ALBANY, N.Y. — Of the 10 provisional retail marijuana dispensary licenses approved last week, only four were granted in the Mid-Hudson region, a Cannabis Control Board spokesperson said Monday.
Provisional licenses are granted to applicants who have submitted all the required material “but have not yet secured a location,” Taylor Randi Lee said. Applicants who are licensed in the Mid-Hudson region can operate in any Mid-Hudson county. The board must still approve all final licenses before a licensee can begin operating.
On Thursday, April 12, provisional licenses for the Mid-Hudson region were awarded to 463 Station, Inc., Kaur Consulting LLC, Serenity Greens LLC and Cannalicious LLC.
The state granted 25 adult-use retail dispensary licenses on Thursday, April 12, but none of them are for dispensaries in the Mid-Hudson region.
On Thursday, the board also approved 25 cultivator licenses, 11 distributor licenses, 22 microbusiness licenses and eight processor licenses, for a total of more than 400 adult-use cannabis licenses statewide this year. Those licenses were available only to individuals who had a marijuana-related conviction before March 31, 2021.
Also on Thursday, the board approved new regulations that are intended to “speed up the process of padlocking” illegal dispensaries and giving the Office of Cannabis Management “more resources to enforce” its regulations, Lee said. Gov. Kathy Hochul announced on Monday that the rules would allow local municipalities to enforce those laws.
Hockul has previously called the state’s cannabis dispensary rollout a “disaster,” but in the press release on Friday, April 13, she said, the board had made “significant progress” and that, with its most recent “issuance of 101 adult-use cannabis licenses, New York’s legal cannabis industry continues to make significant progress with over 400 licenses issued in 2024.”
Most of those licenses are not for retail. Approaching the three-year anniversary of legalization, New York now has 107 licensed dispensaries, with more stores to open statewide.
On March 23, eight new adult-use cannabis dispensary licenses were granted in the Mid-Hudson Region among the 114 approved by the board that day, but a board spokesperson said they did not know whether any of the eight new licensees planned to open dispensaries in Ulster or Dutchess counties.
According to the Office of Cannabis Management, the agency received 4,324 applications for retail dispensary licenses in 2023 and issued 463 conditional adult-use licenses, including 44 for the Mid-Hudson region.
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