City council members from each ward are calling on Governor Kathy Hawkle to block the state’s Cannabis Control Commission’s efforts to allow more licensed marijuana stores to open in New York City neighborhoods.
Nine members of the council’s “Common Sense” Caucus sent a letter to Hochle on Monday slamming what critics call a half-baked proposal for the State Cannabis Control Board to waive the current 1,000-foot buffer zone between legal marijuana dispensaries, allowing more than one store to sell cannabis on the same block.
“Building more dispensaries within the city will not only diminish the quality of life for these communities, but it will also devalue these licenses and encourage further illegal sales,” the letter, addressed to Hawkle and Cannabis Control Board Chairman Tremaine Wright, said.
“We are at a critical crossroads, and reducing the buffer zone at this point would only make the situation worse,” added Councilmembers Robert Holden, Joan Arriola and Vicki Palladino of Queens, Ina Vernikov, Kalman Yeager and Susan Chuang of Brooklyn, Joe Borelli and David Carr of Staten Island and Christy Marmorato of the Bronx.
Lawmakers praised Mayor Eric Adams’ administration’s “Operation Padlock to Protect,” which has closed hundreds of illegal stores, as a “positive step” to reign in the state’s legal marijuana program.
But they said weeding out all the bad stores “remains a huge task and more needs to be done to close them permanently, rather than opening new ones.”
Council members representing Manhattan’s East Side held a press conference on Tuesday to complain about an illegal marijuana dispensary that is still operating on East 23rd Street between Second and Third Avenues.
State Assemblyman Harvey Epstein of Manhattan, who attended the event, also said relaxing the 1,000-foot buffer rule “doesn’t make sense at this point.”
“We want the legal cannabis market to succeed. If the market becomes saturated, that’s a problem. There are still a lot of illegal stores,” Epstein said.
There are currently 161 licensed dispensaries in New York, nearly half of which are located in the Big Apple and Long Island.
Some licensed marijuana stores have threatened to sue the state if officials relax the buffer rules.
In a statement, the Bureau of Cannabis Control said New York state’s cannabis laws and regulations “establish a framework” that allows the OCM and the Cannabis Control Board to “consider exemptions to distance requirements between dispensaries based on factors of public convenience and benefit.”
“The vote by the Cannabis Control Board is a necessary next step in creating a process to implement such an exemption,” OCM said.
“The current regulations are broad and not specific, and would have prevented the Commission from establishing the public convenience and benefit standards necessary to objectively analyze requests,” the agency said.
“The proposed regulations task the Commission with the specific task of developing criteria to be used to evaluate public convenience and benefit requests, and will be open for public comment for 60 days. … During that time, the Commission and the Bureau will seek valuable feedback from stakeholders on what the public convenience and benefit framework should be.”
