Golden banned flavored tobacco sales. Now the city is compensating vape stores for lost profits.

Golden dropped the hammer on more than two dozen retail outlets last year when it banned the sales of all flavored tobacco and nicotine products in the city, costing the businesses thousands of dollars in revenue.

Now, this city on the western edge of the metro area is setting up a one-time $100,000 relief fund for smoke and vape shops, along with gas stations and convenience stores, to soften the financial hit they’ve taken since Golden’s prohibition went into effect on Jan. 1.

The City Council earlier this month directed staff to create a competitive grant program to which businesses can apply for funds. No single store can receive more than $10,000 and the money must be allocated before the end of the year. About 30 businesses in Golden are affected by the city’s prohibition.

“The City Council is trying to say they’ve heard the concerns of local businesses and they want to be responsive to local businesses that were impacted by an ordinance they weren’t anticipating,” said Rick Muriby, Golden’s community development director.

While several Colorado municipalities have passed similar flavored tobacco sales bans in recent years to combat youth consumption of nicotine products, including Boulder, Aspen, Glenwood Springs and Edgewater, Golden appears to be the first willing to backfill revenues lost to a law it passed.

Muriby said the $100,000 figure wasn’t based on sales data from businesses in the city, but was a figure the council and city manager “felt was a reasonable amount for the city to spend.” And while Golden wants to ensure its businesses remain healthy, he said, it has no intention of taking a second look at its flavored nicotine ban.

“They’re letting (the shops) know they are valued but that it’s more important to enact this law to protect kids,” he said of the City Council.

In fact, Golden’s elected leaders imposed guardrails on the reimbursement program. Businesses applying for funds must document only losses above and beyond those caused directly by the ban, or as Golden Mayor Laura Weinberg put it at a recent study session, “the spillover effect” of buying chips, a soda or a lottery ticket that no longer happens because people have taken their business elsewhere.

“I’m not comfortable compensating people for not selling poison to our children,” Councilman Rob Reed said at an Aug. 13 study session, emphasizing his resistance to making dollar-for-dollar reimbursements for lost tobacco sales.

Multiple attempts by The Denver Post this week to get members of the Golden City Council, including the mayor, to comment on the grant program were unsuccessful.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has determined that “no tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, are safe, especially for children, teens and young adults” and that the addictive nicotine they contain “can harm the parts of an adolescent’s brain that control attention, learning, mood and impulse control.”

The agency says the use of flavored e-cigarettes or vapes, with alluring flavors like cotton candy and pink lemonade, is favored by youths over any other tobacco product. When Golden passed its ban in July 2023, the city’s ordinance noted that e-cigarettes and other flavored offerings are essentially “starter tobacco products for youth.”

The Post reached the owners of several businesses in Golden that once sold flavored tobacco products but they declined to be interviewed on the record. Grier Bailey, executive director of the Colorado Wyoming Petroleum Marketers Association and Convenience Store Association, said bans unnecessarily harm stores that already operate on slim margins.

“It’s nice, it shows recognition that these business owners have been hurt,” Bailey said of Golden’s revenue replacement program. “But as a one-time grant, this doesn’t make up for future years of losses.”

Bans, he said, don’t work because most youth who vape or smoke get their products from friends or older siblings. Adults who enjoy a wide range of flavors on the market, Bailey said, are denied what they should be free to buy.

And so they go elsewhere, taking their appetite for flavored tobacco — as well as myriad grab-and-go snack and beverage items sold at gas stations and convenience stores — outside Golden, Bailey said. No other community touching Golden has a similar ban in place.

“For a gas station customer, there are a lot of stations around — why would you go to one that doesn’t have what you want?” he said. “When jurisdictions do this, it doesn’t do anything but shift business to other places”

That was the reason given by former Denver Mayor Michael Hancock nearly three years ago for his veto of a bill the City Council had just passed banning flavored nicotine product sales in the city.

“I believe in passing and implementing effective policies,” Hancock told The Post at the time. “I didn’t see that this bill singling Denver out would do anything to keep nicotine and vaping products from our young people.”

In 2022, the state legislature considered — but didn’t pass — a bill that would have banned flavored vape juice and other products in that category statewide. Statutory counties, like Jefferson County, don’t have the authority to specifically regulate flavored tobacco products, Alexandra Bolivar, spokeswoman for Jefferson County Public Health, wrote in an email.

A bill introduced this spring that would have granted that authority to Colorado county governments died in committee in March.

“Jefferson County could consider a similar policy to Golden’s if there are changes to state statute allowing counties to do so,” Alexandra Bolivar, spokeswoman for Jefferson County Public Health, wrote in an email.

In the meantime, Golden’s mayor said the city needs to balance the need to promote public health among local youth with the idea that businesses subject to the strong arm of the law aren’t left floundering as they try to win back customers who have gone elsewhere.

“This would be a recognition that we want those small businesses to still be in our community,” Weinberg said.

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