Order our study session for Tuesday, July 15th, 2025.

We have the pledge of the earlier meeting.

So we're gonna go right into the agenda and talk about consideration of land use and development code amendments related to natural medicine.

City Manager Martinez.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh, at the request of the mayor pro tem prior to us talking about natural medicine, uh, I've been asked to bring up Director Prater to talk about the merits of Euclidean zoning versus form-based zoning and the pros and cons of each and give it a bit of dissertation.

So just kidding.

James Summer, come on up.

Are we on as you can see on your screen?

We're talking about natural medicine.

Uh I think most of you by now um have had the samples kick in.

Am I right?

So now that they are, we'll turn it over to James and Summer.

We have additional samples if anyone needs any special brownies that were in the back room.

This is possible.

Good evening, Mayor, Mayor Protem, members of city council, and everybody remaining here tonight.

My name is James Gallagher, I'm an assistant city attorney, and with me is Summer McCann, a senior planner with the community development department.

And as City Manager Martinez mentioned, we are here to talk about natural medicine.

So without further ado.

So some background on what led us to here tonight is um this first appeared as an initiative commonly known as the Natural Medicine Health Act, which was on the ballot as an initiated statute in November 2022.

Statewide, the initiative was approved with a yes voting percentage of 53.64%, and for a local level, it was actually approved at a slightly higher rate of 56.2%.

And so with the initiative passing, led to the legislator enacting Senate Bill 23290 in April of 2023, which Governor Polis signed into law in May on May 23rd, 2023.

I'll give that one some thought, but I'll pass this time.

So some other guidelines from the states on Senate Bill 23290 is a natural medicine license will not be granted by the state when it's not permitted under local zoning laws, and it is located within 1,000 feet of a child care center, preschool, elementary, middle, junior, or high school, or a residential child care facility.

But even though this is a required or another guideline from the state, municipalities can lessen these distance requirements or eliminate some of the schools.

So for example, you could reduce it from 1,000 feet to 500 feet.

You cannot go higher than a thousand feet, so 1500 will not be available.

Um, and with this also the applicants for the natural business licenses, when they to show compliance with this, they have to submit documentation to the state that they comply with local zoning laws and distance requirements.

So there's not contact between the state and the city in this regard, it's between the applicants and the states.

So our decision items today are time, place, and manner.

And just as a way of verbal example here, I don't want to list all these for everybody.

Um just so some things the state preempted local control on is Senate Bill 23290 came into two sections of the Colorado revised statute.

One of them is section 44, which is the business oriented section.

So some of the state regulations include restricting alcohol beverages and regulating marijuana on premise, patient confidentiality, records retention, security standards, video surveillance, waste disposal, sanitary requirements, packaging and labeling requirements, transport and storage, advertising, testing requirements, cultivation procedures, inventory tracking requirements, manufacturing procedures, standard operating procedures, and chain of custody.

And there's also section 12, which is more of the administrative guidelines, so how the natural medicine facilitators can run their sessions essentially, in terms of things like training and education requirements, dosage, things of that nature.

So that's not an exhaustive list, but just to give everybody here an idea of how extensive the state guidelines are here, and that we really only get to choose time, place, and manner restrictions.

So for some examples of time, as you can see, we have here, for example, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m.

to 5 p.m.

May not operate in excess of 18 consecutive hours in any 24 hour day.

May operate each day of the week, 8 a.m.

to 12 a.m.

or having no time restrictions.

And these are some examples.

Place, these are some examples that I pulled from other municipalities.

As I mentioned, this is a new state regulation.

Um there's not a lot of there are some municipalities that have these regulations, but it's not as if everyone does so just pulled some here.

So Parker, we have healing centers are permitted in business and commercial zoning districts.

The cultivation facilities are permitted in light industrial zoning.

Centennial, a natural medicine facility has to be 300 feet away from another natural medicine service or 300 feet away from any residential zone district.

Healing centers and cultivation facilities can only be in industrial zoning.

In Boulder, healing centers are permitted in mixed-use zoning, and cultivation facilities are permitted in light industrial zoning.

Where some of these municipal examples here were just copying essentially verbatim what the state put in their statutes into their municipal code.

Um yeah, as you can see here, some of these are restricting private cultivation, which is as I mentioned in the state statute already set forth.

Um things such as permissible lighting is already set forth in the state statutes, storage of natural medicines already set forth, um, odor, they have regulations on the ventilations used and disposal and processing of natural medicine.

So as I mentioned, we have time, place, and manner, even though the state really already covers a lot of the manor possibilities for the city.

And also for from a city perspective, though, the city is may still require a business license of the natural medicine business or service.

So even though they have a lot of this is run through the state in terms of their licensing, a municipality can still require a business license in addition to the state license.

So to recap, a local jurisdiction may enact ordinances regulating or governing the time, place, and manner of licenses, but you cannot prohibit natural medicine facilities or create regulations that are unreasonable or conflict with state law.

So our decision items today are time, place, and manner.

And now you'll hear from Summer on how natural medicine and the land use code are being proposed to interact.