Early in the November 22 Ellenville Village Board Meeting, Mayor Jeff Kaplan came out to the podium to speak about cannabis dispensaries and cafes. He lamented being the mayor of a village with no money.

“We’ve been running on fumes” for years.

He referenced the recent deep cuts in the village budget, 16 percent, and the lack of pay raises for employees over the years. In particular, he noted that the budget for the Ellenville Police Department, at $1.2 million, was not enough to retain young police, who after being trained at Ellenville are hired away to other departments, even the Sheriff’s Office, with much higher pay.

Kaplan said that the passage of the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA), which legalized recreational cannabis in New York, had changed many things. The crucial aspect of it for a municipality will probably be the tax income to be derived.

The local excise tax rate will be four percent of the retail price; three percent of that revenue will go to the municipality and the remaining one percent will go to the county.

Kaplan reiterated that this “is not an issue of legalization for marijuana.” That boat has sailed. Thus, the issue is whether Ellenville’s residents will press the village board to deny any dispensaries or cannabis cafes, whatever they may turn out to be.

Other towns around Ellenville have taken that step. Crawford, Wurtsboro, even Middletown have all taken the option of refusing licenses to any dispensaries. But, as Kaplan, noted, that will not stop marijuana being consumed in those places. It was consumed there when it was illegal, and it will be now that it’s legal cannabis. However, the dispensaries and the tax income will go somewhere else.

And that could be Ellenville. It will most likely also be Kingston and New Paltz. Ellenville could find its geographical location a boon in this new market situation.

Kaplan referred to a Massachusetts town, Lee, just over the state border that has a shop, Canna Provision, that has done a roaring business since Massachusetts legalized cannabis in 2018. Of course, Canna Provision is supplying a market in Albany, New York, and that will more than likely find other legal sources as soon as the New York Cannabis Control Board works out the rules for dispensaries for “adult” sale and use of cannabis. All that will be going on through this winter. The rules and regulations should become publicly available sometime in 2022.

However, Canna Provision has provided approximately $1,080,000 in tax money to the town of Lee. And an interesting aspect of things there — Canna Provision did not have to pay another $1,080,000 “Community Impact Fee” to the town, because the town determined that Canna Provision’s existence had not caused any expense to the town. In addition, the local police chief, there who stands opposed to legal cannabis, admitted that there had been no uptick in traffic incidents since the Canna Provision shop had opened.

Kaplan quickly noted the near-match up of the Lee, Massachusetts, tax income from Canna Provision and the Ellenville police budget. Kaplan reiterated that prohibiting cannabis shops in Ellenville will not affect consumption much in the village, but it would push Ellenville to the back of the line of municipalities that are eager to be licensed by the CCB to allow dispensaries and begin to collect that tax income.

“If you vote to say ‘No,’” he said, “Don’t expect it to be easy to change your mind and get that license. Opting out will hurt us if we change our mind, it will be hard to get in later.”

As to how such tax revenue might be spent, Kaplan suggested that half of it could go to the General Fund, helping to ease the village across the budgetary tightrope it has been walking, and the other half could be used for various “Youth Development” projects, including resurfacing the courts at Berme Road Park.

The subject brought others to the podium.

Mary Shelley spoke of the need for caution. She said she believed that most people in the village did not know that this issue was alive and could affect them. She felt that the village residents should have some say in whether or not to ban “pot shops.”

The board took heed of that comment and is setting a public hearing on the subject at the next possible village board meeting. More details on that will become available.

Following Mary Sheeley came Zach Baum, a newcomer to the area with a considerable footprint now in Ellenville’s retail spaces, who gave the arguments in favor of having dispensaries once again. He also noted that there are really two issues involved. One is for dispensaries, small stores like Canna Provision in Massachusetts, that will sell a variety of cannabis products, everything from “flower” (bud) to edibles and tinctures and creams. The other is the much less defined topic of public places where cannabis could be consumed, as in coffee shop spaces, or even restaurant-style operations. This is a new world in those terms and what kind of successful “consumption centers” might be, if there are to be any, is yet to be worked out.

The artist Paul Villinski followed that with a plea to use tax money derived from cannabis sales to provide addiction services, since the opioid/fentanyl crisis continues to rage, whether or not “marijuana” is legal.