PERRY: Here in Aurora, the Party found pot

What a fool I’ve been. You can hold your applause.

For the last several months I have mercilessly fired everything I’ve got at the Aurora City Council for creating a system so complicated and so contrived for those interested in opening recreational pot shops, that it could only have been created by Denver’s marijuana oligarchs to save their places in line here.

Soon, just after the end of this summer, Aurora pot shops will open for business, spreading the high life out from Denver and into the eastern plains. I was shocked, shocked and dismayed, that the Aurora’s conservative-laden city council would even go for the gusto since many Colorado communities have banned retail sales. But I was even more staggered that some of the most laissez-faire folks along the Front Range started putting together a marijuana-shop licensing process that could have come right out of a Boulder liberal drum-fest and quinoa-salad, sweat-lodge session. Aurora has long been a city that sneers at just about any kind of government intervention into business that comes this way. Only Texas has more disdain for industry rules and regs than does Aurora.

Previously, the city didn’t care how many check-cashing stores reach into the pockets of poor people or how many strip malls sprout, wither and die, or how many cheap cigarette and lotto-ticket stores infiltrate decaying suburban retail space. Business is business, in Aurora. You may not be able to own a pot bellied pig here because of residential rules, but by God you can damn well open a business to sell the nasty things.

So imagine my consternation and suspicion when Denver’s retail and medical marijuana “experts” came a-calling last year to help Aurora figure out how to regulate the industry here. Suddenly, the Let-My-Business-Live-Free-Or-Die city council turns into a downright Duma. Deputies begin to issue custom-tailored requirements that, gee, it seems only deep-pocketed, existing, well-lawyered and well-connected Denver marijuana mavens will be able to meet.

If all that sounds so Chicago or so Kremlin to you, it did to me, too. I became even more suspicious when the city this week added yet additional “criteria” for winning a pot-shop license from the city that included vital, entrepreneurial and public safety milestones for applicants to comply with. New criteria includes things like, how many vacation days you’ll offer employees or which associations you would join. Yes, really.

Well, clearly, I was just high and paranoid. No story here at all, folks. Led by Duma Deputy Bob Roth, a tried-and-true Republican if ever there was one, this is all about keeping your safety in mind and protecting the public interest.

I get it now. Rather than let businesses, the market and free enterprise mess crap up, like the economy, the environment, the neighborhood and your health, it’s far, far better to have local Dumas create important criteria that future businesses can strive for in their bid to win the privilege of ringing cash registers here in Aurora.

I like it. Let’s straighten out the restaurant business first. We’ve got plenty of cheap Chinese restaurants here. Time to winnow the crowd and bring in fancy mother-of-pearl chopstick establishments. All we have to do is set up a point system like pot shops have. Cloth napkins? Add three points. Cheap soy sauce on the tables poisoned with MSG? Subtract eight points. Wanna open a check-cashing store on Colfax? Love to have you, but the winning applicant gets extra points for providing free takeaway Parker or Cross pens at the window, and it would be helpful if you provided counseling to each customer explaining how these check-cashing businesses bleed their already impoverished customers to death. Snacks would be nice.

I like this a lot. How cool would it be tell the next 15 gas stations that open in Aurora that they have a better chance of getting a license if they provide free tire-pressure checks, give their employees Christmas turkeys and get all that nasty junk food away from the register?

Now that Aurora Duma deputies have this thing figured out, you can sleep easier at night knowing that we’ll never again have to worry about convenience stores that only offer one brand of butter, or fast-food joints that don’t give employees their birthdays off with pay, or real estate agents that plug their nasty signs and open-house junk all over the city.

I’ll be damned. All this time, and it turns out I’m a conservative, maybe even a radical. Maybe I was right all along.

Reach editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com