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Council signals support to ease distance rules for natural-medicine healing centers; staff to pursue UDO amendment
Summary
Planning staff proposed narrowing distance buffers and expanding hours for "healing center" natural medicine businesses after a local operator said the current rules would prevent her from opening. Council asked questions about odors, precedence and state licensing and directed staff to advance the draft through the UDO process.
Becky Smith, the city's new director of planning and development, told council on March 16 that staff drafted amendments to the unified development ordinance (CB 20-30, adopted Oct. 2025) to address concerns raised by a local natural medicine facilitator who said the ordinance's distance rules would prevent her business from operating.
Smith outlined three changes in the packet: removing the 200-foot buffer from residential structures, removing the 500-foot buffer from public parks, and expanding allowable hours from a 9 a.m.-5 p.m. weekday window to 7 a.m.-11:59 p.m., seven days a week for healing centers. "Following that adoption, a local facilitator came to council in January with concerns that the regulations as written would prevent her from operating her business," Smith said. "So I prepared some draft amendments tonight ... the first is to remove the residential structure distance buffer ... the second is to remove public parks from the distance constraints ... and then the third is to expand the hours of operation."
City Attorney Hoffman cautioned that the city's authority is limited to time, place and manner zoning regulations and that the city cannot license or exclude businesses under state law. "What the city cannot do is license," he said. "The only authority you have is to do things like distance limitations, things like odor regulation. It was not intended nor can it, under Colorado law, have the effect of excluding them altogether from the city."
Council members asked whether the changes would set a precedent, how odor mitigation and ventilation requirements would be enforced, and whether the city should treat healing centers differently from other natural-medicine uses. Several members supported keeping regulations that address odors and public impacts while making the specific changes under consideration. Smith said that if council directs staff to proceed, the UDO amendment would go to the planning commission for a public hearing and then return to council for first and second readings.
Council did not adopt an ordinance that night; members agreed to move the proposed red-line amendments forward for public review and the formal UDO amendment process.
Next step: staff will schedule the planning commission public hearing and bring the ordinance back to council for readings following public input.
