunny Side Baker at Moore Park. Five Points Globeville in Sun Valley. Any application pending on May one, 2016 for medical marijuana, optional premises, cultivation license or a retail marijuana cultivation facility license shall not be approved by the director if the proposed location would be within 1000 feet of a school or residential zone district as prohibited by sections 6 to 14 and 24 or 512. Perrin F Perrin one. In addition, the pending application shall be required to supplement their application with a letter from the Office of the Superintendent of Public Schools indicating whether or not the school district has any plans to approve or establish a school in the next ensuring year within 1000 feet of a location proposing proposed for licensee if the school district indicates any such plan. The director shall deny the pending application. Thank you, Councilman Ortega. It has been moved and seconded. Comments Councilwoman Ortega. So again, part of what this amendment does is it includes the other neighborhoods that are. Saturated or impacted with these facilities. And I don't know if we put the maps up as well, Kelly. But we we had the maps put on this air system so you could look at where those saturated areas are and be able to understand why. We have had neighbors coming from certain neighborhoods expressing their concern about the impact that this has had to their community. You know, at one at our last committee meeting, we were we were told that there were only two such complaints. I've been to community meetings in these neighborhoods, hearing lots of different issues, complaints, concerns about things that go well beyond just odor. And so looking at how we address relief for particularly the global Elyria, Swansea and neighborhoods that are burdened with so many other issues that it just doesn't make sense to say, well, we only look at five neighborhoods and not include other areas of the city that are challenged and burdened with some of the concerns that we've heard reiterated over and over at both our committee meetings and some of the comments that we've heard tonight. So I would just urge my colleagues to seriously consider this and allow us to go further than what the last amendment did. This one does deal with pending applications, whereas the last one did not. Thank you, Councilwoman Ortega. Councilman Clark. Councilman Ortega. Councilman Clark. Thank you, Mr. President. So my problem with this, as I alluded to in the previous one, is, you know, looking through this list, which we are setting in ordinance this list in perpetuity, in ordinance that these are the neighborhoods that we are protecting, we're choosing them. And yet Plot Park and Capitol Hill appear on these top 12 lists and do not appear on here. So I am I'm not comfortable with the process that somehow picks winners and losers without without that empirical. The statistical background for it and then with it. Then, you know, three years from now, there's another neighborhood that is the most highly impacted. And yet these are the ones that are in ordinance. And so for that reason, I will not be supporting this amendment and have serious reservations. I would encourage my colleagues to support it, as well as that is one of the two that are clearly left off just from these two. This is a neighborhood that I represent. Thank you, Councilman Clark. Councilman Flynn. Thanks, Mr. President. I wonder if I could ask Councilwoman Ortega if she would consider on the cultivation section reducing 2000 feet to 500 feet. From a residential zone district. Thank you. Councilman flynn, david broadwell. I just wanted to chime in before. Go ahead. Craig david. I didn't mean to interrupt that question and i want to get right back to it, but an important clarification in terms of what councilman clarke just said. This doesn't codify these neighborhoods for exclusion for all times. This this amendment is only about the pending applications. So it doesn't go into the code language itself, as in contrast to some of the drafting I did for Councilman Lopez, which does indeed go into the ordinance name neighborhoods where there can't be any licensing indefinitely into the future. This this amendment is very laser focused on the pending applications in terms of where they can't be approved if they haven't been approved by May 1st. Okay. So that's that's important. Has distinguishing this from the others you're going to see later. Now, again, I'm sorry to interrupt. We turn to we're turning to a different issue now in terms of whether that's going to be addressed in this proposal. Thank you, David. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Councilman Flynn. Thank you. And thank you, David. That's a great clarification. As we as we move forward with this council on our take, the reason I asked about the cultivation licenses is that I I'm very troubled by the list of statistical neighborhoods that is on here for cultivation licenses. And they are the only statistical neighborhoods that even allow plant husbandry other than Stapleton, which has an industrial area east of Havana Street that goes all the way outside to I-25. And there's a big warehouse district out there that would be the only location under this amendment where a cultivation facility would be able to locate if it's pending as of May 1st. But that's not entirely true. If I can respond, if you look at the maps, which is why I was trying to get the maps up here so that we have an opportunity for you to see that. I'm sorry. I'm trying to find the right on the maps here. The. The boundaries for the residential and the schools still leave boundaries in those industrial areas where facilities can be located on the cultivation site. So we're not entirely closing out the ability for some of those neighborhoods to still be considered. What we're doing is focusing that in the industrial areas that are not within a thousand feet of residential. I understand that. But with the first paragraph, it absolutely says that any application pending as of May 1st for cultivation, which is what I'm talking about right now, cannot be considered if it's in those neighborhoods. And that's beyond the thousand foot issue. But but the second paragraph clarifies that the thousand foot is the right is the distinction the distinguishing factor right. That if it were. Allowed the opportunity for more of that space to be available. Right, if it were allowed in that statistical neighborhood in the first place. But the first paragraph absolutely says it shall not be approved by the director if the application is in within that statistical neighborhood at all. So that's that's the problem I'm having with it. Okay. And your request is. If. If I accepted the 500. That change your position on this? Not really, because I'm looking at the the draft ordinance that Councilwoman Kennish has, which also has a 1000 foot separation from residential for cultivation facilities that has that that's what has me very concerned. What has me concerned about your amendment is that it rules out all the cultivation licenses that are pending right now at all, because they can't go into they can't go into Harvey Park and they can't go into Sunny Chaffey Park or they can't go into Capitol Hill because they don't have warehouses there. So we're giving we're giving no option at all for any of the cultivation facilities that that's my concern. Okay. Well, that's. Your prerogative. To not support it. But, you know, the expectation was to allow facilities that are outside of the residential to still be available. Just just to clarify, if I could, there's a program that would apply after new applications come in after May 1st. Correct. Correct. This only applies to the demonstrations. Right. Okay. Thank you. The Council and council and commission. Thank you, Mr. President. David, I think we need you to chime in. The amendment is drafted as an and not in any of these statistical neighborhoods and not appending application. Correct. Councilwoman Ortega's intention, as she's describing it, does not match what's on the page. I would just like you to chime in on what is drafted in front of us. Right. There's not an end on the draft because this is what I felt I was being directed to draft. So. So Councilman Flynn's analysis is correct is that there's a complete prohibition on granting of the pending applications in any of the named neighborhoods. Even in the deeply industrial area. I'm sorry. Even in a deeply industrial area. In the named neighborhoods? That's correct. Okay. Okay. And and if there's for example, the Stapleton example is not on that list of name neighborhoods. The the other restrictions related to setback from residential and schools might knock out something in the Stapleton neighborhood because it's not mentioned in the first paragraph, but it would be knocked out by the second paragraph. Thank you. And then, Mr. President, I just want to clarify for colleagues, I just handed out a map that I got late in the day. I do have it on thumb drive if we need to ask the Madam Secretary to put on the screen, but and I'm sorry, it's small, but it is the blue on the map that you're looking at is industrial areas. And then you can see the statistical neighborhood outlines here. And so you can see that indeed, Councilman Flynn's analysis is correct that with this amendment, there would be virtually no industrial zoned areas other than the Stapleton statistical neighborhood that would be available. So and again, I know the names of the statistical neighborhoods are very tiny, but but what we do I just wanted to share this since I know Councilwoman Ortega was struggling to get the maps that she didn't have access to, but this is the map that shows the overlay. So thank you. Mr. President. Could I clarify something on that map? Should I count. The blue area in my district? It's not an industrial zone. It's actually lake marshland. So much so everybody's clear on that. Thank you. Thank you. All right. We are now up with Councilman Espinosa. It sounds like an opportunity for a manmade island, so. Yeah. Councilwoman Kenny Ortega. Sorry, this the clarification, that mean what Councilman Flynn was. What also was giving me pause because there was no and it was absolute in its terms because I do believe that there are parts, particularly in the pending applications again for Montebello in Sun Valley , that could be captured well outside of the thousands, that thousand foot area. But the absolute terms of that first paragraph are strictly prohibited in those two areas, as well as the one pending app in Sunnyside that also would fall outside that boundary. So those the fact that it's that exclusive was giving me pause on supporting this. Thank you, Councilman Espinosa. Councilwoman Sussman? Yes. Oh, thank you very much. I won't be supporting this particular amendment nor anyone of those that give no options to pending licenses. I, I don't smoke marijuana. I don't eat marijuana. I don't put marijuana in my ears. I don't do anything with marijuana. And I have no connections with any marijuana businesses at all. But I am vehemently in favor of allowing spendings to go through in some manner. Would. I don't know. Whenever we have never that we have not grandfathered people in circumstances like this. I can't remember, certainly not in my tenure that we didn't grandfathered people when we were making major changes in the law and people who followed that law faithfully. I just think that if we prevent the pending going forward, we are acting in bad faith and. I would be personally embarrassed. To do such a thing. So this is the first of some of those amendments that are going to prevent. In total some spendings to not go through. I continue to be amazed at the sort of midst last century mid-century opinions of marijuana that we still hold on to that were part of a hysteria against drugs, particularly drugs used by lower income people. And and they made these laws that were extraordinarily damaging to minority communities then. And, of course, applied in this extremely discriminatory discriminatory enforcement. On people of color. And one of the biggest shames of our justice system. It is that discrimination that destroyed these communities. And it's just ironic to me that we have the problems of the communities that are of color, who are who are worried about them, the legalization of it. When the when the illegal possession of it was so harmful. And it was the number one reason why Denver rights voted to legalize it by 67% was the injustice of its enforcement. And sometimes I feel like the 33% are trying to take that back. And I think we owe it to understand in our communities that we wanted to legalize this. But if but it's got to be somewhere in order for it to be legal. And of course, we have more in Denver than we do anywhere else in the state, because we have more people in Denver and more businesses. We have more coffee shops here, more liquor stores, more everything here. And we have them in. Communities. That we have also ignored in our in our history. And maybe it's our ignoring those communities, which is the cause of having this kind of saturation. But we ought to pay attention to the the ignoring of these communities. This is just sort of an effect. So I, I did my marijuana thesis. I did my thesis, master's thesis on marijuana in 1971. If you can imagine. So I know a little bit about this and particularly the sociological aspects of it. So I haven't said very much tonight and I'm probably not going to say much more, but any amendments that prohibit any pending from going forward, I just will never be able to support. Thank you, Councilwoman Sussman. Before I go to Councilman Lopez and Ortega, I would hope that council colleagues were kind of going off into the final question, which I think people will comment on once we get to a bill as amended. I would hope that up until that point, we can just focus solely on these specific amendments. Otherwise, we will break the record for the longest council meeting ever. So if it's possible, colleagues, if we could just focus solely on these amendments, I think about the people who are sitting in these pews watching who would really like to get an answer sometime today. I just really hope we can take that into consideration as we continue to give our comments. Councilman Lopez, you're up. Thank you. And as far as the longest council meeting ever, that was Garcia's thing. I think that went to like three or four in the morning. You know, top of that. Thank you, Mr. President. I I'll I'm addressing my my comments for the need for an amendment. And as much as I absolutely love and respect my colleague, Councilwoman Sussman, it's easy for her to say, because there are very little spaces in her district where a dispensary or a grove facility can go. And it's easy for folks to say that, well, maybe we can attribute this to communities of color being ignored. Well, you have a whole bunch of them that came throughout this process and have said we need some kind of level of protection for Globeville, for Elyria, for swans here, for Val Verde, for a lot of these neighborhoods of color. And they're being ignored. Right. And here's the other thing. You're shaking your head. Are you a person of color? Do I see very many owners of these dispensaries of color? Do you live in Globeville, Elyria and Swansea? If you do, please stand up. I'd love for. I love for an owner to say, you know what? I live in the neighborhood I serve. I don't get to go to a grocery store. Like they don't get a go. That's good. We have one right on that, too, right, hon? Right on. So here's here is my point. Here is my point. For those of you who come up to this dias and say, how dare you attack our business? How dare you attack our industry? Tell me another city in this. State that you can go in there, Dias. And say, please accept my application. You're welcome. Turning away for your welcome. This city. From the get go. From the get go. Whether it was decriminalization. We were supportive of it. That meant less youth of color in our jails. Right. You should all be clapping for that one. Amendment 20 medical marijuana. Denver was at the forefront and I respect the folks. User. User from Chicago. I think you went to northern. I respect the heck out of you. I respect the folks that actually look at this