New York marijuana regulators on Tuesday kept up their monthly pace of adding roughly 100 new business permits at the regular meeting of the Cannabis Control Board, approving 105 new adult-use retailers, growers, distributors, microbusinesses, and processors.
The new licenses bring the total number of permits awarded to 1,117. That includes the 463 social equity retail permits issued last year and the 654 adult-use licenses given out so far in 2024.
According to staff from the Office of Cannabis Management, this year’s license breakdown includes permits for:
- 171 recreational shops
- 115 cultivators
- 113 microbusinesses
- 74 distributors
- 70 processors
“That is obviously a pretty substantial number,” Patrick McKeage, the chief operating officer of the OCM, told the Cannabis Control Board of the license totals. “We’ll continue processing as more licensing staff come on board.”
Working through the backlog
McKeage also informed the board that OCM licensing staff has reviewed 1,091 of the 1,850 retail applications submitted by Nov. 17 of last year, which had locations already locked down. He said that can be taken to mean that any applicant with a number lower than 1,091 is likely in good shape to receive a license. And 789 of those already reviewed have been granted “proximity protection” from other potential cannabis shops.
The intent, OCM Policy Director John Kagia noted, is for the agency’s licensing staff to work through all of the 1,850 November queue applicants before getting started on the 5,024 that were submitted by Dec. 18.
There appears to be no retail license cap or stopping point at this point.
“Certainly, much more work to be done. We have quite a long way to go through the November and December queues to review,” Kagia said.
Legal marijuana shops in New York reported sales of $357.3 million since the market launched in December 2022, OCM Policy Director John Kagia shared with the board during a market update, including $46.2 million in sales last month alone. That, Kagia said, is further evidence that the legal New York market continues to blossom.
“The last week of May, we absolutely barnstormed. We did $12.5 million, our highest week of sales to date,” Kagia said, noting that in the last few months, the legal market has grown by between $4 million and $6 million in sales per month.
But, Kagia acknowledged, some retailers have already experienced a sales plateau after a few months of operations. That, however, may be offset in the near future by ongoing enforcement efforts against unlicensed shops, which have been slowly but surely shutting down across New York City.
“The enforcement team has been going absolutely gangbusters. So has the city’s enforcement unit. We think this is going to be one of the absolutely critical components in the acceleration of the growth of this market,” Kagia said.
The board also issued formal denials for several conditional adult-use retail dispensary licenses, denied a handful of other redundant license applications from entrepreneurs who’d already won permits, awarded another recreational wholesale cultivation permit to medical marijuana company Vireo Health, and approved final home marijuana cultivation rules for residents.
Moving forward
The new acting executive director of the OCM, Felicia Reid, also made her first appearance at the board meeting after her appointment on Monday by Gov. Kathy Hochul. Reid replaced Chris Alexander, whose last day was Friday.
Reid greeted stakeholders and pledged to “strengthen New York’s cannabis industry and to make sure there’s a strong structure,” but didn’t offer much in the way of policy specifics on what else may change moving forward.
Reid said her focus will be “meeting folks where they’re at. That involves going out, getting feedback, understanding criticism, and seeing where the gaps are where we can make things better.”
Kagia, however, did shed a bit of light on what stakeholders may expect as far as policy shifts going forward, after an audit from the Office of General Services released a month ago called for dramatic reform at the OCM.
Kagia said the OCM will have five key policy priorities in the months ahead:
- Growing the legal New York cannabis market.
- Rolling out new programs like seed-to-sale tracking.
- Bringing legacy customers and businesses into the legal trade.
- Engaging more stakeholders such as municipal governments to help in all of this.
- Setting the state up to complement eventual federal marijuana reform.
Questions remain
During the public comment period, the board was deluged by yet another wave of license applicants wanting answers on their permit paperwork. Many said they had been trying to reach OCM staff in vain, and several said they were “bleeding money” while paying for rent each month on facilities that continue to go unused.
“It shouldn’t take this long to say yes or no for an application,” one retail applicant, who said he’d applied last November, told the board. “Some people just want a yes or no answer.”
Yet another retail license applicant said he was initially awarded a provisional permit, but it was rescinded for unclear reasons. Now he’s still waiting to hear whether he’s authorized to begin operations. He said he’d sent “countless emails with no reply” from the OCM.
“I truly feel that I’m in purgatory,” he said, adding that rent on his facility is “costing us $20,000 a month.”
Another hopeful retailer suggested that the board may have opened itself up to further lawsuits by changing the licensing process at its last meeting on May 10, to review all of the November retail applications before starting on the December cohort. She said that as a member of the December applicants, she feels like she’s “in limbo.”
“For many applicants, this endeavor is the Super Bowl. Imagine the chaos if the referees and the rules were changed at the Super Bowl at half time,” she said. “For example, we’re only playing three quarters instead of four. The results will be chaos. This is the magnitude of disruption caused by the change in the rules.”
The post New York cannabis regulators add another 105 business licenses, total now tops 1,100 appeared first on Green Market Report.
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