The push for legal cannabis (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
This past year was remarkable for New York’s cannabis industry. After years of debate, the Legislature passed the Marijuana Regulation & Taxation Act (MRTA), which legalizes and regulates recreational cannabis and will lay the foundation for a recreational program.
Recently, the Cannabis Control Board (CCB) began loosening restrictions on medical cannabis (including allowing patients to buy a 60-, rather than a 30-day supply, along with the purchase of whole flower), and finalized the cannabinoid hemp regulations. In the meantime, tens of thousands of entrepreneurs from all around the state, including the “legacy” (illicit) marketplace, are preparing applications for a coveted recreational license.
Over the next few years, New York’s nascent cannabis industry has a generational opportunity to create a new market out of whole cloth. There are those who push back, holding onto outdated notions of cannabis as a gateway drug and fears that legal cannabis will result in unsafe neighborhoods and loss of property value. Legal cannabis will be a game-changer. Here’s why:
A Boon for New York Agriculture
Farmland makes up about 20% of New York’s land, and we are the fourth largest producer of dairy in the nation, home to over 33,000 family farms. However, the economics of farming are changing, especially in high-cost states like New York, where family farms are disappearing at alarming rates.
A legal cannabis marketplace would be a blessing for agriculture, especially those family farms. Over the last decade, hundreds of farmers have embraced hemp cultivation and craft brewing, both of which have been a lifeline. Legal cannabis cultivation presents a unique opportunity for the farmers, which will allow this evolving industry to harness an existing New York asset.
Generating Thousands of Good Union Careers
New York’s adult-use cannabis industry is expected to generate 30,000-50,000 new jobs. Currently, 80% of the medical cannabis industry consists of unionized workers receiving family-sustaining wages and benefits, along with strong workplace protections, setting a standard for industry employment and creating a dedicated workforce.
New York is committed to ensuring quality careers and a pathway to unionization as the MRTA requires that cannabis employers enter Labor Peace Agreements (LPAs) with unions as a condition of licensure, thus limiting their ability to resist, challenge, or contest workers’ efforts to form a union.
With the inclusion of organized labor, the legal cannabis industry has an opportunity to further professionalize and create labor standards for an industry that has operated in the shadows for decades. Additionally, labor will serve a critical role, ensuring a robust pipeline of talent and local hiring that ensures equity, and acts to represent workers as stakeholders in the industry’s success.
Building Small Business
The MRTA is built around ensuring social equity, requiring that half of all licenses go to people from BIPOC communities, women, veterans, and distressed farmers. While corporate cannabis is already in New York, and will have a role in the industry, the MRTA prioritizes small businesses, and all signs point to the CCB maintaining that precedent. According to leaders from the NY Cannabis Growers & Processors Association, the state’s largest trade federation, “the goal is to create hundreds of millionaires, instead of a few billionaires.”
The cannabis industry is large and complicated, so while most New Yorkers may think about businesses that grow or sell the product, there will be hundreds of ancillary businesses in the sector. This will include testing, marketing and branding, packaging, technology, security, construction, maintenance, and legal services.
As an economic development tool, legalization immediately created an opportunity for tens of thousands of entrepreneurs to join the new industry. While these entrepreneurs represent a wide range of communities, many will come from the legacy market, hoping to legitimize their business and spur a chance to create generational wealth (including growers, processors, bakers, and delivery services).
Investing in New York Communities
In addition to its social equity provisions, the MRTA earmarks 40% of cannabis tax revenue to be repurposed as grants to non-profit organizations serving communities affected by the war on drugs. These grants will be used for job placement and skills training, mental health and substance abuse counseling, nutrition, and financial literacy. Additional tax revenue will fund a state-run incubator for small businesses and social equity applicants, including no-interest loans.
Localities will also have a chance to receive tax revenue from cannabis sales, provided they opt into retail dispensaries and/or on-premises consumption. Those municipalities with the foresight to opt in will soon have a new source of revenue, new jobs, and the economic output that comes with these opportunities.
Within this decade, New York has the potential to be the largest cannabis market, as sales could reach $750 million in 2023 (the first expected year), and $2.4 billion by 2026. Legal cannabis will be a game-changer for the economy and workforce, and generate opportunities for communities long left behind by prohibition. This is a once-in-a-generation moment for New York State and we must work together to get it right.