as a medicine. As something that can be used to develop. That's why I'm not against MIPS. That's why I'm not against laboratories. Recreational. When it was time for us to implement Amendment 64, regulate it like alcohol, we were on the forefront. I was there. My amendments actually pushed that. And when I said we wanted to separate it 1000 feet away from each other, when I first said we're going to have an undue proliferation, everybody shook their heads. No, we're not. No, we're not. No, we're not. And you know what? You blasted it when I said we need a 2500 foot distance, so we have a fair shot for everybody. And you know what? I had to reduce it down to 2000, wasn't good enough, took it down to 1500, and now we're at 1000. And by the way, for the folks in the community who say we have no other choice. Yes, you do. It's 2016, folks. These applications, although they're pending. There is no guarantee of their approval. There's still a needs and desires hearing for those folks that want open centers. So, yes, communities, you do have a voice and you do have power. But I forgive me for being. So what's the word emotional about it? But I am. Because I grew up in this city. I live in this neighborhood. My mom taught at Swansea Elementary School. Every single day those folks wake up. To the smell. Not of flowers, not of bread baking, not of the coffee shop on the corner of dogfood and weed. There are communities that have no it has nothing to do with you all as business owners. Nothing to do with it. What it has to do with is their communities and what they want to see in your communities and their communities. Greenwood Village is a bunch of grocery stores. There are areas all over Denver. Across the train tracks. They have grocery stores galore and dispensaries. And it's a happy little world. But for folks all around this city and primarily in areas like globe, Elyria, Swansea are involved in Sun Valley. There's not a grocery store within walking distance. But there are a bunch of dispensaries. Oh, by the way, a whole bunch of liquor stores. And if you want to open something that's available to. Picture what we want our city to become. And if we want to really level that playing field councilwoman. Now we have to look at this from a 35,000 foot view. If we really want to talk about equality. Absolutely. I applaud those folks. There's a woman there sitting right next to you, the one that owns three dispensaries in my district. That said, I employ a living wage. You said this to Amanda. Living wage. You have folks of color. Great. Well, we got a lot of progress to do with the ownership. We got a lot of progress to do with folks who were in this city, wanted to do business and called this city home as well to. And Denver should not be the only place that regulates marijuana. We can't be. We all should be clapping. Lakewood. Adams County, Jefferson County. These are all cities that thumb their noses. You can't even have a hearing in their chambers. That's all these amendments are speaking as a reason why we're putting these amendments forward. Now, whether this bill passes or not. I think there needs to be a discussion whether it's maybe it's not statistical neighborhood, maybe it's none of these amendments that are going to work. But we have to address this. We absolutely have to address this. I've seen this from beginning to end. I'm the only sitting council member that has seen it from beginning to now. And I implore you to consider it. Not once did we have a speaker that was for the industry. This is what we did with the community. This is what we're doing to reduce this. This how we're working with global learning in Swansea. Nobody said a thing. We are being we've been we've been leaving. And I'm like, please, please don't play. I'm not doing this for applause, please. We've been leaving little tidbits here in there of how to do this, and nobody has picked up on it. Okay. So let's please. Let's give this some respectful consideration. Thank you, Mr. President. I and I intend to supporting this amendment because I think we if this isn't the answer, we still got to be pushing for it. Thank you, Councilman Lopez. And I'm going to continue to advocate that we vote. So let's eventually get to this point. Colleagues, thank you for your comments. We can continue to go down, but I hope at some point we will vote on this amendment, the other five, and then the bill as amended. So please, let's continue to drag along. Councilman Ortega, you're up, man. Um, well. The only thing I wanted to add is that when we started this conversation and only half of this body was here when we started dealing with the retail recreational marijuana, we had 210. We now have 1000, almost 1030 licenses that will be that will exist in this city. I'm sorry. It's 1301, to be exact. So when you talk about the the the fact that we have moved so fast and furious in a short period of time, as I said in committee, this city has been very generous. There is no other city in the world that has as many licenses we do, not even Amsterdam. So when you look at the fact that, you know, we're trying to look at some balance between having neighborhoods that have some quality of life and. Allowing the industry to exist. You know, I supported this as we move forward and we had the the recreational retail framework that was put together by half of us that were here. And. The fact that some of us thought we were only tying the. Recreational to the medical. But somehow we went from five. We're now at 561 existing licenses. On the growth side, with 132 pending and a majority of those are on the medical side where we have a declining number of cardholders. On the store side, we have 346 existing with 34 pending. And then on the maps, we have 134 with 62 pending. So you can't tell me that we haven't already done more than any city in this state is done or in this country in trying to be generous and work with this industry. And I get that many of you have been through a process, but when you look at how many of these are already in existing operating locations, only 62 of them are for new locations. So I question, you know, the investment, the information we just got tonight doesn't give complete information on, you know, exactly where people are at in the process. But, you know, I had argued maybe we should only deal with the 62 new locations and forego the rest of them because those are already existing operating businesses. But, you know, I think addressing the issue of licenses is an important one. And so I would just respectfully ask that my colleagues give this serious consideration. Thank you, Councilwoman Ortega. Councilman Brooks. Yeah, very quick question, right to the point on this bill. Councilman Ortega, are you willing to adjust this bill at all to the considerations that. Councilman Flynn. Yeah, I would be. Okay. And that would take you down to 500 feet instead of a thousand. Is that what you're asking? Yes. But it's also asking the question around what David Brown? Well, it seems like there was some miscommunication of what he intended. The and that's in the provision and what you intended. I guess my biggest question is if there are pending licenses that are not within that buffer zone, that they would not be touched. You know what I mean? And so I just want to make sure that we can address that, because it seems like there'll be another kind of supporter there, if we could. So I want to be clear on what you're asking in terms of the buffer that you just referred to. Yeah. So, Councilman Flynn, are you are you asking about the and provision? Are you asking about the 500 to 1000 provision? Which one? Thank you. I'm sorry. But that was President. Councilman Brooks. I had a side discussion here with Councilwoman Ortega earlier, and the and I'm talking about the end. In order for the 500 foot buffer reduction of two 500 feet to mean anything. Then the first paragraph of the amendment would have to be stricken for cultivation licenses. And that could get you supportive of this. I'm not sure it accommodated her because it also it also if we only remove cultivation licenses for the for the pending, it still leaves in all the retail and medical spendings that would be thrown out. Okay. So never mind. All right. Any other comments on the First Amendment by Councilwoman Ortega? Seen none. Madam Secretary, Councilwoman Kenny, each last minute chimed in. Ah, nope. She backed out. You could pull them back. All right. Thank you. All right, Council. We are no more comments on second first amendment by Councilman Ortega. Madam Secretary, welcome. Ortega I Susman No. Black, no. Brooks Clark. No. Espinosa Bass. Flynn. No. Cashman, no. Carnage. Lopez. I knew Espinosa. I. Mr. President. Now. Correction, I. Madam Secretary, please quote the voting and announce the results. 66 nays. Six I6 nay. The motion has failed. Councilman Ortega. You have your second. There you have your Second Amendment you wish to offer me. Read this. Mr. President, I move to amend Council Bill 16 to 64 in the following particulars on page one, line 11 through 12, amend the title by striking the words number of license locations where marijuana cultivation and sales may be permitted in the city, and inserting a number of new licenses for marijuana sales, marijuana cultivation and marijuana products manufacturing that may be issued in the city, a line 13 after the word licenses insert in both retail and medical marijuana products. Manufacturing licenses. On page two, strike line 23 through 37 and insert the following. Number two Cap on marijuana cultivation licenses a maximum 275 medical marijuana optional premises cultivation licenses or retail marijuana cultivation facility licenses on page three, strike line one through 13, and insert the following three. Cap on marijuana sales licenses, meaning a maximum of 250 medical marijuana center licenses. Retail marijuana store licenses. On page three line 14, insert a new subsection four in re number succeeding subsections accordingly. Number four cap on marijuana manufacturing licenses, meaning a maximum of 150 medical manufactured, medical marijuana infused product licenses or retail marijuana product manufacturing facility licenses. On page five, strike line 37 to 39 and substitute following marijuana cultivation licenses, the cap on marijuana sales licenses and the cap on marijuana manufacturing licenses. With these caps to be administered and enforced by the director in accordance with this section, strike lines 41 through 46 and remember each succeeding subsection accordingly a line 49 strike end and substitute a comma on page six. Line one after comma insert medical marijuana infused product license or retail marijuana product manufacturing facility license align to strike license locations and insert licenses straight lines three through five and insert the following licenses the cap on marijuana cultivation licenses and the cap on marijuana manufacturing licenses, respectively, allowed six strike sales locations, strike lines nine through 20 and remember succeeding subsections accordingly on page seven, line 11, strike end and substitute a comma after the second licenses insert and marijuana products manufacturing license to the extent capacity for new licenses exists under any of the respective caps. On page eight Line 44, insert a new Section five of the Council bill and renumbered succeeding subsections according to Section five that the introductory sentence of Section six, Dash 213, Denver Room II Revised Municipal Code shall be amended by adding the language under underline to read Section 6-2 13 Licensing Requirements Retail Marijuana Products Manufacturer Effective May one, 2016. The director shall not receive or act upon any application for retail marijuana product manufacturer license except through the annual open application process set forth in section six. 203 In addition to the requirements set forth in the Colorado Retail Marijuana Code, any rules or regulations adopted pursuant there to the following recommendations shall apply to the issuance of any local license a retail marijuana product manufacturer on page 12. On page 12 Line eight, insert a new section of the Council bill and renumbered succeeding section according section. There is no number here. That Section 20 4-509 Licensing Requirement Medical Marijuana Infused Product Manufacturing License Effective May one, 2016. The director shall not receive or act upon any application for medical marijuana infused products manufacturer licensing, except through the annual open application process set forth in Section 6-203. In addition to the requirements set forth in the CMC, the following requirements shall apply to the issuance of any local license for medical marijuana infused products and manufacturing. And if I could just explain what this does. As I indicated earlier, this would create a council. And let me first just move your motion of the first and second, and then I'll come to you directly for comments. Okay. All right. So that was second motion to amend that has been moved and seconded. Comments. Councilman Ortega, go right ahead. So what this does is it creates a cap over time. By each category. So that. Over time that we would essentially ratchet down over a period of time so that we have caps on the different categories. And we don't, you know, unless there's something that opens up and we have the lottery process that's spelled out in Councilwoman , can you just fill. We basically have a ratcheted down number based on the numbers that I read earlier. Thank you. Councilman Ortega. Councilman Flynn. Thank you, Mr. President. I strongly support this. One of the problems I have with the bill as it is originally drafted is that it's such a cap. All caps are arbitrary, by the way, but the cap in the original bill that we're looking at unamended leaves us with a cap that is everything that exists now and everything that gets approved, that's still pending and that's just as arbitrary. I. Denver really is, as the gentleman said, the Silicon Valley. But we're actually we're the center of it because around and if you bear with me, just take a second. The cities in the metro area that prohibit what we're doing here tonight. Arvada, Brighton. Broomfield, Castlerock, Centennial. Cherry Hills Village. Columbine Valley. Englewood. Erie Federal Heights. Firestone. Frederick Golden. Greenwood Village. Lakewood Littleton. Longmont Lone Tree Mawson. Parker, Sheridan, Superior, Thornton and Westminster. If you look at the maps that are online of where to buy your marijuana, all of the most of the pinpoints are right in the center of Denver. So to be getting emails for the last two weeks about how we're assaulting the industry and we're stifling the industry, I think the exact opposite is true. This is about the only place in the metro area that you have this kind of that you have this kind of access to the market. And by the way, this is not a free market. The folks who testified up here that we're overregulating and it's a free market, the people who wrote Amendment 64 said it's not a free market. We're doing the job that they told us to do. I wholeheartedly support setting a cap that is lower than what we will end up with by simply letting the paintings go through. We will have a number of like we will be over the cap for some period of time, but over time it would ratchet down . Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilman Flynn. Perhaps someone can. Thank you, Mr. President. I want to again reconcile between the framing of the amendment and the language. Mr. RUDD Well, I'm reading the back page of the amendment. I don't see where it ratchets down. What I read is it includes the total number of existing licenses plus the pending. I don't see that there is a ratchet down. It's basically status quo, what's what's what's existing, plus what's pending. So Councilman Flynn is has based his vote on the idea that it ratchets down through attrition, but nothing in this language does that. So I want to just clarify what it what it does and what it does not do. Well, I think I I'd stated a somewhat different way. There's a big ratchet down implicit in the amendment, but it's essentially a one time thing. It's a it's the idea that there's a number of maximum licenses. We're no longer talking locations here. We're talking licenses. That's a stated number that would be codified in the law and which would tell the director, you can't conduct an open application process or a lottery until sometime in the future when the number of licenses in Denver go below that number. And the numbers that are proposed are substantially lower than the number of licenses in the city today that that this really puts off until some some distant future when the number would go below that in terms of licenses that we would be accepting new licenses under the open application process. That's what this move if there was. Slightly to that language, please, where the number is lower. I've heard this in the description, but I am looking at the text of the amendment and I do not see where it changes the number. So if you can just point me to the line. I hope I've got the right copy. The middle of the first page 275. Oh, we don't have that number. Okay, maybe I'm looking at the wrong version. Sorry. Okay. I must have an old version. Mine does not have a 275, so. I mean, look. Where is this? What color? We. We passed out the. That's the way. It should be. I'm sorry I wasn't reading from the colored one. Oh, we passed out the one that was written on. The white. Flight. Okay, so I just want to clarify. We skipped over Amendment two and went to Amendment three then. Is that what occurred? It is correct. That. Okay, that helps quite a bit. Thank you. I was an amendment. Yeah. Councilman Ortega chose to. Were you still going to do for Councilman Ortega or did you or. I do plan to do for. Okay. All right. So, Councilwoman Kinney, any other questions? Tracking. Now I make sure I got councilman carnitas questions answered. Can someone just confirm I'm on the right color? It is the. I'm looking at white. It is the White House. Okay. There's no. Okay. All right. This is our Second Amendment. Any other comments? On Councilwoman Ortega's Second Amendment. Councilman Kim H. I thought you might have something I wanted to give you a minute. To thank you and your. Parents. I'm juggling a lot of paper up here, and I think I must have had an earlier version of the amendment. So I want to just point out one of the significant differences that this amendment will create, as opposed to the bill as drafted, which is not just that there is, you know, a ratchet down in the numbers , but there will actually be no city controlled new entrants. So we at this point, we would have a secondary market where existing business owners could sell licenses to others, but there would be no ability for the city to set a higher standard. So, for example, right now in this pending in this drafted bill, the lottery pro qualifications include the fact that no one has had any any violations of a safety related matter in the prior year. No one's had any revocations at another location. And that applies to all of the owners that are involved. None of those criteria would then apply because this new law is for individual businesses to choose who they want to sell to. The city has certain veto powers. For example, if you had it didn't pass the criminal background check, for example, but you would be literally giving the existing industry exclusive control over who the new entrants are. So that isn't perhaps an unintended consequence, but it is indeed a consequence of this dial down. And this was earlier in this process, a persuasive issue for some people who felt like it was important that the city be the one to be controlling new entrants to the market. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Kenny. Councilman Flynn's okay if I hop over you for councilman new councilman new. You're up. Just a question on the deputy's license numbers. Is that about 50% of what the current license figure is? Is there some is there some percentage of your work? That is that is correct, except on the maps, it's actually higher than more than what it is. With the total number, including the pending that would that would go through. But certainly on the on the grows and on the stores, it would be about half. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman new Councilman Flynn. Thank you. Just for a clarification on the secondary market issue, Mr. Broadwell, maybe you could help me out here or maybe Stacy. But when a when an operator when a licensee wants to sell the business to another to a buyer. They can't just give them the license. We have to approve that. So it's not the case that you're selling our license. You're selling your business. And yes, it may be more valuable because we're limiting the number of businesses. But you're not selling a license and we can subject the transfer to the exact same standards. Simply by adopting that. If we don't have them already, I'm shocked. I'd be shocked that we don't have the same level of scrutiny for a license transfer as we do for anyone else applying for a license. Could you help me on that? Mr. Bravo. Yes. Just briefly on that, the neither the main bell tonight or any of the amendments change up the basic rules for transfer of ownership of a license and transfer of ownership of marijuana licenses very similar to liquor licenses is a fairly simple process now under current law that basically you don't do new needs and desires or anything like that. It's just doing the criminal background and character check on the new owners. Right. It's essentially a look at the character of the new owners. But as of right now, the kind of what what you look at, what the disqualifier as might be, are entirely set forth in state law. The city has never adopted any unique or additional filters or criteria for the background check for the new owners. It's not something we've ever regulated in detail. There was going to be there's there's some additional requirements set forth in the in the annual open application process and the underlying bill for new licensing. But for transfer of ownership, it's pretty minimalist in terms of what the standards are under state law that we follow currently. You're a good councilman for good. Councilman Kenny Tribeca. Thank you. Yes. As I caught up with my reading, I began to apologize for being on the wrong amendment. Two other consequences I want to make sure folks understand. We had had an extensive conversation in committee about the importance of allowing conversion or additions to retail. This would not allow it. The cap on marijuana sales licenses at 250 would prevent existing medical facilities from adding retail to the extent that they would exceed the cap. So there would be no we would remember we've talked about freezing the world in medical. This bill would do that because it applies the cap to both medical and retail in combination. The second piece that this amendment does that, again, we had talked about in committee, we had no testimony about impacts to communities from MIPS. MIPS tend to be thousand feet type facilities, which is like, you know, think about your house square footage probably, you know, if you live in a in a single family home or a duplex, your house is perhaps more than a thousand feet of of space. These are small commercial kitchens, laboratories that do extractions. They do not have customers coming and going from them like stores do. And they do not have growth of marijuana. They're not cultivators unless they have a cultivation license. And that's a different matter. But this would limit the manufacturers as well, which as we discussed in committee, there was not a strong interest in that obviously could have changed. But I just want to make sure folks understand that with this bill, you are capping manufacturers along with the other two categories we've mostly been discussing. And you also are prohibiting addition or conversion to retail because it would exceed the cap. So just making sure folks understand that. Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman Canete. All right. We've got Councilman Black. Thank you. I have a question. So this is based on capping licenses. And the premise of Councilwoman Finishes, Bill is locations which I thought we were all in agreement about. And so I'm wondering if this passes, will it replace. What's in Councilwoman Pernicious Bill regarding licenses over locations. Do you want me to address that or she's looking at you, David. But I think. Dave I think she was looking at you. Okay. I will defer to the proponent of the amendment, but but this is germane to if you go back to the top of this amendment, you'll see this is the only one that actually amends the title of the bill because it fundamentally does change the thrust of the bill, that the conversation that the bill itself is focused on capping locations based upon the status quo, essentially. But this does by changing the focus to number of licenses instead of number of locations, it actually necessitated a change to the bill title, right, in addition to a number of the details in the body of the bill itself. But but it does, you know, undoubtedly kind of change it from one paradigm to another. And that's why it required a couple of pages worth of worth of amendments to do that. But it's still a the bill, right? Still has the open application process somewhere down the line for new licensing. If we ever go below these numbers, some of the fundamentals of the original bill are still in place. But it is really a shift from the location idea to a license idea and a license number that is a much lower than current status quo number . And if I could just continue. So. Effective May 2016, the director wouldn't accept new applications, but with all of the current, existing and pending. It would start from that number. And so after all of these licenses that do allow the the co-location are approved, then it would set a different number as as the cap for each of the categories. All right. Well, thank you. I won't be supporting it because I fully support our original premise, which was to. Look at the locations and not the licenses. I also don't think we should restrict maps for exactly the same reason that Councilwoman CORNISH mentioned. I won't repeat them. So. Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman Black. Next, councilman to take you. I'll pass a lot. My colleague speaks that. I just. Okay. Councilman Flynn. Thank you, sir. I just wanted to clarify that for Councilwoman CORNISH, that the this amendment applies only going forward, that it doesn't affect the pending application. So any conversions that are already in the works would go would go forward if the applications are in. I'm. Hmm. No. We would end up with the number that we end up with. But you couldn't have any new applications until we get below the cap. Okay. Thank you. Councilman Flynn, any other comments on the Second Amendment? So. So, David, I just want to ask if you could just one more time, since there was a lot of confusion going back and forth. And if you could just succinctly say what this amendment is, again, I want to make sure I don't see any other comments or about the vote, but I want to make sure everyone's clear about what this particular amendment is. And there was a little bit of confusion. So if David, if you could just one more time, just some me some summarize. Okay. So so the the base bill coming in to tonight cap the total number of locations in the city pretty much based on status quo, existing plus pending. Right. And it was very focused on physical locations, as we've all learned. Many locations have multiple, multiple license layered on to the same location. But that was the thrust of the bill. This changes the focus to number of licenses in Denver, Colorado, and basically says that it's that unless we go below a certain number as specified in the amendment, we will not be accepting new applications for licenses, whether they're co-located with existing in the future or whether they're going to be a unique location. We just won't be accepting them until total number of licenses in Denver go below the number. The other significant thing I'll emphasize again that others have noted is that this is the only amendment which also gets into the realm of manufacturers. Okay. Everything else you're talking about tonight is stores, sales and cultivation. But this one gets into capping the manufacturing licenses as well. And that's another unique aspect of this, which takes the bill into a different realm. Thank you. And this has no impact on the previous amendment that was passed earlier in regards to the lottery. Correct. And any impact on what. The previous amendment that was passed in regards to a lottery. No, this was still leave provisions in the bill or regarding a lottery at some point in the future. The amendment you passed earlier talks about blacking out some statistical neighborhoods that would still be in play whenever that would occur in the future. But this would basically make that future a long time further away in terms of when we would probably be going below those numbers. Thank you, David, for that clarification. Any other comments on the Second Amendment from Councilwoman Ortega? See nine. Madam Secretary, roll call. Ortega Susman. No. Black? No. Brooks, clerk. No. Espinosa, no. Flynn. I. Cashman now. Can each know Lopez? Pass. New? No. Lopez. No. Mr. President. No. Madam Secretary, please, first of all, announce the results. 369389a second. The amendment fails. Councilman Ortega, do you have a you have a Third Amendment you'd like to offer? I do. Amendment four is the gold sheet, and this is. Mr. President, I move to amend Council Bill 16 to 64 in the following particulars on page 13, line 42, add section 12 to the Council Bill and Marine number of succeeding sections. According to Section 12, the Section 12 Dash 96 for B DRC shall be amended by adding the language underlined to read as follows. Section 12 Deaths 96 Dash Notification. The following agencies of the city shall be responsible for the following notification. Proposed Action Application for any type of new business license under the Denver Medical Marijuana Code or the Denver Retail Marijuana Code in any location in the I8 or I.B. Industrial Zone District, as defined by the Denver Zoning Code, or any proposal to change the location of the existing marijuana business license to a new location in such zone districts and the responsible city agency would be excise and license. Thank you. Councilwoman Ortega has been moved and seconded. Comments. Councilwoman Ortega. So basically what this does is it ensures that communities who are adjacent to the I and Ibe zone districts who currently are not receiving any notification would be entitled to that. Any of the IMX zones do provide notification to the adjacent neighborhoods. They just don't. For the IEEE and the IB and we have heard repeated testimony from the community asking for this notification. So that's what this would do. Thank you, Councilwoman Ortega. Councilwoman, can each. Thank you, Mr. President. I seconded this motion. It's my intention to support it. I believe this allows an opportunity for communities who've been asking for notice to be able to have an opportunity to reach out to the businesses and create a dialog. The council member can be a part of that or not. But it creates an opportunity for communication where there hasn't been enough. Clearly, we would not be as as Nancy mentioned, we would not be in this boat if we had had more communication from these businesses to these communities. And this creates that opportunity. So in an effort, as Councilman Lopez requested, to try to find ways to find common ground, this is a good one and I'm happy to support it. Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman Canete. Councilman Brooks. Thank you, Mr. President. David, let me ask you a quick question around this. On the similar bill that we are not a similar bill, but we passed this omnibus bill earlier this year. If we did the notification and in the omnibus bill, we talked about getting a number of signatures. And Stacy LAX can answer this question as well. A number of signatures for a hearing. Does this coincide with that? Can you have a hearing for an I believe even those for you, sir, I. Even if you had a number of signatures. Well, I'll invite others to talk about that. That particular provision of the omnibus who worked on that more directly. This is purely a one way street. It's just a notification requirement that excise and licenses has to provide to the R and O's when there's any kind of marijuana business licensing in these in these industrial districts. It doesn't talk about hearings. It doesn't talk about petition processes. It's just notices that have to go out to the RINOs more. More broadly, there are some existing notification requirements they have to do now. Yeah, that's already in the same ordinance. But this makes it broader. I'm in the I want and I. And David, I'm clear on that. What I'm not clear on is will this connect to the greater omnibus bill that talked about existing notification? Was that all only for IMX Stacy? It's about time you come to the mic tonight. Thanks. Councilmember Stacy Lux, that executive director of the Denver Department of Excise and Licenses. This does not connect to the omnibus bill that was specifically for the iMac. Zone districts to provide that notification requirement, a public hearing requirement. This would be entirely. Separate for a night. B zone districts, not for IMAX. Okay. Thank you. Given that, you know, I will be supporting this, I think it is important to underscore and underline that this gives kind of a false hope in representation, that there could be a public hearing and needs and desires hearing for for this. I want to remind folks in the public that I be is for use by. Right. There's several other breweries and things like that are in this is very difficult and I know a lot of folks in the community asked me to look at this. We looked at it. So it's a it's a tough deal, but I just I'm going to support it with the understanding that I think what councilman can each say it was right on that this helps in that community process. It's amazing to me, you know, at these are my comments for the the larger bill, Mr. President. But I'll just say this is amazing to me that there's so much so many people in the industry upset. But I heard very little, very little on community outreach. And I just want to tell you, community outreach, reaching out to neighborhood residents, giving me a phone call in the community does not take much effort. And so this would require that and, you know, I'm going to support this, but I'll say my comments the larger bill. Thank you. Hey, thank you, Councilman Brooks. Councilman Flynn. Thanks, Mr. President. I'd like a little clarification maybe from Councilwoman Ortega or from Mr. Broadwell. Section 1296 of the R.A. Ordinance says in paragraph A that we notify registered neighborhood organizations when something happens within their boundaries or within 200 feet. And but then I see in the proposed action, it says it doesn't have any distance. It says any location in in a fire or I.B. zone. So does that need to be reconciled with the fact that it follows a paragraph that says within 200 feet because some of these will be, as we know, they got to be more than a thousand feet from the neighborhood so they won't be within the 200 feet . And that's one thing. And then the second question is, Councilman Ortega, what R.A. would be notified if, for example, that A or I.B. zone is not in is not covered by an R.A.? Are you talking about any surrounding that zone or. Yeah, so maybe. That and maybe that has. Clarified. Geographical boundaries. So they would have to be within the geographical boundaries. But there are some are in those that cover the whole city, so they automatically be notified. But, you know, as we know, if you send an email to agency about something that's happening in my neighborhood, no one in my neighborhood ever hears about it. So I'm most concerned about getting this notification to the R and O's that border, but may not cover that industrial zone. So will this do I'm I just wonder, will this do that? David, I would appreciate your interpretation, but it's my understanding that the R.A. who covers the geographical boundary where the application is proposed, would be notified if they're outside of the boundary. They wouldn't be notified. David, do you have something more? If you could come back to me, you're quoting it in context with the rest of the section councilman. Is that right? And I don't have that in front of me right now in terms of reading this language, in the context of the proximity language. So I think if it can wait a second and I can do that. And Councilman, we'll we'll come back to you as we have more council members in the queue. Councilman Lopez, you're up. Thank you. I was having questions along the line as Councilman Flynn, so I really want to hear back from David Brown on what? He thinks about that. But this is a step in the right direction. And I agree with my colleague on the east side. Councilman Brooks. And I think a lot of this could have been quelled. Very easily. It's looping in the neighborhoods. It's creating that relationship because at the end of the day, you could have any elaborate security system you want. There's nothing more elaborate than those nosy neighbors. And they look out for the businesses and they look out for everything in that neighborhood. So especially the ones out there in Globeville. All right. I support this. I think David Davis got the answer. No. Well, actually, at this late hour reading the sense of council, we will make sure that it codified as an amendment to the bill, that it includes both the literal and the proximate, because that's the spirit of a lot of the notification requirements that are in the code now. So if the amendment itself is improperly worded, we'll make sure it gets inserted to cover both scenarios. Okay. And that's the reason I brought that up. As I see, there are some RINO's in. MONDELLO For instance. MONDELLO Tony does not their boundaries do not include the warehouse district that where where this where cultivation is allowed. And I certainly want them to be notified if that happened. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Flynn. All right. Any other comments on the Third Amendment from Councilwoman Ortega? All right, CNN, Madam Secretary, roll call. Ortega I. Sassaman. Right. Black. All right. Brooks Clark. All right. Espinosa. Hi. Flynn. Hi. Cashman. I can eat. Lopez. I knew. Mr. President, I am secretary. Please Thursday announce the results. 12. 12 eyes. The motion passes. How about that? All right. And unanimously. Councilman Ortega, you've got one more. I believe the last one. I think because it's so similar to one of the other ones that I brought it basically. Let me just tell you what it does and why I'm not going to bring it forward. I find it. Um. Thanks for your. So this particular amendment. Or. So this particular amendment would have proposed a cap on sales and cultivation in the statistical neighborhoods, which are the same neighborhoods or similar neighborhoods that are some a number of them are overlapping that would have basically gone into effect after. All the pending had gone through. And given that we have not had support for addressing any of these, I'm choosing to withdraw this at this point in time. Thank you, Councilwoman Ortega. All right. So those were your three. Councilman Lopez, did you have a motion to amend? Yes, I have two amendments that. Go right ahead. Whichever one you'd like to begin with. Thank you, Mr. President. I move to amend Constable's 16 to 64 and the following particulars on page four Line 12. By the following definition, 11 statistical neighborhood means a geographical neighborhood, boundaries established by the city and county in Denver in 1970, conjunction with the Community Renewal Program, consisting of combinations of census tracts to which the city has assigned geographic place names corresponding to commonly used names of subdivisions and historical parts of the city. On page eight, line 43, add new section five to the bill and renumbered each succeeding section accordingly. Section five, that section six Dash 26 to 11 shall be further amended by the addition of a new subsection F to read as follows . Section six Dash to 11 Licensing Requirements Dash Retail Marijuana Stores D Effective May 1st, 2016 New application shall be received. No license shall be issued for any new retail marijuana store in any of the following typical neighborhoods. One Overland. Two Elyria. Swansea three five points. Northeast Park Hill. Valverde. Baker Sunnyside. Globeville Montebello. Capitol Hill College View Platte Park Civic Center. Coal. That should be Hamden. As a sec, as a separate neighborhood, that's a typo. 15 Lincoln Park, La alma, 16. Rosedale, Ruby Hill and Speer. On page ten line 33 ad the new subsection e read as follows de effective me first 2016 application shall be received. No approval shall be given for the change of location for any existing license for a retail medical marijuana store to the new location in any of the following statistical neighborhoods, Oberlin is 1 to 5 points Northeast. Parkhill. Valverde. Baker. Sunnyside. Globeville. Montebello. Capitol Hill. College View Platte Park Civic Center. Cole Camden. Lincoln Park Lama. Rosedale, Ruby Hill and Speer on page 13, line 42 and new subsection G, Teresa's read as follows Effective G Effective May 1st, 2016. New application shall be received and no approval shall be given for a change of location for any existing license for a medical marijuana center to a new location in any of the following school neighborhoods. Oberlin, Elyria, Swansea, a five points Northeast. Parkhill. Valverde. Baker. Sunnyside. Globeville. Montebello, Capitol Hill College View Platte Park Civic Center Cole Hamden. Lincoln Park Larchmont. Rosedale. Ruby Hill Spur on page 13, line 43 strike any and insert except as provided here in any on page 14 after line four, insert the following any application pending on May 1st, 2016 for medical marijuana, optional premises cultivation license or retail marijuana cultivation facility license shall not be approved by the director if the premises of the proposed for licensing is located within any of the following statistical neighborhoods Oberlin, Elyria, Swansea or five points Northeast. Parkhill. Valverde. Baker. Sunnyside. Globeville. Montebello. Capitol Hill. College View. Platte Park. Civic Center. Cole Hamden. Lincoln Park, Llama, Rossdale, Ruby Hill and Spears. Thank you. Councilman Lopez has been moved and second in comments. Councilman Lopez. Thank you, Mr. President. I made my points at an earlier, earlier testimony into a very similar amendment, but a little different. This one actually separates out retail medical centers, the actual marijuana centers and the cultivation, you know, as I said before, has nothing to do with it is a matter of making sure that we have choice in our neighborhoods of other uses. We don't have that in very many of our neighborhoods. And as a city, we need to do a better job. But that's not just the role of government. That's the role of everybody. Do I think, you know, here's the reasoning for all these neighborhoods. These were the neighborhoods that were identified. It was empirical. It was not just cherry picking by whatever one rhymed with Oberlin. It. It was completely empirical based off of the saturation. Right. These neighborhoods from top to bottom, saturated, saturated all the way. And there was, I think, a seven way tie from. Not mistaken with the number 13 spot. So I just I included them all in there. To be fair, no way. It didn't look like we were just picking one over the other. Just to be absolutely fair and empirical. And I hope my my colleague, Councilman Clarke, appreciates that. Empirical miss. So, you know, I hope. This if it does not pass. I just hope it strikes that discussion and that point. You know, I, I, I'm passionate about it because I live in one of these neighborhoods. I live among my whole life. I'm not one of these folks that have this this fear of marijuana. I grew up around it. I know how to roll it. I know. I know. I know. I know a lot about it. And it's one of those things that, you know, it's sad because you see you see arrests happening on around. You see you see everything that comes around with the community for good and for bad, for better and for worse. You know, it is it is one of these things that I wish people had more respect for. As a medicine. We'd be in a whole different ballgame at one. You know, if the FDA just got with it, we wouldn't have a need for a dispensary, folks. You just be able to walk into Walgreens, get the prescription and go home. Right at the end of the day. So we don't do it for Tylenol. You don't have dispensaries for Tylenol, sir. So anyway. Thank you, Mr. President. I think folks get my point. Thank you. Councilman Lopez. Councilman Flynn. Thank you, Mr. President. Councilman Lopez, I just want to clarify before I decide on this. The as far as licensing requirements for retail, everything except the cultivation. You're saying effective May 1st, no application shall be received. A no license shall be issued. Do you mean that? Does this mean that all the pending ones would also not be issued? All the pending. Okay. I would only support this if that were removed. I can support going forward with effective May 1st. No application shall be received from these neighborhoods. But we've already voted down an amendment that would have not process the pending. So if you were open to that, I could support it. And also, if you took out the cultivation section. There's only a cultivation section in the next amendment. This one doesn't have a confirmation on it. Did you not read this point on the. They have a cultivation. Yes. Any application pending May 1st for a medical marijuana optional premise cultivation. Right. You're alluding to the other. I'm curious about the list also, because it includes neighborhoods that I don't think have cultivation, Capitol Hill Civic Center especially. So if that were removed and if it only applied going forward to new licenses, I could support it, but otherwise not. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilman and Councilman Black. Thank you. I appreciate everyone's concern for our neighborhoods. I have deep, deep sympathies for the injustices to a lot of our neighborhoods, particularly Globeville, Elyria and Swansea. But the injustices were not caused by the marijuana industry. The marijuana industry did not cause the odor of Purina, but has been there my entire life. Nor is it the marijuana industry's fault that there aren't grocery stores in neighborhoods. So. I'm not saying that for applause. I just I think we're confusing some things that aren't necessarily related and by preventing the pending applications to go through. It's not going to bring us a grocery store and it's not going to make Purina smell better. So those are issues that absolutely have to be addressed if we can have economic incentives to bring Panasonic and Costco . I really don't understand why we can't get grocery stores. I, I just find that really hard to believe, but I don't think that it's because of the marijuana industry. And I do want to help these neighborhoods absolutely 100%. But I think the blame should not be put on the industry. Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman Black. Councilman Lopez, it's okay if I go to Councilman Espinosa since you had a chance to speak. Absolutely. Councilman Espinosa. Yeah. I'm just I'm just going to comment. The fact that these businesses are concentrated in areas that have our food deserts is not an applause line. This is sort of what I've been trying to push in committee, is that we should be using this industry, both the money it's generated and the opportunities that it can create to actually solve problems like that. And so. And when we get to the final comments, you're going to hear me say a lot about the fact that none of these proposals even touch about community benefit and how we can actually maybe liberate more locations to be eligible for this industry. Because the problem isn't these that these businesses exist. It's how they exist. We can all do better on both sides of this thing. So that's not an applause line. And I'm sorry, I just had to say something. I can't listen to that. Thank you, Councilman Espinosa. Councilman Lopez, you're up. So I draft this. And this is the making sausage part of governing governance. Right. And I'm absolutely open to having the conversation on pending. I'm absolutely open to having the conversation on which neighborhoods should be here in which should I put them all in here just to not cherry pick, to put them all here? This list was provided to me based on the numbers that are there. So as I mentioned before, finding that middle ground and keeping the fine and keeping to keeping that search on for that for that sweet spot and how we actually pass a bill that addresses a lot of this. This is this is a step in the right direction in terms of how we having that conversation. I just hope that we are all open minded to be able to do it. And secondly. You know, to address the issue on grocery stores. You're absolutely right, Councilwoman Black. It's not this industry that caused this problem. It isn't. It's a lack of regulation in the beginning that did that. It's a it's a lack of priority on a citizen that has done that. But I'll tell you a story. We decided to I mean, in the spirit of 64, Amendment 64 is to regulate like alcohol. I got excited about that because I think there's a lot of problems with alcohol regulation. I think it's a heck of a lot more dangerous of a drug than this will ever be. And so we decided to block an application through needs and desires. And that's why we have a needs and desires. And hearing in here that the community says, we have enough. You don't need it. We have a lot of them. And in our neighborhood, we have a lot of liquor stores. You can walk to all kinds of different ones from your house. Well, there's one on first inox. Now, we fought that one off. Why? Because it used to be our grocery store. And we fought another runoff. And guess what? We were able to land a grocery store. Because we fought it off. Twice. And the other one right across the street where Moka had this restaurant is matter of fact the owner the owner A and I hate this wanted a liquor store. Because of our policies, because of the things that we were working on, talking about how we modeled the needs and desires hearings here and because of our distance regulations. We were able to actually block that one and convince the owner. Of something we actually need. I and, you know, we don't have a restaurant in this little area. There. Heck, a lot of us that like us. And guess what she did. She opened that restaurant five years ago. Six years ago. It's the most popular one in the neighborhood. Sometimes it does take some pushback. Sometimes it does take us work in the market a little bit, and sometimes it does take us a step in there. And the fact that there aren't any grocery stores, that's not your fault. The fact that people raise their rents around you because they see you around. It's not your fault. They just do it. And as a byproduct, it's harder for some of these mom and pop shops to open up grocery stores. There's a lot of different reasons why grocery stores don't want to go into the. And it's not right. And someone should put a stop to that. Someone should incentivize that that conversation is taking place. But I do that and I talk about those food deserts because that is what the midst of what you are in if you are in these neighborhoods. That's just the reality of it. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman Lopez, want to bring us back. If we could continue to focus on the particulars of each amendment, we will get out of here before 3 a.m.. David broadwell did. You said you wanted to chime in. It's a quick clarification. This was probably related to drafts flying around this morning. To be clear, the amendment on the floor is only supposed to be about marijuana sales stores all the way through to the end on the pending application provision. It says cultivation, but it's not meant to say stores. So this will prohibit new new stores and centers in certain neighborhoods and also cut off the pending application for marijuana sales in those neighborhoods. The next amendment is entirely about cultivation, again, blacking out certain neighborhoods and cutting off pending applications in those neighborhoods for cultivation. So that was just a word processing error. If you vote on this, understand this is going to be entirely about stores. Cultivation will be the next amendment. Sorry about that. Thank you. Thank you so much, David, for that clarification. Councilman Flynn, you got something? Yes. Thank you. That's that's exactly what I was going to bring up. Apparently, I was looking at the Amendment one, the yellow sheet, because Councilman Lopez was reading from a yellow sheet. So I apologize. But in the list of just for clarification, the list of neighborhoods. So I guess I'll bring it up when we get to the yellow sheet. Where. We are on the other one. Okay. Amendment one. Okay. In the list, there's a neighborhood. I think there's a says Cole Hamden. It's supposed to be. It's just supposed to be Cole. That was a typo. I didn't hit the space. I should've hit the honor bar. Do you mean to include the Hamden as well? Okay, that's what I needed to know. Thank you. All right. And it was an identified neighborhood. And Councilman Lopez. Are you are you open to restricting this only to new applications after May 1st? I'm absolutely open to it. If you do that, I would vote for it. You can talk about that afterwards. Right. All right. Thank you, Councilman Flynn. So once again, thank you, David Broadwell, for that clarification so that people are aware of what this amendment speaks to specifically to stores, not cultivations. And correct me if I'm wrong, it also includes not allowing opinions as well. There was just a conversation about would he be willing to change that? Councilman Lopez says he is. However, this particular motion includes the pending. So to make sure everyone's aware of that scene. Mr. President, if I could interrupt, I don't know if that was intended to be a friendly amendment where the movement is now agreeing to sever that last paragraph. So it's not in there anymore. But that's what I heard the colloquy laid out. I was I was not I wanted to make sure we just kept the motion that Councilman Lopez originally said is on the floor that does take out pending applications. And if he wants to offer another one, I will go to that after we vote on this. All right. We got company. Yes, Councilman Espinosa. Yeah, if I don't click in. Who? Can you trace that? So I did have a question, a clarification. Did I just hear the exchange between Councilman Flynn and Lopez say that this only applies? To do that. This was on. Two applications after May 1st. This one does not. No applications after May 1st, as well as pending applications. Thank you. All right. See the comments. Madam Secretary, roll call Lopez. I knew Ortega. I Susman. No black? No Brooks Clarke? No Espinosa. No Flynn. No passion. No carnage. No Ortega. Ortega. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. What was your vote? Had voted earlier. I. I just had pressed it on her. Okay. Can each. Mr. President. I. All right, we got them all. Madam Secretary, please close the voting results for ice. Eight nays for. Ice, eight nays. The motion has failed. Councilman Lopez, do you have one more motion you like to offer? Last one. And I will do my best to read right through it. Thank you, Mr. President. I move to amend Constable to 64 series of 2016 and the following particulars on page four Line 12 add the following definition 11 Statistical neighborhood means the geographical neighborhood boundaries established by the city and county of Denver in 1970, in conjunction with the Community Renewal Program, consisting of combinations of census tracts to which the city has assigned geographic place names corresponding to commonly used names of subdivisions in historical parts of the city. On page nine, line 27, add the subsection E to read as follows. E Effective May 1st, 2016, no application shall be received and no license shall be issued for any new retail marijuana cultivation facility in any of the following statistical neighborhoods. One Elyria. Swansea A. Two Oberlin. Northeast Park Hill. Montebello. Valverde College View Lincoln Park Lama Sunnyside Baker ATH Ma Park Five Points, Globeville and Sun Valley on page ten, line 33, a new subsection Eat or use it read as follows. Effective May 2016. No application shall be D effective May 1st, 2016. No application shall be received. No approval shall be given for a change of location of any of the existing license for a Retail America retail marijuana cultivation facility to a new location in any of the following statistical neighborhoods. Elyria. Swansea. Globeville. I'm sorry. Illyria. Swansea. Overland. Northeast Park Il. Marbella. Valverde College View. Lincoln Park Le Alma Sunnyside Baker Atheneum Park Five Points. Globeville Sun Valley on page 13, line 20, line 42. At a new subsection G. Theresa read as follows g. Effective May 1st, 2016, no application shall be received and no approval shall be given for a change of location of any existing license for a medical marijuana optional premises cultivation facility to a new location in any of the following statistical neighborhoods. On page 13, line 43 strike any and insert except as permitted provided herein any. On page 14 after line four, insert the following any application pending on May 1st, 2016 for a medical marijuana optional premises cultivation license or retail marijuana cultivation facility license shall not be approved by the director if the premises proposed for licensing is located within any of the following statistical neighborhoods. Elyria. Swansea. Oberlin. Northeast Park Hill. Montebello. Valverde College View. Lincoln Park Lama. Sunnyside. Baker. Asma Park. Five Points. Globeville and Sun Valley. Thank you, Councilman Lopez. It has been moved. Colleagues, we never moved and seconded comments. Councilman Lopez speaks for itself. Same, same principle. Thank you, Councilman Lopez. Any other comments on Councilman Lopez's Second Amendment? No comment. All right. Cena and madam secretary, welcome. Lopez. I knew. All right. Ortega I. Susman no. Black no. Brooks Clark no. Espinosa no. Flynn no. Catherine no. Kenny, no. Mr. President. I. Madam Secretary, please. First of all, right, now the results. Five, seven. Five, eight, seven, eight. The amendment has failed. All right. So that that concludes all of our amendments. So, Councilwoman Black, since the bill has been amended, we had two successful amendments. We need a motion to order published as amended. Thank you, Mr. President. I move that council bill 264 be ordered, published as amended. And wait for technology to catch up. It has been moved and seconded. Before we go on to comments from members of Council, David, could you for us to summarize that? And David, Dave is not listening. Hey, David, bravo. Could you just quickly summarize it what we have now with the bill and the two amendments that were passed and I'm sure a council member would do it, but I would just defer to you as our legal. You ask me to summarize. Yeah, just that the two the two amendments that pass what we have now before us. Briefly, briefly. Yeah, briefly. Why are you asking me? This is the bill as as filed on Thursday as you saw it filed on Thursday with with some time ago. How long ago was that? The the clerk Gilmore amendment was adopted early on that struck a provision of the bill as filed regarding improving the chances of being picked in the lottery and so forth, and adding the requirement that the director assess the five five highest concentration neighborhoods, both for stores and for cultivation, prior to conducting the open application process in the lottery, either in 17 or as soon thereafter as we have capacity to do new licensing. And then the one you just adopted was broadening the random notification for all all marijuana business licenses in I and Abiy's home districts. Otherwise it remains intact. And if you order it published, we'll have a final vote next week. Thank you, David. That was very succinct. All right, council members, we are now voting on the big bill as amended. Councilman Cashman. Ura Thank you, Mr. President. For those of you who think we don't care, that we're not listening and that we don't know what we're doing, I would offer up that we do care. We are listening and we do know what we're doing. We may not be doing exactly what you want us to do, but we know what we're doing. We're trying to keep an industry afloat that. Generated $996. Million of sales last year in Colorado. We're trying to do that without crushing any individual neighborhoods. And without even more importantly. Bringing the wrath of the federal government down on us. In case anyone's forgotten, this is illegal on a federal level, and we're dancing a fine line so we could go Wild West on this and take just take all the regulations off. But I really think in this particular case, the danger is not overregulation. The danger is under regulation. Any bill that we pass is going to annoy somebody because it is going to clamp down a bit on somebody. But I think it's something that we need to do. I am not a particularly happy camper tonight. I am not happy at all about putting even one more location in in neighborhoods that are begging us not to put one more location in there. I am a neighborhood guy. I think our neighborhoods have the right to say I don't want it. Unfortunately, I agree with what Councilwoman Sussman offered up so eloquently earlier. I don't see how I can stop the pending locations. I have looked at the possibility of, as Elizabeth talked about before, some sort of fund so we can stop these locations, these new locations and make people whole. I've been advised that that's not wise. And when counsel says that if we're sued, if we were to stop these paintings and we were sued, we'd probably win. In court for various reasons. Well, that eliminates the last make hole opportunity that I've got. You know, if you open up a dispensary and it turns out you don't know how to do business and the competition beach and you lose three, four or $5 million. That is the risk of doing business. But if you follow the rules that the city presents to you. For me, that's a contract that we need to uphold. Yeah. That's all I've got. I will be supporting this bill tonight. Thank you. Councilman Cashman. Councilwoman Black. Thank you. This is really democracy in action. It's great to have everyone here. Thank you for staying so late. The diversity of opinions is incredible and we are going to compromise. And like Councilman Cashman said, most people aren't going to be happy. But that's that's what happens. Thank you to Ashley Kilroy and her staff and Stacey Locks and her staff and the other city people who have been here. Councilwoman Kanis did a tremendous job trying to accommodate everybody's different wishes on this bill. This was not the bill she started with, and she really did a lot to work with everyone. So I appreciate all of her hard work. We all want to protect neighborhoods in our kids. That is absolutely 100% true. This ordinance is much, much more restrictive than the moratorium. We're going to set a citywide cap. We've got the buffers around grows. We're going to limit where growth can be in the future. The or odor ordinance hopefully will eliminate odor. And I think that is the biggest complaint that people actually have is odor. And so hopefully we will get that worked out. We're going to prohibit medical licenses and we're going to have needs and desires hearings in neighborhoods. So my final wish is that we have a permanent council committee, whether it meets monthly or whatever. We'll just stay on top of this issue and we will continue to create legislation that addresses marijuana. I agree. We need to honor those pending it. It was the contract this city made with the business community. I think it would be damaging to our reputation. I appreciate. And Elizabeth, again, her suggestion that we could counsel people out of certain neighborhoods. And I hope that we can still do that. I know a lot of you have investments, but if some of you are still willing to look elsewhere, I think we should work with you on that. And I know some people up here said. You all need to engage more with your neighborhood. So I hope I hope you will do that. I won't go on and on. But thank you again for your passion and for being here. Thank you, Councilwoman Black. Councilman Brooks. Thank you, Mr. President. And I want to thank all of you all for being here past midnight in those