County attorney urges commission to extend medical marijuana moratorium

Local advocates try to find a way to beat July 1 deadline

Medical marijuana advocates in the valley have been waiting nearly a year to hear how Gunnison County would respond to a state law regulating the emerging industry. Now they’re racing the clock to get applications for dispensaries in the hands of local officials before July 1, when a state-imposed moratorium would shut them down for another year.

But if the commissioners take the advice of county attorney David Baumgarten and vote to extend the unincorporated county-wide moratorium for another year, they won’t be accepting applications.   
When the Board of County Commissioners passed a moratorium on medical marijuana-related operations last year, they cited the lack of clarity in the voter-passed amendment to the state constitution.
Now the state legislators have settled on how they want medical marijuana to be regulated and distributed, with House Bill 10-1284 and Senate Bill 10-109.
That authority comes at the cost of local regulation on the industry and any regulation working its way through the county process, as any of the recently adopted regulations prove, will take longer than five weeks.
If the governor signs the bills, dispensaries would have to get local approval before the state would permit their operation. With a moratorium in effect, each of the dozen local medical marijuana caregivers who showed up at a work session on Tuesday, May 25 will have to set up shop elsewhere or wait out the year.
For Tripp Blalock, co-owner of Western Holistics, that might mean taking his operation, and the taxes it pays, to greener pastures in another county.
“I love Crested Butte, I’ve been here 12 years,” Blalock said. “But I’ll go over to Paonia or to Carbondale and give them all of my money, because they’ve figured it out.”
Andrew Keal and Candice Gannon also showed up to the work session to see what kind of advice the commissioners would get on county policy. They were disappointed to see another budding industry cut as a potential means of economic development in the valley.
“It sucks that it’s driving people who love Crested Butte and this valley out of here so they can actually find the means of survival, so they can make some money and live,” Keal said.
Dave Penney was another valley resident who is now finding himself in a tough spot because of the county’s likely refusal to accept applications before the July deadline is up. But his concern is for those people who will have to go to the black market or travel outside the county to get their medicinal marijuana needs filled.
“In the legislation, there is an allowance for a caregiver to have five patients,” Penney said. “But I have more than five patients. Everybody does. So where do those extra patients go to get their medicine?”
There was consensus among the caregivers at the meeting that the county should let them submit a business application that could wait for some county regulation to be adopted before being reviewed. That way, they reasoned, they could get their foot in the door before the state deadline, but give the county time to draft regulations.
A copy of Boulder County’s newly adopted regulations were also provided to the commissioners as a guide, should they choose to act.
But the idea of holding applications until local rules were in place made Baumgarten and county manager Matthew Birnie squirm, and they urged the commissioners to consider what legal ramifications such a move might have.
They said holding applications could leave those the county ultimately accepts open for legal challenge, if the applicants didn’t like the terms they adopted.
The commissioners will decide Tuesday, June 1 if they will extend their moratorium or find some alternative that would allow dispensaries to beat the July application deadline.