The city of Durango finally gave birth to the last in a series of interrelated ordinances dealing with recreational and medical marijuana at Tuesday’s special meeting of Durango City Council.
Though the ordinances approved on Tuesday went through a 20-month gestation period that included tense public hearings, tumultuous study sessions and endless redrafting of the ordinances, it didn’t spare the council a difficult labor with last-minute complications.
Since last month, councilors have been working with City Attorney Dirk Nelson as neighborhood groups mobilized against the ordinances, vowing to keep up the fight until Election Day.
In the end, the measures passed without even a whimper, much less a bang, at a short meeting that drew just four spectators, including two members of the media, Durango Police Department’s Chief Jim Spratlen and one woman.
In just a few minutes, city councilors Sweetie Marbury, Christina Rinderle and Dean Brookie unanimously approved the measures. Councilors Dick White and Keith Brant were absent. The finale to what had been an embattled saga seemed to take even the councilors by pleasant surprise.
Grinning widely, Rinderle said the evening’s accomplishments were somewhat surreal.
“It’s all done, just like that,” she said.
In July, aspects of the pot ordinances and one dealing with vacation rentals spurred some segments of the community to embrace open revolt. Represented by lawyers, neighborhood groups lodged a cluster of petitions with the city clerk that threatened to derail the marijuana and vacation rental laws.
The groups presented the City Council with an ultimatum: Either repeal a smattering of problematic sentences in the ordinances that offer pot merchants a Trojan Horse to infiltrate Durango’s placid pot-shop free residential neighborhoods – or risk petitions that, if successful, would place marijuana ordinances on the ballot, potentially scuttling the entire regulatory framework.
A similar fate awaited rules on vacation rentals if councilors refused to accept the neighborhood group’s demands.
On Tuesday evening, Rinderle reserved special thanks for Nelson and the other city employees who reworked pot ordinances that, even last week, threatened to end in political miscarriage if councilors failed to assuage the neighborhood groups.
Represented by lawyers Dan Gregory and Nick Anesi, groups like the Boulevard Neighborhood Association argued that the council had inadvertently opened a “legal backdoor” through which a pot merchant, hoping to peddle weed in downtown residential neighborhoods, might later wander.
The problem boiled down to ambiguous language in a smattering of sentences in ordinances regulating medical marijuana.
In the end, the councilors acquiesced to the neighborhood groups, nixing the ambiguous language that the detractors had objected to in the batch of ordinances passed Tuesday, thereby closing the “backdoor.”
On Tuesday, Nelson read aloud to councilors an email from one of the neighborhood group’s attorney, Gregory. In it, Gregory assured Nelson that the neighborhood groups are planning to drop their petitions in light of the new language the city had introduced, which definitively bans medical marijuana shops in mixed-use zones along College Drive, Ptarmigan Center and Main Avenue north and west of downtown..
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