hard seats and hope your cars are okay and you don't have any tickets. I, I don't I don't take it for granted that you all are here, honestly. So I really appreciate I really appreciate you for just being here and dealing with all the issues. Councilwoman, can each my partner in crime on many subjects. I really appreciate your thorough nature in putting this together. This is. This is our job. And it's never 100% ever, ever, ever. And so we live with a constant dissatisfaction of not being able to get it right. But I hope you feel satisfied that I think you did a really good job among 3013 crazy individuals. I want to thank I want to thank the marijuana policy team led by Ashley Kilroy for all your hard work. I want to thank Stacey and her team for your hard work. So I, I represent let me just start by saying I get knocked on this council by being the pro-business guy to a to a discredit. And this is why perception isn't always reality. And we are people up here who have many different lenses and in our many different contexts. But I will tell you why. It's important for me to side with this incredible neighborhood in which I'm six blocks away from and why I'm not supporting the pending licenses. Number one, we had I believe I believe in the ethos. The ethics of business and the ethics of businesses is not so much the profit. It's about the customer in the community. And if that is not your focus, you should not be in business. I just honestly and and and here's my problem in the Cole Clayton global response he neighborhoods we had. A town hall. We had a town hall and we had 100 people come to it. And we had, as you said here, Brett King. And I appreciate that. And Brant was one of the only representatives from the industry. That's him. That's a layup. That's a give me for business and the industry to say, hey, we want to learn. What can we do? What can we do to mitigate some of the issues you're experiencing? That's really all the neighborhood wanted to see. Are there some? Can we meet in the middle? And no one showed up except for Brant. I got a big issue. I got a big issue with that. And I think the neighborhood had a big issue with that. And so I find myself in this position of, you know, this bill doesn't quite get to all the neighborhood protections in the future that we need. But I hope that there's a lesson that's learned in all of this, that there are ways to meet in the middle. And for the conversation about the grocery stores. Some of us know how to go after and get a grocery store and make it work. But we can't teach a business how to be in a community and be effective. You got to do that. And that's why we're in the place we're in and we're not discriminating. We do the same things with liquor stores. We do the same thing when there is a conglomeration of bars. We have gone in and worked hard to get a bar shut down if it's if they're not communicating, connecting with the neighborhoods. So there is no discrimination. I live in them. I represent the most eclectic district with all these issues. And so I will not be supporting this bill tonight. I can't support this bill tonight because I live in a neighborhood. I live 800 feet from a grow facility. And. When you begin to saturate and when you begin to concentrate, there's no smell ordinance that can identify where this is coming from. Right. It's not a particular location when you have all these locations in one small area. And I've never seen a council so sure of a bill. That hasn't even come through committee yet that it's going to work. So and it's much more than smell and it's much more than folks going through the dumpsters. And it's all you need to do is call and all you need to do is call enforcement. We know that communities of color do not call like that on specific issues. So this bill doesn't get here. I'm upset about tonight. I don't feel like, you know, we're getting to the issue. I think Councilwoman Black brought up a good point. We need to continue a working group to get to some of these larger issues. I am fully supportive of figuring out a financial mechanism to see some of these saturated, highly concentrated neighborhoods receive some of the resources. And so it's not the industry's fault, but they can be a part of the solution. Oh, and by the way, I got about five, six, seven people who are in the industry sitting down right now that I trust a ton. And they're doing great work. And the other thing that drives me crazy about this is they're taking the heat for some bad actors in the neighborhood. And so it's a it's a it's a tough place to be in. But I will not be supporting this. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman Brooks. Councilman Lopez. Thank you, Mr. President. It is not often. Necessarily that we don't call. That said, no one responds. And we found that out to be an issue with our own city. And it's that that accountability. Right. I also live in an area that is identified as one of these neighborhoods. And. I'm a council man. I'm blessed to have a job, but to be able to drive back and forth to it or take the bus, I have my choice. I also live in a neighborhood where people that don't have a lot of choices. And. They love the neighborhood. But it says something as a city when we're. Creating density in of services, an area in poorer neighborhoods. You know, willing to. Load it with services. Right. Load it with whatever we can do in the public sector. But. When we look out for the daily lives of the folks in those neighborhoods, we cut our hands off. Right. I'm talking about areas like Villa Park and Sun Valley and Wild Ride. They. These are areas that. We still have some spaces left. And there are some hopes for other uses. There are some hopes to not gentrify the neighborhood. But to develop the neighborhood in a way that folks can stay there, be there, live their lives. And I talk about this particular neighborhood because this it's interesting how this neighborhood is so adamantly against. Any more dispensaries. Associations are big time. Cultivation big time anti. And when I heard testimony from a similar organization not too far away from us in along South Broadway, they said, oh, we ain't got no problems with it. I find that to be completely interesting. At the most dispensaries in the city. And in the overland neighborhood these areas. Most dispensaries in the city. Right next to cultivation. What is it? What is it about that neighborhood in our neighborhood? Well, there's different access to different things. There are choices. And as a city, we've historically looked to neighborhoods quite differently. Right now, we need to level the playing field so that no matter what industry exists. You don't get the bat end of the stick. And but it's going to it's going to take this participation. And I think when we look at how we're regulating this, you know, I think my I can't say anything that would ever top what Councilman Cashman had said. Exactly what he says. And Councilman Black wanting to see this be a permanent. Committee is absolutely necessary. We lead the world. And how you regulate. But here's the thing. Here's the only thing I would say differently. We can come up here and meet as many times as we want and figure out and scratch our heads on how to find this middle ground. You all are the best ones to do it. You all know the interesting intricacies of your industry. The folks that you employ. And that's the kind of input we need. But we need it open and we need to be able to do it in a way that protects some of these neighborhoods and protects them in a way that allows them to have other choices and help solve some of these other industries are completely intrigued. But the idea and the thought that. The marijuana industry is helping a neighborhood get a grocery industry. Think of what that possibility could be. But we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about this bill. My only. My only. Torn side of this is I was completely I'm completely torn about this. And the one thing that's really keeping me. I'm fully is the respect I have for my colleague Robin each. I've texted back and forth to her. Not during public hearings. I have, you know, back and forth all day. Yesterday came in on my day off just to talk to her, to kind of pick her brain a little bit. Councilwoman Canete, you worked really hard on this and. Not for any anything else, except for if she wants to help solve this problem. And you're the one that took this on. And I want to help you solve that problem. I want to get closer to figuring this out. I absolutely honor my my colleague, Councilwoman Kenney. She is taking that higher level. And looking at this from a completely different level in a lot of us, council district members are. So I respect that, but I have to stay true. To. Our car is out there and tonight I won't be supporting this bill. But I don't think this is the end. I think this is just another step in that process. And making sure that we have a bill that takes into account seriously. What so many of us have been saying in this on this dais, but folks have been coming to these council meetings who don't have any who are not paid to do this or anything else. They don't have an industry. The only thing they got is the home that they're raising their family and they want to be able to stay there. So with that, I thank you. Thank you, Councilman. Thank you, folks, for being here. Let's help solve this together. Thank you, Councilman Lopez. Councilman Espinosa. Where do I start? The. I mentioned it. I referenced it, sort of my frustration is, is that none of the I've been commenting, if you've been watching this whole process and then commenting from sort of early on this need to address the concerns that this industry brings or raises. And so where we stood and I'm and I'm really frustrated, actually, Ashley, I want to commend you for the work with the excise and licensing policies that we adopted. But I'm really concerned with the administration and our leadership in how we even got here 2016 in this extended moratorium. Because I knew, you know, yeah, I was sworn in in July, but I knew that there was a moratorium deadline at the end of the year. And yet we don't talk about it as counsel until November of 2015. And we create this weird situation. We approve language that puts these pending applications in limbo. And I can't like my councilwoman, my colleague, Councilman Cashman, can't can't justify putting having put out that language and saying you're okay and then pulling the rug out from underneath those industries. I mean, does does those actors and if you've been watching, you've heard me say, I have no problem with it, I have no problem with it. But that was a bit of language that I actually didn't fully understand that I had approved. And that's really a shameful thing for me to admit. But it's true. And so once I saw that specific language, I just can't do that. I can't do that to those applicants that came in before the end of July, I mean, December 31st. But one of the things that we did by waiting until the 11th hour and not getting not spending the first five months of my time here working on this legislation is that we did not. Ever put forward the effort to try to address the community concerns in any language? Prior or past, what we were talking about was another two year extension of the moratorium. So guess what? None of this matters if we're doing that. So anything that we're doing, limited or not, is still not another two year extension. What to do, what to figure this out. Because we just said we don't know enough information. But what that is, is that's status quo, how we've been operating for the previous two years since its inception and then moving forward two more years, just keep doing what we're doing as we were doing it. So no improvements, just more status quo. And that's my concern about every single thing that we've done here today or talking about amendment wise is it's more status quo. It's just a now it's just the number of businesses that are operating in that status quo. So like I said, if you've been watching, you'd see me sit there and go, well, how can we actually. Push these businesses to actually be the leaders of the community. The pride of the community. Let's take Globeville. And maybe I got my history wrong. But yes, we knew that places a meatpacking mecca in years past. And if you go down to the Orthodox Food Festival and stuff like that, and you meet multi-generational families that were from Globeville, they take real pride. They don't mind that the area stunk. They take real pride in their sense of community around an industry. Well, now we got a whole new industry, but no sense of pride around that. And so that's where I see there is an opportunity and it can either be voluntary or involuntary, and we're not getting in voluntarily. What I did have conversations had conversations with major lobbyists, big players in Denver about this. And I charged them with, hey, what can you do to bring this industry in? I mean, somewhere close to the community. And I got a commitment that we could look into that. But I'm actually sitting here going. The only language I have is the stuff that I generated myself. And unfortunately, too late to actually get get it properly vetted. But what I've been posturing for is why not? If the if the industry's not going to itself perform these duties, why not regulate it so that it does? And and so, like I said before, I'm actually more open to more flexible location allowances and stuff like that. But if we had some provisions and and you know what? I've, you know, there is a licensing I mean, licensing in Dave is going to get mad at me, but I have looked it up while we were here . The statute, the Colorado revised statute on business improvement districts, there is no limit, there is no size restriction on boundaries or specific operate, you know. You know, the specific I have already dropped my language. But anyway, what we can do through our licensing requirements is we can require certain bits and pieces of information to be in an operating plan. And what that can do, I mean, then operating plan then has to be approved by the city. And so these property owners that want this industry, we could make it so that they actually get into into essentially a voluntary district that they make themselves eligible for these things. That's a public private meeting. That's a vote of themselves. But it is a you know, this this operating plan and these other things could we could we could make that part of the hearing process, part of the approval process, and we could talk about those requirements so that we actually get some sort of commitment. So I and so I'm going to I'm throwing that out there because here's what I would like to see happen. I would like the council to take another 45 days, sorry, to devise a means to mitigate the impact of these types of facilities on the surrounding residential communities. I'm only concerned about that. Like you heard me talk about how Montebello is an industrial industrial area. Stapleton is the same way. And then there are parts of my district, Sunnyside, I mean, yeah, and in Sun Valley that just people aren't living. It was designed for industry to exist. So when we're talking about this interface between actual living communities and schools, that's what that's my area of concern. So I in particular, I would like industry specific districts with specific requirements to address facade treatment, site lighting, odor control, right away improvements and community outreach. You know, that's amorphous. But I think we can I think we can hammer down what that is so that we actually our our marijuana industry becomes a pride because it already is a source of revenue. It's a source of it's a driver, a catalyst in this community. But why not? Why not amplify rather than mute? So these conditions would be a requirement. The way I would see this as not making these pending applications ascribe to this, because like you said, the rules were set. But what we would do is we would create a series of triggers so that as there were changes or as there were licensing issues and things like that, that these things would have to be assumed so that you're making a calculated decision after May 5th, I mean, May 1st or actually July 1st or something like that. So again, you continue to operate the way we are, but we set a time limit and this is not unheard of . We do this in the building code, right? You don't have to modify your building until you choose to modify your building, even though the code changes every two years. And so we we can do that. We have the tools, we have the wherewithal. So I think but I just we need a little more time to figure that out. That said, I do want to commend Councilwoman Canete, because you did a hell of a job getting it this far that we can even talk about that. And I appreciate you mentioning this notion of Community Improvement Fund, because if this goes through, that's the piece that I'm going to say. Let's let's I've got you on camera. That's the part I'm going to hold you to. I don't know how that one works, but. But that that's that's what I wanted to get out there. Thank you very much. Thank you. Councilman Espinosa. Councilman Flynn. Excuse me. Thank you, Mr. President. I am going to vote no on this. One of the major. Elements that I wanted was a lower cap and it's not part of it, and I can't support it without a lower cap. I also can't support it with the thousand foot buffer from residential zones. That impacts the only areas where we actually permit cultivation. But I think as was amply shown during the testimony and during the comments. Denver We talk about how we have saturated neighborhoods. We have a saturated city in relation to the metro area and the state. If all the pending licenses go through city and county of Denver, we'll have just about 49% of all the licenses in the state of Colorado. We have a saturated city. It's not just some of our neighborhoods. So I want to see something that has a lower cap and not just what we serendipitously end up with after processing all of the applications. And then one last point to Councilman Lopez and Councilwoman Black. There is actually a nexus between supermarkets and marijuana outlets. I know from personal experience, for example, that Kroger King Soopers does not want to be in shopping centers where there's a marijuana shop. So to the extent it comes from Lopez, a District three in fills with marijuana shops, your chances of landing a Kroger outlet is diminished somewhat . So, Councilwoman Black, there is somewhat of a nexus between the two. So I would I'm going to vote no on this, and I would urge my colleagues to do so as well. