Commentary: Croton Planning Board approves cannabis dispensary despite significant opposition from village residents.

Village officials consciously and deliberately kept residents in the dark about the project as long as they could get away with it, thus making the decision a fait accompli.

Mindset proprietor Vincent Silvestri (left) and cannabis lawyer Micci Weiss (right.)

Last evening (April 14) the Croton-on-Hudson Planning Board unanimously approved an application submitted by a murky Limited Liability Company (LLC) to open a cannabis dispensary at 370 South Riverside Avenue, which is currently occupied by a mini-mart.

We say “murky” because the attorney for the LLC has refused to answer any questions about who actually owns it, despite repeated queries from the Chronicle. That lack of transparency is also reflected in the conduct of village officials, who deliberately attempted to keep the community in the dark about the application for as long as possible.

We realize those are strong statements, but they are backed up by evidence.

The only reason news of the application became widespread in the village is because sources told the Chronicle about it at the beginning of April, and thus we were able to query Village Manager Bryan Healy about the matter. Only when it became clear that we were going to publish the story with or without his input did Healy provide us with a statement and some details, which led to our initial report of April 2.

The attorney for the dispensary project, Micci J. Weiss of New Jersey—who specializes in helping cannabis businesses to open and expand—filed the formal application with the Planning Board on March 25. Had word not leaked out, when would the residents of Croton-on-Hudson have found out about it?

At this juncture, there is no reason to think that the village would have told anyone before Friday of last week, April 10, the day that village officials normally send out the agenda for Tuesday evening Planning Board meetings.

Many residents spoke against the dispensary at the April 14 Planning Board meeting/ Photos by Michael Balter

And yet the process that led to the approval of the dispensary did not begin just a matter of weeks ago. At last evening’s meeting, Weiss told the Planning Board that he and Vincent Silvestri, the proprietor of the Mindset Dispensary in Tarrytown who will now also operate a Mindset Dispensary in Croton, had been talking to business owners in Croton for the past eight months, trying to find someone who would relinquish their premises. After all that time, only one, Gholam Razghandi, owner of the DB Mart at 370 South Riverside, agreed to do so, and so that is where the dispensary will be.

Also at the meeting, it became clear that village officials, including the Village Attorney, had been in touch with Weiss for quite some time, discussing the details of the project. For how long? We don’t yet know, and that reporting continues, as we discuss below. But it did come out at the meeting that the Village Manager had already told Weiss and Silvestri they could purchase permits for two additional parking spaces near the store, before the application had even been formally approved.

We don’t yet know how long village officials have known about the intention of the applicant to open a cannabis dispensary in Croton, but it was not for lack of trying to find out. On April 2, the same day we published our first report, we filed a Freedom of Information Law request with the village asking for all of the application documents, as well as all communications between the applicant and the village. To make the search easier, and in our naïveté at that time about when the village first knew about the plan, we only asked for documents dating from December 1, 2025 to the present.

We also asked that, in light of the public interest in the issue and the upcoming Planning Board meeting, our request be expedited and that the village not wait the normal 20 business days to fill it. While the FOIL request was quickly acknowledged, as required by New York state law, our request to expedite it was ignored and received no response. We will now be revising the request to cover at least the last eight months, if not further back in time.

To make matters worse, neither Weiss nor Silvestri responded to repeated emails and telephone messages, beginning last week and continuing to the morning of the meeting, asking them to provide us with more details about their operation and who would be the actual owner of the dispensary. (We published the detailed questions we posed to them in the Chronicle last Friday.)

Nevertheless, at the meeting, Weiss and Silvestri stated over and over how eager they were to be part of the Croton community and to contribute to it. (The video of the meeting should be available at this link very soon.) In our view, such sentiments are very nice, but they need to be accompanied by transparency about their operations. Who will be the real owner of the dispensary?

