Cluster of marijuana shops in Commerce City has leaders mulling geographic store limits to spread impact

Commerce City wants to impose some order on its marijuana sector.

Nearly all of its retail cannabis stores are located in the southern half of the city — with several clustered close together and more on the way — and elected leaders there want to spread the wealth.

Ultimately, they want to limit how much there is to spread of the industry’s impact, whether good or bad. They’ve proposed an eventual cap of eight stores in the city, split evenly between two sides of town.

“Once you hit a saturation point, it’s not good for the stores and it’s not good for the community,” said Sean Ford, a former Commerce City mayor and current councilman. “We watched Denver with the Green Mile, and we were worried that that’s what would happen here.”

The Green Mile, a reference to the proliferation of pot shops that opened on South Broadway in the early days of recreational legalization, has already arrived in Commerce City — albeit on a smaller scale — in the view of Mayor Steve Douglas.

“You have pot shops, one after another,” the mayor said of a trio of cannabis shops clumped together in a half-mile stretch of busy North Quebec Street, near Dick’s Sporting Goods Park.

Commerce City approved retail sales of marijuana in 2015 but never set a limit on the number of stores.

Altogether, there are eight marijuana shops in south Commerce City — generally delineated as the older and less affluent part of the city, below East 96th Avenue. Licenses for three more are already approved.

By contrast, just one shop is operating in the northern tier of the city, which is largely characterized by master-planned suburban neighborhoods built in the shadow of Denver International Airport.

That concentration of marijuana businesses in the city’s south prodded the City Council in the summer of 2023 to place a yearlong moratorium on any new cannabis shops opening in that part of the city. It renewed the moratorium for another six months this past summer.

The city’s new proposed ordinance calls for a limit of four shops in the south and four shops in the north, using 96th as the dividing line. In reality, those limits may not be fully in force for years, given that the city has no plans to revoke any licenses.

But south stores that close would not be replaced with new ones until the total number falls below the four-store cap.

The council passed the measure on its first reading Dec. 16. A final vote is scheduled for Jan. 6.

“You can have too many dry cleaners, you can have too many auto parts places,” Ford said. “Why do we need a pot shop on every corner?”

By comparison, he said, Thornton limits the number of marijuana shops to four — and it has a population twice as large as the nearly 70,000 people who call Commerce City home. Brighton, which just legalized cannabis sales this year, also has a limit of four stores citywide.

Douglas, the current mayor, said Commerce City experiences millions of dollars a year in retail and restaurant sales “leakage” to other communities because it doesn’t have enough commercial operations for the fast-growing city. Another weed store isn’t going to fill the bellies of a family looking for dinner out at a restaurant, he said.

“We are trying to fill these gaps with the missing piece of retail and commercial,” he said.

Truman Bradley, executive director of the Marijuana Industry Group, said the days of a Green Mile-style concentration of marijuana shops are over. The industry has seen significant sales decline in recent years following the short-lived boom in business during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Now that we have a mature market, we have a better idea of what demand is,” he said.

Commerce City’s geographically bifurcated approach to cannabis regulation is as legitimate as any other approach cities or counties have taken, Bradley said.

“I think Commerce City is doing the right thing by evaluating whether their licensing model works for their community,” Bradley said. “It’s not one-size-fits-all.”

The prospect of fewer pot shops in Commerce City doesn’t bother Garrett Yamashiro, the general manager of Starbuds on Dahlia Street. His store sits right next to a LivWell marijuana storefront, a vestige of the years when Commerce City had no distance separation requirements from one store to another.