An Aurora City Council committee this week held consideration of an ordinance amendment that also puts on hold a new tattoo establishment.
Aldermen on the Public Health, Safety and Transportation Committee on Tuesday decided they did not have enough information to amend the city code on Tattoo and Body Art Establishments to add space for another tattoo license.
Currently, the ordinance allows a maximum of four licenses, and the proposal before the committee was to expand that to a maximum of five licenses.
Expanding the number of licenses would allow another tattoo establishment to open. Randy Rodriguez already has paid for and done his due diligence to get a license for his Paradise Tattoo at 559 High St., officials said.
But officials cannot issue the license until the City Council expands the number of allowed licenses to five from four, said Lisa Zepeda, manager of revenue collection for the city.
“We currently have four, we need to make it five,” she told committee members. “I cannot approve (the license) yet because it needs a fifth license.”
The city in 2022 expanded the number of tattoo licenses allowed from two to four, doing so because at the time there were already four tattoo establishments in the city. Two of them had been grandfathered in under a 2012 ordinance that set the maximum number of licenses to two, even though there were four establishments.
Two of them were grandfathered, but when the city updated its tattoo and body art code in 2022, they changed it to a maximum of four licenses.
Jennifer Stallings, city clerk, said Rodriguez’s application meets the criteria to establish the tattoo facility.
Part of the ordinance changes in 2022 required that tattoo establishments be at least a half-mile apart from each other. Aldermen said they were unsure if the proposal for the High Street place would meet that.
In moving to hold consideration of increasing the number of allowed tattoo licenses at the committee level, Ald. Juan Garza, 2nd Ward, said City Council members “need more information.”
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