Newburgh Supervisor Gil Piaquadio initially expected his town to opt out, the cautious bet for municipalities across New York weighing the unfamiliar idea of allowing marijuana stores and smoking lounges to open.
But then he reasoned, customers would just go elsewhere if Newburgh prohibited those types of businesses. So why not steer that new commercial activity to his own town, whatever his personal views on it?
“We’re not going to stop it by not selling it in town,” he said.
One by one, municipal boards around the state have been holding hearings and voting on whether to prohibit cannabis dispensaries and consumption sites once the state begins licensing them. Each had until Dec. 31 to “opt out” under the state law enacted in March that legalized recreational marijuana use by adults.
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Those that forgo that option by the deadline can’t decide later to prohibit pot businesses. But those that do opt out can reverse course any time. And for many local leaders in Orange County, that flexibility was reason enough to adopt bans for the time being while New York watches how the new industry unfolds.
“We didn’t want to bind future village governments to a law that they couldn’t get out of,” said Greenwood Lake Mayor Jesse Dwyer, whose lakeside village opted out of both retail sales and consumption sites.
Most of Orange County’s 43 municipalities took that same course. As the Dec. 31 deadline approached, seven appeared likely to allow dispensaries and just three – the city and town of Newburgh and village of Woodbury – were set to allow places where cannabis products are sold and consumed, according to a database of statewide opt-out decisions compiled by SUNY’s Rockefeller Institute of Government and the Times Herald-Record’s reporting.
The flood of bans still leaves places scattered throughout Orange where retailers could open shops, from the city and town of Newburgh on the eastern side to Port Jervis on the western side. The other municipalities in the county that were set to allow dispensaries were Wawayanda, Tuxedo, the town of Warwick and the village of Woodbury.
Orange County municipalities were much more conservative in their opt-out decisions than their counterparts in neighboring counties and the state as a whole.
Only five of Sullivan County’s 21 towns and villages – Callicoon, Cochecton, Highland, Lumberland and Neversink – had opted out of dispensaries and consumption sites, according to the Rockefeller Institute’s records. One other town, Mamakating, had proposed to prohibit consumption sites, but voters overturned the Town Board’s decision by a 1,078-741 vote in a Nov. 2 referendum.
Opt-outs were even rarer in Ulster County. Just four of its 24 municipalities – the towns of Gardiner Ulster, Kingston and Esopus – had voted to block consumption sites, and Esopus had opted out of dispensaries as well. The rest are open to both types of businesses.
Statewide, 588 of all 1,518 municipalities, or 39%, had blocked dispensaries, while 670, or 44%, had prohibited consumption sites, according to the Rockefeller Institute. Some of those opt-out tallies might rise slightly after boards voted in December, including a few in Orange that were expected to opt out.
Cornwall-on-Hudson Mayor James Gagliano, whose village board was set to opt out of both dispensaries and consumption sites on Dec. 20, said that decision seemed appropriate for a bedroom community with a small downtown, and in line with its residents’ current views. He acknowledged those attitudes and the village’s policy could shift.
“We made the calculated decision that we can opt in at any time if opinions change, if facts change,” he said.
A spokesman for the recently established state Office of Cannabis Management predicted some communities that opted out will opt back in after the adult-use market begins.
“There’s no surprise that they’ve acted ahead of the deadline, and we expect some will chose to fully join the marketplace as we build a new, safe, regulated cannabis industry that protects public health and creates opportunity,” spokesman Freeman Klopott said.
Municipalities that wind up hosting dispensaries or consumption sites stand to collect most of the 4% tax New York will collect on the sale of cannabis products. State law entitles host municipalities to 75% of the revenue and leaves the remaining 25% to the host county.
It’s unclear how many dispensaries and consumption sites ultimately could open in New York. The state currently has 38 dispensaries selling similar cannabis products for medical use, a market that is much smaller than the recreational-use market is expected to be.
The Hudson Valley has seven medical dispensaries, some of which may seek a second license to sell to anyone over 21 if their towns haven’t opted out of adult-use sales. The Etain dispensary in the town of Ulster and Curaleaf dispensary in the town of Newburgh would face no opt-out barriers. But The Botanist store in the town of Wallkill would, unless the town later reverses its ban.
The legalization law set some rules about dispensaries and consumption sites, while many other details will be spelled out it in regulations. The law states, for example, that cannabis consumption sites can’t sell alcohol as well and can’t be located within 500 feet of a school or 200 feet of a house of worship.
Some local leaders were reluctant to open the door to marijuana businesses before the regulations are written and the finer details are known.
“We have no idea how things are going to work,” Barry Cheney, a Warwick village trustee, said at a Dec. 6 meeting before his board voted to prohibit cannabis sales. He argued the prudent course was to opt out and reverse the decision later if necessary.
All three villages in the town of Warwick voted to opt out, while the Town Board voted to allow dispensaries but not consumption sites in certain zones in the town’s unincorporated areas. Town officials plan to share cannabis-sale revenue with Warwick’s villages if any stores ultimately open in Warwick.
Like Mamakating in Sullivan, the town of Tuxedo held a Nov. 2 referendum on its board’s decision to prohibit consumption sites. Tuxedo voters narrowly affirmed that ban with a 458-420 vote.
One of the first communities in Orange County to act on the cannabis option was the village of Woodbury, which took up an opt-out proposal in June and promptly rejected it in a 3-2 vote.
Woodbury Mayor Tim Egan, who voted against the proposal, said in a recent interview that he saw no reason to adopt a blanket prohibition on a legal business that the state allows, regardless of his own feelings. Whether a specific cannabis business is later approved in Woodbury should be decided through the usual review process with public input, he said.
“That’s something that should be determined by a public hearing on a case-by-case basis,” he said.
This article originally appeared on Times Herald-Record: Most Orange County municipalities opted out of cannabis businesses
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