New York’s Hashish Management Board (CCB) has unanimously overturned Southampton’s restrictive hashish ordinances, ruling that the city’s allowing scheme was unlawful and designed to forestall authorized dispensaries from opening.
The choice, issued Monday, invalidates a number of sections of Southampton’s native zoning code and units a statewide precedent for a way far municipalities can go in regulating hashish companies.
The ruling got here after Southampton-based dispensary house owners Marquis Hayes and Kim Stetz, of Brown Budda, filed go well with towards the city, accusing native officers of weaponising zoning and allow guidelines to dam their state-licensed retailer. Their lawyer, Christian Killoran, referred to as the board’s choice ‘a powerful rebuke to native officers who as soon as claimed we stay right here, the state doesn’t stay right here.’
“The state has now made its place unmistakably clear, Southampton is in New York,” Killoran stated.
“The choice affirms that state legislation, not native politics, governs hashish regulation and that municipalities can not rewrite the foundations to suit their very own agendas.”
CCB Declares Native Guidelines ‘Unreasonably Impracticable’
In keeping with the CCB’s Advisory Opinion 2025-02, adopted at its 6 October 2025 assembly, Southampton’s native code imposed ‘unreasonably impracticable’ restrictions below the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA).
The board discovered that the city’s necessities for ‘special-use permits, distance buffers, and cannabis-specific charges’ violated Part 131(2) of the Hashish Regulation by irritating state-licensed operators’ potential to open and function companies.
The choice additionally struck down Southampton’s try to control hashish deliveries, declaring such actions ‘utterly exterior of municipal authority.’
Below the ruling, municipalities might solely regulate hashish companies throughout the slim ‘time, place and method’ limits listed in 9 NYCRR §119.2, corresponding to working hours, parking, visitors administration, odour management and architectural integrity inside historic districts.
Broader restrictions, corresponding to limiting dispensaries to pick enterprise zones, mandating particular charges, or imposing design requirements, at the moment are thought of illegal.
