Manitou Springs, CO Cannabis Regulations: Buffer Zones (2026)

100 of the Manitou Springs Municipal Code sets the location criteria a medical marijuana center, retail marijuana store or marijuana testing facility must clear before the local licensing authority, the city council, will issue a license, and failing any one of them precludes the license outright. Subsection E lists six hard location bars: within five hundred feet of a public or private educational institution or school, unless the distance runs to bare school-owned land with no actual school building on it; within five hundred feet of a licensed child care facility; within five hundred feet of any alcohol or drug rehabilitation facility; inside any building or structure that also contains a residential dwelling or lodging unit; within five hundred feet of an existing medical marijuana center or retail marijuana store, counted regardless of whether that existing store sits inside or outside city limits; and anywhere on property the City of Manitou Springs itself owns.

Subsection G fixes how every one of those distances is measured: as the crow flies, straight-line, from the nearest property line of the protected use to the nearest property line of the proposed marijuana business, with no discount for buildings or terrain in between. Subsection F adds a softer layer for uses without a fixed buffer, residential zone boundaries, community centers, parks, designated recreation trails, libraries, hotels and public recreation centers, which the licensing authority must still weigh for proximity and compatibility even though no minimum distance applies.

Because Manitou Springs is a narrow canyon town, these overlapping five-hundred-foot circles combine with the separate zoning limitation in subsection A to leave a genuinely small area of the city eligible for a license.