City council members from across the district are urging Governor Kathy Hochul to block the state marijuana regulator’s push to allow more licensed marijuana stores to open in the Big Apple’s neighborhoods.
Nine members of the council’s Common Sense faction sent a letter to Hochul on Monday denouncing what critics say is the state’s cannabis control agency’s ill-conceived idea of granting exceptions to the current 1,000-foot buffer zone between legal cannabis stores, allowing two or more stores to sell weed on the same block.
“Flooding our city with even more dispensaries not only worsens the quality of life in these communities, but also reduces the value of these licenses and only encourages more illegal sales,” the letter to Hochul and Cannabis Control Board Chair Tremaine Wright said.
“We are at a critical point, and any reduction in the buffer zone would only make the situation worse at this time,” added Council members Robert Holden, Joann Ariola and Vickie Paladino of Queens, Inna Vernikov, Kalman Yeger and Susan Zhuang of Brooklyn, Joe Borelli and David Carr of Staten Island and Kristy Marmorato of the Bronx.
Lawmakers praised Mayor Eric Adams’ administration’s “Operation Padlock to Protect” initiative, which closed hundreds of illegal stores, and called it a “positive step” toward controlling the state’s legal marijuana program.
However, they said that eradicating all fraudulent stores “remains a herculean task and more needs to be done” to close them permanently – rather than adding new ones.
Lawmakers representing Manhattan’s East Side held a press conference Tuesday to complain about an illegal marijuana shop that is still operating on East 23rd Street between Second and Third Avenues.
Manhattan State Assemblyman Harvey Epstein, who attended the event, also said, “Right now, it doesn’t make sense” to relax the 1,000-foot buffer rule.
“We want the legal cannabis market to succeed. Oversaturation of the market would be a problem. We are still burdened with illegal businesses,” Epstein said.
There are currently 161 licensed dispensaries in New York, almost half of which are located in the Big Apple and on Long Island.
Some of the licensed cannabis stores have threatened to sue the state if the authorities relax the buffer rule.
The Office of Cannabis Management said in a statement that New York State’s cannabis laws and regulations “establish a framework” that allows OCM and the Cannabis Control Board to “consider exceptions to the distance requirements between dispensaries based on factors such as public convenience and benefits.”
“The Cannabis Control Board vote is a necessary next step in creating a process to implement such exemptions,” OCM said.
“The current rules were too broad and too unspecific and would have prevented the panel from establishing the criteria of public convenience and public benefit necessary for an objective analysis of the applications,” the agency said.
“The proposed regulations specifically task the Board with establishing criteria to be used to evaluate applications for public convenience and benefits. They will be made available to the public for comment for 60 days. … During that time, the Board and the Office will seek valuable feedback from stakeholders on what the public convenience and benefits framework should look like.”