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Jordan Isenstadt is a Senior Vice President at Marino, a New York City-based public relations agency, where he leads a team focused on a burgeoning portfolio of cannabis-focused brands and serves as a member of the Town of North Hempstead Cannabis Task Force. Nikki Kateman is the Political & Communications Director of Local 338 RWDSU/UFCW, a labor union whose growing membership represents 80% of the workers in New York's cannabis industry who are employed across the supply chain from seed to sale, and serves as a member of the Town of North Hempstead Cannabis Task Force. On Twitter @MrIsenstadt of @marinopr and @nmkateman of @Local338.
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Eric Adams at a climate rally (photo: Office of Eric Adams)
Earlier this month, Senator Joe Manchin appeared to scuttle the Biden Administration’s Build Back Better bill, which promised to be America’s largest ever investment into clean energy. Just like that, local governments – which have been shouldering the climate leadership load for the last decade – could be losing their best chance to see active federal investment to avert the climate crisis now underway.
Luckily, cities like New York are already leading. This month, the City Council passed and Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a ban, with limited exceptions, on using fossil fuels in new buildings. Along with other actions, it makes a remarkable finale for the de Blasio Administration’s climate portfolio, which includes passing a world-leading climate and jobs law (aka Local Law 97), divesting $3 billion in city pension funds from fossil fuels and unleashing billions into clean energy, securing state approval for clean energy transmission into the city, enacting landmark environmental justice legislation, and investing billions into infrastructure and housing to make the city safer and more resilient.
As Mayor-elect Eric Adams prepares to take office, it’s important that New York City goes even further to continue transitioning away from fossil fuels while preparing for the ever-growing risks of storms, heat, and sea level rise that will continue to disproportionately impact our most marginalized communities. His administration now inherits world-leading policies and an incredibly talented climate team. But that won’t be enough.
Here are seven ways for the Adams administration to go even further and be the climate leader that the world needs.
1. Appoint a Deputy Mayor for Climate
The Mayor should improve climate governance by appointing a Deputy Mayor, with clear public accountability, to convene and lead a cabinet of agencies and offices that must work together to slash emissions, build resilience, secure environmental justice, and expand the dialogue with the communities and civic leaders who are critical to this work.
2. Expand Local Law 97 and Take Next Steps to Decarbonize the City
The Mayor should send a clear signal that he will enforce Local Law 97, which sets strict caps on the carbon pollution emitted by large buildings, providing certainty to building owners as they navigate the energy transition.
The city must also continue its efforts to secure clean energy transmission from hydropower, offshore wind, and solar. It needs to keep electrifying vehicles and expanding busways and protected bike lanes. And new actions will be needed, like electrifying our port facilities, rolling out citywide organics composting, and decarbonizing small buildings.
3. Promote Environmental Justice
It’s clear that historic choices and policies have meant that some communities, largely indicated by income and race, bear a disproportionate impact of pollution, flooding, heat, and other climate impacts. The Mayor should embrace the Environmental Justice for All report, now under development, to reverse this history, embed environmental justice into the city’s decision-making, and promote public health in our frontline communities.
4. Reduce Embodied Carbon
Many New Yorkers know that 70% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the city’s 1 million buildings. Less well known is the role that consumption (the products we buy, the foods we eat, or the way we build) plays in our global carbon impact.
The Mayor should direct his team to include these “Scope 3” emissions in its greenhouse gas inventory. And the city can take immediate steps to reduce these emissions, like adopting clean construction standards into the building code or upgrading procurement rules to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from purchased products and food.
5. Protect New Yorkers
As we continue to learn from extreme weather events, there is still much more to be done to protect New Yorkers from flooding, heat, and sea level rise. The Mayor should speed up investments into physical infrastructure like storm sewers and floodwalls or lighter-colored pavements, and nature-based solutions, like oyster reefs or bluebelts, across the five boroughs and continue baking resilience into our building and zoning codes.
6. Strengthen Long-Term Planning
The city’s planning efforts, built up over time by a variety of legislative mandates, are not always coordinated. The Mayor should release an updated strategic plan, due in April 2023, that lays out a new approach to the intersection of land use planning, capital budgeting, strategic planning, and the variety of other plans issued by the city. All of these can be better coordinated with community input to make all land use and capital budget decisions climate-smart.