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Flynn. Councilwoman Canete. Thank you, Mr. President. I was thinking about waiting till the end, but I thought it was important to go before everyone had had a chance to dig themselves into their final votes. I, too, want to thank the staff. The enormous personal cost that they have all invested in the time they have spent preparing numerous maps, documents, spreadsheets. They're all here now. They've been working this weekend. They've been working mates and they've been working mornings. And you really can't actually thank public servants enough for the kind of dedication, especially when they serve elected officials. We're a hard bunch to serve. And I just want each of the departments to know how personally I appreciate all of their time and their effort. It's it's hard to imagine what this process might have looked like if we had taken the slow path. I think Councilman Espinosa touched on this point. You know, if we had just said time out, two years. I think that there is something to be said for the frequency with which we met and the depth with which we could go when we were meeting that frequently that as difficult as this speedy process has been, perhaps allowed us to really stay focused in a way that would have been much more difficult if we'd met once a month over the course of two years. And honestly, I think it would not have been led by this council. And and I like Councilman Espinosa. I mean, I stepped up in part because I am responsible. I was a carryover council member. And, you know, I, too, could have and should have stepped up and prompted conversation sooner and did not. And so it is in part that sense of responsibility that has me feeling like it is our job as a council to engage and to lead. We are we have more resources, the 13 of us, in terms of interacting directly with the community, ironically, than than than the administration. We just have a different access to our communities and a different ability to to engage them. And and so so I want to just thank my colleagues, frankly, for the breakneck speed and pace that we've pursued. This I, I would not support a delay. I don't believe that we can necessarily bridge the Gulf that we have on pending applications. It is such a moral issue for folks. And and just speaking for someone who has aired on the side of allowing the pending applications to proceed it, I do it at great cost. I don't take it lightly. I have there is not an argument that I have heard in this entire debate that I would consider invalid, particularly for those community members, most of whom are not in this chambers anymore. I hope that they or their, you know, their their organizers with whom they're working are watching or summarizing. But to the residents of Globeville, to Elyria, Swansea, I we do still have my fellow here. We had a resident from Cap Hill who had no affiliation to those residents who are not employed or affiliated, but who put their time and effort in. You have changed this conversation. You have changed this bill. You have changed me through this process. I think that Mickey spoke very Mickey Kaplan spoke very eloquently about the idea of how communities feel empowered. And one way that you feel empowered is that you get everything that you asked for. But another way that you can feel empowered is to know that you changed the conversation. I am serious about my my commitment to carrying a budget proposal to this council that includes a community impact fund approach. I am serious about probably the 3 to 5, maybe even six changes I made to this bill in direct response to the feedback I heard from communities and so organized communities, eloquent communities, communities that spoke from the heart. You have an impact make on impact value in mutual spaces, which is opportunity that is. I can be our. Khorasan is imminent. This you've changed hearts and you've changed minds. So I want to say to my colleagues now, I'm a no vote on this bill does not get you a more stringent bill. Reminder that a no vote if no bill gets out of this council, the moratorium ends. And we could revisit this Gulf on pending applications for 45 more days or 45 more months. And I do not believe we would probably change the hearts and minds of folks on that issue any further than they have moved that that divide has stayed. And I'm counting votes, as my colleagues know, probably several times a day. Folks have just not moved on it. And so I. Say to you. Why put the community through that additional time on an issue that we have debated for weeks publicly? We have debated this issue more publicly and more transparently than probably any other major debate we've had. We don't ever debate zoning laws before they come. We you know, the camping ban was mostly debated on the floor and one or two committee meetings. This is the most transparent debate we've ever had. And I believe that we all compromised in the process of doing hard fought things. I was once told when I was running for office that someone who did not agree with me on every issue said that they were going to support me because they thought the council had a lot of 12, one and 13 zero votes. And that probably wasn't good for the city because if you don't have some divided votes, you're probably not taking on hard enough issues and you're probably not digging deep enough into them. And so we've done that. But what that means is that people walk away without everything. So a no vote on this bill is a luxury. It's a luxury to vote no and then say, okay, what are you going to replace it with? Because there are not the votes on this council to replace this bill with something else magically. Okay. So we have 12 members here today in a66 vote kills this bill tonight. We have a missing member who will be back this next week. And we can talk about if this bill fails. But again, a no vote doesn't get you something else you want. It just says no to what's on the table. And there's a risk in that. This bill has. Moved. Twice tonight towards opponents. Towards opponents. I'm not I have never once been excited about this thousand foot residential buffer. The first time I saw it, and I saw that it hit 57.98% of all facilities, I said no way could I ever support something. If we're going to do that, let's just ban GROSS. Let's just do it. But I moved, as did others in this dais, towards opponents, towards those who wanted more. So I've moved twice tonight. Others have moved twice tonight, moved two or three times in committee. So I ask those of you. Who will. Seek a more conservative. Bill. Where have you moved? When have you moved? And if there are not the votes for your position, how can you in good conscience kill this bill and put us through another and not just us as council members, but this community through months? More of debate, right? Without the votes to move an alternative. So I ask one several of those of you who have reservations, who wished who wished that one of these amendments might have passed to acknowledge the distance that has been traveled, to acknowledge the impact that these communities have had in this bill, and to move us forward , not to end the conversation, but to continue it on all of the fronts, to continue it with a serious set aside. I to my councilman colleague, Councilman Espinosa, I agree with you that we should be using the resources and the treasure of this of this industry to benefit communities. If we needed more money to do that, we could take 45 more days to create a new mechanism. Again, I don't think it's a bid because even if you have one business in a bid, guess where you can raise the money, you can use it on the sidewalk in front of that business. You can't use it outside the zone. So you can have a one business bid, but the money can't go outside that area. So here's the thing. We don't actually need more money. We have a surplus above and beyond the city's reserves right now, a surplus that arguably was buffered quite a bit by this industry. We have the money. We have a budget mechanism. We don't need to delay this bill to pursue that kind of an investment in these communities. We should. And you have moved me. This would not have been my my budget proposal, but for this conversation and the impact this community's had. So I say that we have the tools we need to continue this conversation in the budget and in the other areas. And I urge us to bring this to a closure of this chapter so that we can move on to those other chapters. This has been an extremely constructive process. I want to thank everyone for their respectful disagreements, the sincere efforts to keep the lines of dialog open. I have never probably felt as collaborative with this council as I have in this bill, and we can use that collaboration on the next step. So I urge those of you who who thought you were going to vote no, who've stated you were to reconsider, to move this bill on to a second week. There is anything else we can do between first reading and second reading. My door continues to be open. But let's move on. Thank you. Thank you. Councilwoman. Can each councilman. Clerk. Thank you, Mr. President. There's so much to say. And yet it's almost 1:00 in the morning. So I'll try and boil this down as quickly as I can. My. My heart. In this issue, five of the top 12, no matter whether you look at storage or cultivation from a neighborhood, statistical neighborhood, five of the top 12 are neighborhoods that I represent. I am one of two councilmembers to my knowledge, and I don't have everyone's home address. So correct me if I'm wrong, but one of two council members who lives in a neighborhood that appears on one of those two lists. And I'm raising a seven year old and a nine year old. So I think that I feel the impact and the weight of what we're discussing up here. And I relate with both sides of this debate as people come up and I hear, you know, the emotion and the passion and the fear in people's voices. I've said in committee before and I'll say again, this body, it's our job to write the rules. And it gets harder and harder every day. Still, in my first year, as six of my other colleagues are seven of us total to put that blame back to another council. And here I think we sit with that perfect example. I have said before, all along the way, we set the rules and I feel like we've come to so many compromises tonight. We have voted and we have openly debated so many things. And we've come to a bill that is in front of us, that has been amended, has been tweaked, has been changed with as many areas as could get enough votes. And that's how we work. Do we get enough votes? And now here we are faced with do we pass a bill or do we not? And I've said before, anywhere along the line, we could have closed the door. And I will say we now an own it because this is us as a body and I'm not trying to go after anyone in particular or anyone who's voting one way, but as a body of city council left the door open during the previous moratorium and said These things are okay, continue doing them. When we extended this moratorium and said We're going to take time to think in January, we could have closed the door on pending applications and we didn't. Whether that was the right decision or the wrong decision at the time, we are going to vote on something today. And if this bill fails after all the compromises that we've made. We're going to ask for more time to think about it tomorrow. Someone maybe in this room, but across the city, people are going to spend money because tonight we tell them it's okay, because tonight we say these are the rules and then we're going to take 45 more days to decide whether we're going to pull the rug, slam the door. It's time for us to make a decision. And we've debated what it looks like moving forward. And I feel like there is enough consensus on that. And we have debated protections for neighborhoods and different models for that. And we've come up with an amendment that was the one that had enough support. And now it's time to do something. Faith in government is at an all time low. And it's because more often than not, government doesn't do anything. It's not, What are we doing that I'm mad about? Then be mad about it. But we're doing something. It's that we're not doing anything. We have debated for hours and hours and hours and there are either enough votes or there weren't enough votes and there was ample opportunity for amendments. Clearly, anyone who said I think it should be this way could throw it on the table and we could vote in public in front of all of you. And there's either enough support for it or there's not. And now we're here, and our choice is do nothing. And that's what I've always loved about city councils. The only reason I decided to get into politics is that I felt like city council was different. It wasn't about doing nothing and fighting about doing nothing. It was about having a healthy dialog and a healthy conversation. And you don't win them all. But at the end of the day, it's about doing something. We've had our chance to amend this bill. We've had our chance to change this bill. We either need to close the doors tonight and let people have closure or we need to set the table for what we're doing. The time for dialog is over and now it's time to move it forward. There were chances to change and amend this in every way and I feel like it will be a disservice. We will have failed as a body if we are if we choose to walk away tonight as a body saying. We've done nothing. We've sat here since we switched over to this item at 8:00, 9:00. And at the end of the day, if we don't pass this bill after all this work together, after listening to you, to all of you, and listening to each other and making our peace heard and having the opportunity to say our piece . If this bill fails, we will have done nothing for the last 5 hours. And tomorrow people will be spending money. And we will still be deciding whether we're going to pull out the rug. We're going to still leave neighborhoods in limbo about whether now anything will happen and a moratorium will expire and it will be free market , because that's what we do. If we don't pass this bill. So I would implore my colleagues that the time for dialog is over and it's time to get something done. It's not perfect. We were on grand display today showing that democracy is messy. It's passionate, it's emotional, it's messy. Now let's do our job and get something done before we leave here tonight, because it would be a tragedy to have done all of this and to have done nothing. