{"id":93973,"date":"2019-05-15T20:11:21","date_gmt":"2019-05-16T02:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/cortez-council-denies-settlement-recommendation-with-marijuana-shop\/"},"modified":"2019-05-15T20:11:21","modified_gmt":"2019-05-16T02:11:21","slug":"cortez-council-denies-settlement-recommendation-with-marijuana-shop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/cortez-council-denies-settlement-recommendation-with-marijuana-shop\/","title":{"rendered":"Cortez Council denies settlement recommendation with marijuana shop"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"The
The Cortez City Council denied a settlement recommendation with NuVue Pharma LLC during a regular meeting Tuesday night.<\/span>Durango Herald file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The Cortez City Council denied a settlement recommendation with NuVue Pharma LLC, meaning litigation will continue between the city and the marijuana company.<\/p>\n

The recommendation comes after NuVue sued the city<\/a> for denying its application to open on the east side of Cortez.<\/p>\n

At a regular meeting Tuesday night, City Attorney Mike Green put forward a recommendation the city\u2019s attorneys had been working on.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are asking authority from council to settle the matter as was recommended,\u201d Green said. The recommendation\u2019s terms had been discussed during an executive session before the meeting, he said, but he didn\u2019t say what they were during the public part of the meeting.<\/p>\n

Councilors unanimously denied the recommendation but did not further explain their vote. Green declined to specify the recommendation\u2019s terms.<\/p>\n

NuVue Pharma LLC is a Pueblo-based company that applied to open a marijuana dispensary in Cortez last summer. The company sought to set up shop at 503 Patton St., across U.S. Highway 160 from Denny Park. NuVue\u2019s proposed retail marijuana license was denied at the council\u2019s Sept. 11, 2018, meeting.<\/p>\n

The dispensary met \u201cdistance requirements\u201d set by the city and state, and company\u2019s owner, Dr. Malik Hasan, passed a background check, according to the Sept. 11 meeting minutes.<\/p>\n

By law, marijuana shops must be located at least 1,500 feet from a school, day-care center or other dispensary.<\/p>\n

However, several neighbors and community members opposed the dispensary, voicing concerns both in letters to the city and at the Sept. 11 public hearing. Many opponents said Cortez already has too many marijuana shops.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are highly against this business,\u201d wrote Paul and Sue McCall in a letter to the City Council. \u201cOur home is on Patton Street and (we) are concerned with safety for children, pets, our property and ourselves. This town has more than enough marijuana shops. This type of business will drop our property value and bring in high traffic volume.\u201d<\/p>\n

The council voted unanimously to deny the application.<\/p>\n

The issue was brought forward again at a public hearing on Oct. 9, 2018, when the council once more denied the application. At that meeting, Councilor Jill Carlson clarified the previous motion to include three factors for denial the council is allowed to consider: reasonable requirements of the neighborhood, desires of the adult inhabitants, and the character of the applicant.<\/p>\n

Mayor Karen Sheek said NuVue\u2019s request was denied because of its proposed location, noting that most other marijuana dispensaries are in a business sector.<\/p>\n

On Nov. 8, 2018, NuVue Pharma filed a complaint for judicial review in the 22nd Judicial Court.<\/p>\n

The complaint alleges that council exercised \u201carbitrary and capricious abuse of discretion\u201d in their denial, further alleging that the residents opposing the motion did not live close enough to the proposed location to be directly affected, and that their concerns were ungrounded.<\/p>\n

\u201cFour out of the six submitted letters were from sources miles from the neighborhood, and the two neighborhood letters contained inadmissible marijuana critique and speculative fear,\u201d the complaint alleges.<\/p>\n

NuVue\u2019s team also compared the situation to that of other marijuana shops in Cortez, such as Durango Organics and Medicine Man, two Main Street dispensaries with neighborhoods nearby.<\/p>\n

This week, councilors discussed the ongoing litigation during an executive session preceding their regular meeting, before Green brought it up for a vote during the meeting itself.<\/p>\n

After councilors denied the existing settlement recommendation, Green asked council for approval to continue negotiations with NuVue. The council unanimously approved the motion.<\/p>\n

ealvero@the-journal.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Litigation continues in NuVue Pharma case<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":93974,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[21,318,1610],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-93973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-cortez","tag-cortez-municipal-government","tag-recreational-marijuana"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93973\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93973"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=93973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}