7. Empower Local Partners for Global Action
As the home of the United Nations, Wall Street, media and cultural institutions, and a thriving set of civic leaders, universities, activists, and community-led organizations, New York City already has an out-sized influence in the world. The Mayor should further embrace these relationships and convene local and global partners to spur greater financial investment and cultural support for climate action.
The whole city, in fact the whole world, is rooting for the Adams Administration to succeed on climate because what happens in New York City matters everywhere. And regardless of what happens in Washington, there is no greater issue that matters to humanity than confronting our climate crisis and ending the age of fossil fuels. The world needs New York City to lead the way.
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Daniel Zarrilli, former NYC Chief Climate Policy Advisor, held a variety of senior climate policy, resilience, and sustainability appointments under Mayors Bloomberg and de Blasio. On Twitter @dzarrilli.
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Gov. Hochul signs legislation (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Office of the Governor)
Imagine being a young, impressionable teenager unable to vote or even drive a car. A teenager who can’t take a field trip, get a passport, or make health decisions without the guidance and consent of an adult; but if you made a terrible mistake, you were held accountable as if you were an adult.
Young people are more emotional, vulnerable, and impulsive than adults. Yet, prior to 2019, 16- and 17-year-old teenagers across New York State were automatically charged and sentenced for crimes as if they were adults.
One bad decision leading to one terrible mistake meant that your opportunities were considerably limited for the rest of your life, even after you accepted full responsibility and were held accountable.
Your pathways to education, employment, and housing were forever limited because your teenage actions led to an adult criminal conviction in the court system. Employers, educators, and landlords perpetually reduced you to the stigma associated with the charge for which you were convicted.
Judges have the discretionary authority to grant teenagers charged as adults a status known as “youthful offender” or YO. This status is meant to relieve the young person from the onus of having an adult criminal record haunt them for the rest of their lives. Their records are sealed, and they can move about the world without the stigma of a felony conviction.
Without this status, individuals would face lifelong consequences because their conviction is accessible to employers, landlords, and schools by way of background checks.
Sadly, in many instances, judges have chosen not to grant YO status, which has happened to far too many people in New York who were charged and sentenced as adults when they were young.
It happened to me when I was 17 years old.
Like too many Black and brown teenagers, I was raised in an over-policed, underserved community that lacked appropriate resources, was plagued by drugs, and provided limited role models and opportunities for young people.
I made poor decisions that held severe consequences. I was charged and ultimately convicted as an adult, serving 10 years in prison. I spent most of my adolescence in an adult correctional setting and was forced to grow up in one of the most dangerous and challenging places anyone can fathom.
After leaving prison in 2003, I was determined not to engage in the behaviors that led to my confinement. But as I returned to my community, I was confronted with systemic barriers. I remember filling out a job application to work in the stock room of a national retail chain. During my interview process, they asked so many questions about my conviction. Ultimately, they said I needed more experience and denied me the job. Eventually, I was relegated to back-breaking labor on a construction site with no benefits because that was my only option at the time.
This was just one obstacle. According to the Council of State Governments, in New York there are 1,052 collateral civil consequences: legal and regulatory restrictions that limit or prohibit people convicted of crimes from accessing certain occupations, licenses, funding, and more.
When young people sentenced as adults ultimately complete their prison sentences, they are subjected to a life sentence of lost opportunity.
Thankfully, New York State recently took a big step to supporting second chances. Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law new legislation (S.282/A.6769) providing individuals who were sentenced as adults when they were youths with a new pathway to remove their adult felony conviction. This new law allows people to reapply for consideration for youthful offender status, and it offers hope to those still suffering the consequences of an adult conviction for a decision they made as a teenager.
What does this mean for me?
I may be free—finally—of the limitations of a felony conviction record. I was released from prison at age 27. Now, more than 17 years later, I am eager to reapply for youthful offender status. I am so much more than the felony record which has labeled me for all these years.
I am proud of the work I have done both to help people avoid incarceration and to assist formerly incarcerated individuals with the process of reentry in New York City. I am filled with hope that this change will be transformative for people who made mistakes when they were young. May they have the opportunity to live better lives without barriers to success.
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Rob DeLeon is the Senior Vice President at The Fortune Society. On Twitter @RobDeLeon14 & @thefortunesoc.
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