Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We will look at the first cannabis licenses issued in New York State. We’ll also look at how stalemate alert days are chosen, because today is one.
Eventually the numbers became 903, 28, 8 and 282.
It’s not a football game. There were 903 applicants for permits for the first recreational marijuana stores in New York State. On Monday, 28 licenses went to entrepreneurs and eight to non-profit organizations. And regulators released 282 pages of proposed fees and timelines that would, among other things, allow the state’s existing medical cannabis providers to enter the recreational market.
The licenses were granted by the state’s Cannabis Control Board. My colleague Ashley Southall writes that the action has closed a supply chain from seed to sale and is expected to lead to legal retail marijuana sales by the end of the year, even though a Michigan company is challenging some New York licensing requirements – including one that says applicants must have been convicted of a cannabis offense in New York State. That provision was designed to help provide legal cannabis trade opportunities to people in communities targeted by the war on drugs.
Tremaine Wright, the chairman of the board of directors, called Monday’s vote “a monumental moment”.
“Not too long ago, New York’s idea of legalizing cannabis seemed incredible,” she said. “Now we’ve not only legalized, but we’re building a legal adult marketplace with an equity-based approach.”
The Office of Cannabis Management, which develops regulations under the supervision of the control board, said most permits went to people in New York City and Long Island. Freeman Klopott, the agency’s spokesman, said 20 of the recipients came from areas with some of the lowest median household incomes in the country.
They included Naiomy Guerrero, 31, and her father and an older brother, Hector. She said Hector had been arrested several times for possession of marijuana during the stop and frisk era, a program that led to unwarranted pedestrian stops and searches in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods such as Morris Heights in the Bronx, where Guerrero’s siblings lived. grew up. A federal judge ruled in 2013 that such tactics were racially discriminatory and unconstitutional.
“To do this for my family, to move this forward, is my life’s work,” she said. “If the real purpose of cannabis in New York is to be just, who better than us? Because we have suffered under the influence of the war on drugs. We come from the most controlled neighborhoods in the Bronx.
Licenses went to at least three New York City-based nonprofits: Housing Works, the Doe Fund, and LIFE Camp, a 20-year-old nonprofit that originally aimed to help reduce violence and arrests in southeastern Queens. It is believed to be the first non-profit run by a black woman to be licensed.
The 36 permit holders must now provide additional information about their finances and business partners. Once regulators review that information, they can begin deliveries from locations of their choosing, a shift announced Monday by regulators said would enable operators to “generate capital and scale their operations”.
But that change suggests the state is struggling to provide permit holders with storefronts and loans as planned. The state’s dormitory authority, the agency that directs the rental and design process for the storefronts, said in a statement that with licensee selection and “a delivery model,” it can now “proceed to finalize leases and financing without the delay sales”.
Weather
Expect a sunny day with temperatures around 40 degrees and a clear evening with temperatures around 30 degrees.
ALTERNATIVE SIDE PARKING
Effective until Thursday (Thanksgiving Day).
The latest New York news
Anne Marie Doherty has been thinking a lot about today and tomorrow, two of the 19 gridlock alerts the city is issuing to discourage heavy traffic in Midtown Manhattan on the days it expects to do so.
As senior director of research, implementation and safety for the Department of Transportation, Doherty is the leading annointer. If people pay attention to her choices, the streets may not be deserted, but they are a little less impassable than they otherwise would have been. If people ignore them, fuhgeddaboudit, to use a word that is in the dictionary.
Gridlock warning days were invented to discourage motorists from driving into Midtown when traffic jams were to be expected – for example, the day of the Rockefeller Center tree lighting (November 30 this year). They’ve been a part of New York life for over 30 years now, long enough for you to question whether they’re useful or useless.
“Giving special advice for traffic congestion in New York City — where the term ‘gridlock’ was invented — is like giving advice for cold weather in the North Pole,” the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a policy group, stated in 2015 in a post on his website announcing that every day is a stalemate alert day in New York. It added that “traffic is nothing new in the five boroughs.”
Doherty knows this, but says stalemate alert days make a difference. For the week of gridlock alert days during the September sessions of the United Nations General Assembly, she said there was a 4 to 5 percent decrease in traffic at East River crossings. She also knows that Midtown traffic slows down on gridlock days. But the crawling can be even slower.
“The purpose of this is when we know there are attractions for people to drive into the city, to discourage them,” she said. “Not to drive in.”
She said the numbers suggest that gridlock warning days have over the years. In 1991, about 1.6 million vehicles entered Manhattan on a gridlock alert day — about 500,000 more than on a similar day in 2019, before the pandemic.
Doherty chooses the days without stalemate behind the wheel. She takes an express bus to work from Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, to Lower Manhattan.
“I never dream of driving into town one day,” she said. “It’s folly.”
A church that wants to tear down and rebuild
In December 2020, a five-alarm fire broke through Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village. The bell in the tower, which had rung at the birth of the nation in 1776, was saved. Tiffany’s stained glass windows were not. The granite rock-faced walls were all that remained of the church. The church says they’re unstable.
Today, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission will hear witnesses about the church’s application to demolish them — a request some conservationists oppose. “We do not believe there is sufficient documentation that alternatives to preserve the historic facade have been fully explored,” the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation said on its website, “nor that there is sufficient evidence at this time to support permanent and irreversible removal. .”
Theodore Grunwald, a conservationist who lives a few blocks from the church, called it “a distinct architectural presence.”
“And that distinct architectural presence can persist, as every other municipality that has been devastated by fire has done,” he said. “Those exterior walls can’t be duplicated, and once they’re gone, they’re gone.”
The church’s senior pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, said the church had spent $4.2 million, about a fifth of the insurance payments it received after the fire, on studies to see if what was left of the facade was sturdy enough to be incorporated into a new building. “Our experts say it isn’t,” she said, “so it’s not appropriate to keep it.”
“We want to build back on our historic site,” she said, adding that “there is no developer in the wings” with a plan for the site. She said the church could no longer spend time or money studying ways to preserve the facade and that the monuments commission “holds our future in its hands”.
METROPOLITAN Diary
Dating game
Dear Diary:
My girlfriend and I were having cocktails at a restaurant in my East Side neighborhood when a woman I had briefly dated walked in and saw me.
