City Council members from every borough are urging Gov. Kathy Hochul to block a push by the state’s weed regulatory board to allow more licensed pot shops to open in neighborhoods across the Big Apple.
Nine members of the council’s “Common Sense” Caucus fired off a letter to Hochul on Monday decrying what critics call the state Cannabis Control Board’s half-baked idea to provide waivers for its current 1,000-foot buffer between legal cannabis shops — thus allowing two or more stores to sell weed on the same block.
“Flooding our city with more dispensaries not only degrades the quality of life in these communities but also decreases the value of these licenses and only encourages more illegal sales,” reads the letter to Hochul and Cannabis Control Board Chairwoman Tremaine Wright.
“We are at a critical juncture, and any reduction in the buffer zone at this time would only exacerbate the situation,” 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.
The lawmakers lauded Mayor Eric Adams’ administration’s “Operation Padlock to Protect” initiative that closed down hundreds of illicit shops as a “positive step” to controlling the state’s legal-pot program.
But they said weeding out all the rogue stores “remains a herculean task, and more needs to be done” to permanently shut them down — instead of adding new ones to the mix.
Lawmakers representing Manhattan’s East Side held a press conference Tuesday to complain about an illegal pot shop still operating on East 23rd Street between Second and Third avenues.
Manhattan state Assemblyman Harvey Epstein, who attended the event, also said, “It doesn’t make sense right now” to ease the 1,000-foot buffer rule.
“We want the legal cannabis market to succeed. Oversaturating the market would be a problem. We’re still burdened with illegal shops,” Epstein said.
There are currently 161 licensed dispensaries in New York, with nearly half located in the Big Apple and Long Island.
Some of the licensed cannabis stores have threatened to sue the state if officials loosen the buffer rule.
In a statement, the Office of Cannabis Management said New York’s cannabis law and regulations “establish a framework” allowing OCM and the Cannabis Control Board to “consider waivers of distance requirements between dispensaries based on public convenience and advantage factors.
“The vote by the Cannabis Control Board is a necessary next step in creating a process to implement such waivers,” OCM said.
“The current regulations were too broad and nonspecific, and would have prevented the Board from establishing the public convenience and advantage criteria needed to objectively analyze requests,” the agency said.
“The proposed regulations specially task the Board with creating the criteria which will be used to evaluate public convenience and advantage requests and will be out for public comment for a period of 60 days. … During that time, the Board and Office will solicit valuable feedback from stakeholders on what the public convenience and advantage framework should be.”
