City Rejects License Transfer for New Dispensary at 40th and Tennyson

A new dispensary won’t be coming to Denver’s Berkeley neighborhood after residents and the area’s Denver City Council rep opposed the plan.

The owners of Green Man Cannabis, a now-closed dispensary on 1355 Santa Fe Drive, had applied for a location transfer to the corner of West 40th Avenue and Tennyson Street, according to city documents. If the move had been approved, Green Man’s dispensary license would have been purchased by Native Roots, one of Colorado’s largest dispensary chains. But after more than a year of back and forth with the city, the transfer was denied by the Department of Excise & Licenses.

In a decision issued on June 5, Excise & Licenses Executive Director Molly Duplechian cites resistance from neighbors and Councilwoman Amanda Sandoval, whose district includes the Berkeley neighborhood, as grounds for the denial. According to Duplechian and a city hearing officer, Green Man and Native Roots failed to prove a need for a new dispensary in the area, with six dispensaries located within 1.5 miles of the proposed address.

“My constituents felt like it was not needed or desired on Tennyson, and I went to back up the testimony of numerous residents who were going to be impacted, including those who lived the nearest to the dispensary,” Sandoval says.

Sandoval and twelve other residents appeared at a January hearing to oppose the location transfer, according to the final decision. The proposed dispensary had received support from the Berkeley Regis United Neighbors neighborhood organization and the owner of nearby business Mouthfuls Pet Supply, but those weren’t enough to sway Duplechian, who wrote that “just one neighborhood witness was not sufficient” to prove that Berkeley needed a new pot shop.

According to Native Roots policy and public affairs manager Liz Zukowski, Native Roots had also submitted a petition with 150 signatures of neighborhood residents and business owners who supported the transfer. While those signatures were accepted as evidence, the licensing department noted that only one person showed up to the hearing to testify, and ultimately shrugged off the petition.

Native Roots had leased the location at 4030 Tennyson Street last July, and after paying for empty space for close to a year, the company was “extremely disappointed” to get the city’s decision, Zukowski says.

“Over the past year, we have been working with the community to meet their requests to have more convenient access to our products and industry-leading customer service. This final decision by the City of Denver, which came five months after the hearing and twelve months after we began paying rent on a storefront on Tennyson Street, means that customers in this area will need to continue to travel to our Highlands location for their cannabis needs,” reads a statement from Zukowski.

Last November, Excise & Licenses approved a hotly contested dispensary location transfer into the Bonnie Brae neighborhood. According to Duplechian’s decision in that case, she approved the move because the dispensary in question, Silver Stem Fine Cannabis, had more support from neighbors.

“In that matter, the Director was persuaded that the neighborhood both needed and desired the retail and medical marijuana store licenses by the number of petition signatures in support of the applications combined with the large number of individuals testifying at length, en masse, and via affidavit in support of the applications,” Duplechian’s denial of the Tennyson transfer request reads.

Sandoval, who is cited several times in the denial, says that she does “not have a problem, for the most part,” with the marijuana businesses in her district, but worries about issues such as “right of way enforcements, people parking in front of fire hydrants, littering, blocking alleys and fire access.” Still, the councilwoman adds that she didn’t expect the city’s final decision to go her way, even after a hearing officer recommended the denial in February.

“When I saw the determination, I was shocked, to be honest. The bar is pretty high for that. I was pleasantly surprised and, I believe, so were my constituents,” she says.

GMC LLC, the ownership group behind Green Man, could not be reached for comment.

Green Man once owned two dispensaries in Denver, with locations on Santa Fe and East Hampden Avenue. The Hampden location was acquired by Trees dispensary group earlier this year for $6.7 million, but state Marijuana Enforcement Division records show the Santa Fe license is still owned by GMC LLC.

The city’s denial of the transfer killed the license acquisition of Green Man’s old Santa Fe location, which sits in a strip mall set to be redeveloped into residential units, according to Native Roots.

“Green Man Cannabis is the owner of the license, and the sale was pending the approval of Native Roots opening a location on Tennyson,” Zukowski explains. “As the process stalled, we had to set our sights on other opportunities, and we are looking forward to opening our 21st location in Grand Junction this summer.”