[420 Girl]

Some Aurora city officials have outlined a list of possible amendments to a state bill that would impose regulations on those who use and recommend medical marijuana, and those who sell it.

The amendments are for House Bill 1284, a bill that was introduced earlier this month and sponsored by Rep. Tom Massey, R-Poncha Springs, which would require dispensaries to be designated as state nonprofits and would allow cities to regulate or ban dispensaries at their discretion.

The bill would also impose a one-year moratorium on the opening of new medical marijuana centers.

“What we are trying to accomplish by these changes is to maintain the city’s flexibility to implement the rules that make sense of what we think is reasonable for the city of Aurora,” said Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates, who presented the suggested amendments with Nancy Corley, intergovernmental relations coordinator for Aurora at a committee meeting Feb. 12. City councilmen Ryan Frazier and Bob FitzGerald attended the meeting.

Oates said if the bill passes, the city would most likely have additional regulations at the local level as well.

“This bill is likely to pass,” he said. “Assuming this bill passes… there will be a whole other line of inquiry by council as to how we are going to regulate this on the local level.”

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Oates and Corley said that medical marijuana dispensary regulations should mirror laws governing liquor stores and liquor licenses.

They said dispensary owners should be required to renew their licenses annually and cities should be allowed to require their own forms for licensing in addition to the forms provided by the state licensing authority.

Also, business plans should be required from an applicant, which detail the list of equipment and the amount of marijuana that the center plans to grow or have in its inventory.

FitzGerald said another amendment should be added which requires the medical marijuana to be occasionally tested for quality assurance, to prevent marijuana from being laced with harder drugs.

“Once you have acquired it, there has to be some sort of quality control,” FitzGerald said. “I think it has to be tested with random lab tests with an independent lab.”

Corley said members of the public and intergovernmental relations committee would work with the Colorado Municipal League to present the amendments to the bill’s sponsors.

Other proposed amendments include:

• Setting a date for when the state must communicate rules for medical marijuana regulations.

• Allow the city to have access to records regarding sales volume or quantity to ensure the center is paying appropriate taxes.

• Local authorities should be given four to six months to process applications for medical marijuana centers, just as they process applications for liquor licenses.

• Employee identification cards should identify the medical marijuana center where the person is authorized to work. If the employee leaves or is fired, they would be required to surrender the card and the center or the state should notify police that the employee’s ID card is no longer valid.

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