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilman Clark. Councilwoman Ortega. Thank you, Mr. President. You're right. It is messy. And it doesn't mean that because we disagree that. We shouldn't stand by your principles on the things that we think are important, that, you know, some of us tried repeatedly to get addressed in this process. But, you know. Some of these issues just did not get clearly covered in the process. So, you know, the 20 foot buffer from schools. Okay. We're going to deal with that. But it's only after we have 266 number of those have already been approved. But that's how many pending applications we had when this process started. And. When it started, we had the neighborhood saying to us. Hey, guys, we need some relief. We were feeling boxed in in our own neighborhoods by this industry. I think by and large, we've had a really good dialog with the industry. I have been in a number of facilities. You know, I'm not anti-marijuana. You may feel that way because of the amendments that I've brought forward. But the reality is this is trying to strike a balance between having quality of life in our neighborhoods and allowing the industry to exist. And, you know, the fact is, we did stop pending applications with the omnibus bill. We didn't hear all the screaming and hollering when we did that. We had the ability to do that here. But, you know, the votes weren't here to address that. We have a number of outstanding issues that this body hasn't even started to talk about. You know, the state legislature started having a conversation about the potency. That's the potency on the chips is where the biggest concern in the impact, especially to kids, is that my concern from day one has been what are we doing to ensure that we're protecting keeping this product out of the hands of our kids and making sure that where we have saturation in neighborhoods where we have lots of kids that, you know, we're looking at, how do we ensure that folks are keeping their dumpster lids closed and that they're not leaving? Marijuana leaves all over their parking lots. Like one of the facilities that I toured where that's exactly what I walked up to when I when I went to this facility. You know, so if it's that available, kids are going to look for this stuff and, you know, what are we doing to ensure that we're addressing all of those things? Yes, we have an enforcement arm. You know, there's compliance, but we don't have enough inspectors to be at all these facilities all the time to ensure that everybody's following the rules to the tee. And I think it's the bad actors who are typically not the people who come to these meetings and not the people trying to, you know, ensure that they are in compliance, that that are creating part of this problem. I also appreciate the businesses who came to the public meeting that Councilman Brooks talked about earlier because they wanted to hear what the neighbors had to say. I actually talked to a couple of the guys from Live While and I know there were more more of you that are in this room that were at that meeting. There were Councilman Brooks was was indicating but the folks from live well we talked about coordinating a meeting with all the groups facilities in the neighborhood and starting to have this conversation. I think, you know, the discussion we're hearing tonight about how do we do that in a much bigger way is an important conversation. And, you know, remember, you know, as a city, we could actually tax this at a higher rate. I'm not suggesting that's what we need to do, but it's it's something that we could be doing. And we've not even had that conversation about how do we address some of these unintended consequences, not only to the neighborhoods, but, you know, you guys have heard these discussions, many of them that have been had at the state level . We've had some of the input here in the committee meetings when we had presentations from different individuals and not just from Smart, Colorado, but talking about the impact that we're seeing in our schools. I've got grandkids that go to school and they talk about how easily this is accessible to kids. And you look at the statistics of how many eighth graders have access to it. It's it's astounding. And so protecting our kids and being in compliance with the Cole memo is one of the things that I think is paramount. Otherwise, we jeopardize a whole damn industry and the federal government come in and shut us down at any point in time saying, you know what, you guys did not heed the warnings and let's just shut them all down. And so that has been my threshold with which I've been trying to, you know, kind of. Encourage and urge us to be paying such close attention to, because I think the the reality is at any point, the whole industry is in jeopardy unless across the country everybody votes to pass it. And, you know, that hasn't happened yet. The other thing I think is important is. We were adamant that we were going to shape this. And yes, we had input and involvement from our marijuana policy office, but it was we need this information, provide us that information. It wasn't a partnership in terms of saying help us look at the things that you guys are dealing with and you get calls about day in and day out so that we're doing this together and not just saying we're the legislative body and we're going to figure it out alone. I think we could have done a much better job in that in that arena to ensure that. It was a little bit more comprehensive then than what we were able to do. And, you know, I sincerely appreciate the efforts of Councilwoman Canete, who, you know, worked to try to round up the thoughts and ideas of what had been put on the table. But I'm. I'm frustrated that we really have ignored. Through through the. To where we are now in this process. The voice of the neighbors. Who. Who are just. You know, we've we've had people come to these meetings. I've talked to one woman who cried after leaving a meeting feeling so frustrated. Like, we are not listening. And you heard that testimony tonight from a couple of the Spanish speakers. Whoo! You know, I was insulted that a couple of people were laughing while we had a Spanish speaker trying to talk, whether it was directed at that or not. That's what I saw. And, you know, if this is how industry folks feel about the neighborhoods that they're in, that they're impacting. You know, we're going to get nowhere. So we need to have a serious attempt at trying to figure out how do we. Address the real impact to these communities? Yes, I get that. You know, when the framework was created about where the medical facilities were originally placed and again, none of us were here except Councilman Lopez. Because that was done before we all got elected. Yes. That identified primarily the industrial areas. And that meant that some neighborhoods were going to get them and then other neighborhoods weren't going to get any. And and that's what you see. There are some neighborhoods that have, you know, very little of any of the retail facilities. But you see that it's predominantly low income neighborhoods and minority communities that are saturated with the grow facilities. And the odor ordinance is going to be 18 months before folks have to comply. So for the next 18 months, you know, these neighborhoods still have to deal with that problem. So I'm not there. I'm not there on on supporting this. I know we've all put a lot of work into it. I've attended every meeting that that I could be at. I think I may have missed one. But, you know, we're all trying to give input on how we can get there. And I'm just not there yet. So thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman Ortega. Councilman Flynn. Thanks, Mr. President. Just briefly, I want to slightly differ slightly from the suggestion that the folks who are intending to vote no tonight haven't moved on anything. I feel personally, I've moved a lot on the things I wanted and we've all moved toward each other trying to find those seven votes and we all move for the same reason, and that was to try to get the seven votes. So we built an extra week into this process precisely because of this possibility. And I would suggest the people who who want to vote yes just to move it on, that you that you can vote no because we have another week to work with. But the suggestion that the people who are voting now haven't surrendered anything that they wanted just was disproven tonight by the fact that a number of these amendments lost. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Councilman Clay and Councilman Lopez. Thank you, Mr. President. On my screen, I see two Espinosa's. Maybe that's because I've been to Espinosa that out, but I see two Espinosa right here. Espinosa out. Yeah, I've been. It's been. I was out. I'm tired. I China has done. The first contact. Hi. Without anything that's working. Mr. President, I chimed in because I was moved by. But Robin, what Councilwoman Kenny had said. And. I know at this moment it's a little late, but. I am willing in this next week. To make some of those moves to the middle. With my amendment. I know we had a discussion. On this dais. And I know that was an unanswered question in terms of the pending and has it as it relates to this amendment, number one. And I'm willing to have those conversations. Uh, Councilwoman, I do want to meet you at the middle. I don't want your work to go in vain. Not necessarily because I've known you. And you're my homegirl. But. Because I think, you know. That's just what we do. This is the sausage making that's happening. And I think. In this next. Weak, perhaps, that we have built in. I'd like to explore that idea. And if there are open minds. I'm open on what neighborhoods are there. And I'm open on. What applications are there and what are. So. Just a final comment. Thank you, Councilman Lopez. Councilman Espinosa. Yeah. I don't know if you're paying attention. You notice that I actually didn't say how I was going to vote. That's because I'm pretty torn, to be honest with you. But the comments here matter. And so it's going to be clear who this is directed to. The time for dialog is not over. The comments by the bill author were a very open door. Thank you, Robin. So to that end, my concerns that I already stated, meaning I already stated in my comments that I supported the pending apps and that I'm not interested in changing the rules for those that are already in the queue. I am interested in changing how this how we. The outcomes that we're getting going forward. And I would, I heard in Robin's dialog and others is that yeah. So this bill goes through. There's still a chance to amend or put in different, different rules and different ordinances. So this is not the end of the line or the end of conversation, I hope. So to that end, if I need to be the seventh vote to get you to next Monday, I'm happy to do that. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman Espinosa. Any of the comments on 264? I will I will chime in and then we will go to a vote. Juan, I want to apologize. I was I was confident I could get you out here by midnight. I was grossly wrong. I tried really hard to push this through. And but I appreciate the dialog one from you and your perseverance to stick around as well from our council colleagues. You know, this body decided in November. We wanted to tackle this head on. We wanted to we wanted to dove in like we did a couple of years ago when there wasn't an Office of Marijuana Policy. And we have that prerogative as a body. And from that was information, I believe, that we weren't aware of. When you go down into the weeds like the agencies do, you learn some things that you were unaware of and it allows you to make a more informed decision. And that's why I have no problem saying we should stop the pending applications. And I think it's important we start from a reality of where we are. And Councilman Flynn said this, and I'll just echo it. We're not in a free market. We're not. And I it's a great argument. It's a great soundbite. But that's not the reality that we live in. And there is saturation. I wrote down the comment. One person said so-called saturation. That is that is absolutely a naive opinion. And my the way that I look at to say that there are communities that are not saturated, it is not so-called it is real. And I don't believe anybody on this body is wanting to stop the industry. The industry is being very successful, as Councilman Ortega said, very generous in the legislation that we passed earlier. And you thrived. And I think for us to take a look now and say, how can we, for lack of a better word, level the playing field so communities feel and I say communities feel because right now they don't feel this way. Communities feel they're being heard. How can we do that? And I believe that's one way to to help, is we're stopping the pending applications because the community, the industry will still thrive. People will still have the ability to get the marijuana anywhere that they need and very openly. So I don't understand how as I listen to people speak, they speak about how we're being unfair. One person said they were experiencing anger and sadness. Well, I imagine that's how rich barrios feels. And for those of you who don't know who Richard Barrow is, he's the site director for the Montebello Boys and Girls Club. And he came and spoke about how that has impacted his community when he sees these kids know they have more access to marijuana than anything else. One person mentioned that there are businessperson how they would be the ultimate loser if we stop the pending applications. I respectfully disagree. I would say the ultimate loser would be the communities, particularly the Globeville area, Swansea. That has said repeatedly over and over again help us so that we can have something that is not just marijuana throughout our entire community. I don't think there's anything wrong in saying let's help these communities and was and I appreciate Councilman Brooks's perspective when he said not a lot of industry representatives came to the table and say, yes, we can do better, because I didn't hear that generally speaking. And that's what I hope we can hear because the industry is here to stay, but you can absolutely be a better community partner and the first thing you do is acknowledge that. And I hope we can get to a point where the community does that. And I know there are some people that have that recognize that, but generally speaking, it's just about us and how government is getting in your way. And as Councilman Flynn said, this is regular. This is illegal in the eyes of the federal government. So, yes, we have a responsibility to go a little bit closer than we would than a restaurant. Because I remind people, restaurants are in this entire city. Restaurants are in every neighborhood. Marijuana dispensaries are not. So no, I don't support the pending applications. No, I do not feel bad about changing my opinion because I now see taking a deep dove how that has detrimentally impacted particular communities. And I believe we have a responsibility and an obligation to help those. Madam Secretary, roll call. Look, I. Brooks. No. Clark. Hi, Espinosa. Hi, Flynn. No. Can I. Can I. Lopez? No. New Ortega assessment. I. Mr. President. No. Councilwoman each. Madam Secretary, please close vote. Announce the results. 66 nays. 66 nays accountable to 64 as amended has failed. One three adjournment announcement Monday, April 18th Council Hold Required Public Hearing Council Bill 215 Designating 4655 Humble Street the stadium area as a structure for preservation. See, I know of a business before this body. This meeting is adjourned.