Just before the meeting began, which was attended by the liaison to the Planning Board, Deputy Mayor Len Simon, we asked Simon how long he had known who the applicant actually was. Rather than responding, Simon asked us to put that question in an email, which we did, along with a second question about how long the village itself had known about this pending application. We will update this story when we have a response.

Attorney Jeannette Koster of McCarthy Fingar LLP explains Croton’s limited options under New York state law.

At this point, many readers will be asking what difference it would have made had village residents known about the plan for a cannabis dispensary earlier than they did. In our view, a much longer lead time for residents to consider the project, discuss it, and possibly organize against it might have made a difference. At the very least, it would have been much more democratic to allow that process to occur, and to allow opponents, who by all appearances are a significant percentage of village residents, to explore their options. The actual process was obscure and anti-democratic.

As many have pointed out, the original sin for those opposed to a dispensary in Croton was committed back in 2021, when the Croton Board of Trustees opted out of allowing allowing on-site consumption of cannabis but did not opt out of retail sales. Both Mayor Brian Pugh and trustee Len Simon were on the board at that time.

The subject apparently first came up for discussion at a Work Session on June 14 of that year, and was discussed in Mayor Pugh’s newsletter on July 3. A public hearing was eventually scheduled for September 20, 2021, but apparently only on the question of whether the village should opt out of on-site consumption—which it then did.

It is not clear whether villagers fully understood at that time that Croton was not opting out of retail sales, but the deadline to do so under New York law—December 31, 2021—came and went without that happening.

At the Planning Board meeting, Jeannette Koster of McCarthy Fingar LLP, the law firm that represents the village, asserted that the body had little choice other than to approve the application unless it could be shown, with evidence, that there were tangible considerations—parking, traffic, proximity to schools and churches, and so forth—that could be invoked against the project. Mere opposition to the use of cannabis, vague concerns about crime, and other unproven claims would presumably violate New York state law and lead to possible litigation against the village.

Based on that advice and its own clear and obvious inclination to approve the application, despite receiving an avalanche of letters before the meeting which opposed the dispensary by a ratio of about five to one—and despite overwhelming opposition from residents who showed up to make public comments about the issue—the Planning Board unanimously approved the application.

As we said above, if village residents had known about the project much sooner, those with strong opinions about it would have been in a much better position to make their cases, one way or another. While the Village Attorney provided her legal opinion about the village’s options, there might have been other legal views on offer. Those residents who wanted to could have consulted with outside counsel and gotten a second opinion. Perhaps a majority of Crotonites would have felt that it is worth the risk to find reasons to deny the application, even if that might have led to litigation agains the village.

In fairness, it is true that some other communities in New York state have tried that and failed, but it is still our choice to make, not one that should be made for us by default.

It is also possible, and certainly not unprecedented, that an applicant who proclaims their love of our village and its community, as Mindset proprietor Vincent Silvestri did repeatedly during the meeting, might decide it was not worth it to start a business in a hostile environment.

As it was, the Planning Board, and village officials at large, went belly up and engaged in pre-emptive capitulation to a dispensary that many in the community do not want.

(We discussed in our earlier coverage the out-of-the-starting gate bullying language that Weiss employed in his cover letter to the application. In essence, this “friend” of our community was threatening to sue us if we hesitated to do what he and his client(s) wanted us to do.)

It might be argued that the village should not have, or did not have the right to, divulge the business plans of the dispensary’s owners (whose identity or identities we still do not know, and which Planning Board members never once inquired about.) And yet Weiss and Silvestri told the meeting that they were going around to business owners and talking with them about taking over their businesses, so it was no secret.

The reality is that village officials tried, and largely succeeded, in keeping the looming prospect of a cannabis dispensary in Croton secret as long as they possibly could. That is typical behavior on their part, as we have seen in many cases including housing projects in the village; but it is anti-democratic, and Croton residents should not accept it, no matter what their feelings about the specific projects being considered.

We will continue reporting on this issue and update this report as we get further information and details.

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