Briefs Mt. Crested Butte

Towns grant $12,500 for Growing Winters Program
Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte made five awards from the Growing Winters 2013 Grant Program totaling $12,500 on Monday, January 7.
This is the first year of the program, which received $7,000 from each municipality to provide funding to events or ideas that would improve the winter product for tourists in the East River Valley.
“[The proposals] needed to be something that went outside the local market to bring visitors to the valley,” councilman Dave Clayton said.
The Center for the Arts asked for $5,000 to market its winter program outside the valley and got $3,000. Elk Mountain Events is planning a triathlon-type event Clayton called Pole, Pedal, Paddle that will debut on the mountain this spring. The towns gave that plan $1,500.
Mattie Brown’s Black Line Entertainment got a $3,500 grant to help fund a spring concert being planned, along with another $3,500 for the BMI/Crested Butte Songwriter’s Festival. KBUT’s Mardi Gras event asked for just over $3,100 and got $1,000.
Living Journeys, Crested Butte Music Festival/Trailhead Children’s Museum, Janelle Smiley’s bid for an athletic sponsorship and an Elk Mountain Events ski mountaineering race fell short of the requirements for a grant. In total, the committee received $28,000 in grant requests, funded $12,500 and put $1,500 away to be awarded when the program is offered again in the winter of 2013-14.

November sales tax
Sales tax collections in November were just over $57,000 and $800 less than what had been budgeted for the month. All sectors—lodging, retail, restaurant and other—all saw sales tax drop from the same month last year.
Town sales tax collections are almost right on budget for the year, but more than 4 percent below sales tax collection at this time last year.

Council votes on ordinance aimed at banning pot shops, cultivation and testing facilities
The Mt. Crested Butte Town Council passed on first reading the changes to the town’s zoning code that would prohibit “marijuana cultivation facilities, marijuana product manufacturing facilities, marijuana testing facilities, and retail marijuana stores.”
The Town Council started to move toward the ban preemptively at the end of January, before anyone had a chance to set up shop, just as it had done previously after state voters opened the door to medical marijuana.
Under the new law, which makes possession of less than an ounce of marijuana or cultivation of up to six plants legal for people 21 years or older, municipalities have the option of prohibiting marijuana-related operations.
The ordinance notes that the Town Council “has carefully considered the provisions” of the new law and concluded that the “impacts” to the “health, safety and welfare of the Town and inhabitants thereof” were such that they should exercise their land use authority and prohibit pot-related commercial operations. Cultivation and possession of marijuana for personal use is not affected by the ordinance.
The council will have a second and final reading of the ordinance at its regular meeting February 5.