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The latest cannabis dispensary in Southampton Town, the fourth so far, opened for business on the fringe of Southampton Village this past week, just in time for April 20, a holiday of sorts in the marijuana world.
The Hamptons Collective — the name is a nod to both the acronym for the active ingredient in cannabis products, THC, and the fact that the business is owned by a collection of young partners — opened in a former garden shop next to the Capri Hotel on County Road 39, just east of North Main Street, after nearly two years of navigating the legal hoops of approvals from Southampton Town.
The ownership group is billing the shop as a luxury dispensary, focused on a broad selection of high-end cannabis products in a chic and cool setting tailored for the refined Hamptons crowd.
“We are offering a product that is catered to the higher end of edibles, flower, vapes and other cannabis products,” one of the partners, Matthew Goldberg, said on Monday. “We wanted to make sure we carry enough product, not just two or three of each kind of thing, but ensure that they are of the highest quality.”
Goldberg said that the dispensary will focus on the wellness appeal of cannabis in an age when alcohol consumption is in steep decline among young Americans and the zest for infamously full-tilt inebriation is waning.
The shop offers mini-joints it calls “dog walkers” — intended for a quick jaunt and a light buzz.
“A lot of Americans are making the switch from drinking alcohol to cannabis products. We think the Hamptons are the epicenter of it,” he said. “People want to have fun but still be healthy and feel good — no hangovers, no liver damage.”
Like other local shops, The Hamptons Collective, is offering delivery of its product through its website, thehamptonscollective.com.
All cannabis products offered at state-licensed dispensaries must be made from marijuana grown in New York State, produced in the state, and inspected and tracked by the State Office of Cannabis Management.
The Hamptons Collective’s eight partners come from a broad array of professional backgrounds: in marketing, one at Google and two who have worked in the cannabis industry’s growing tech sector.
The partners are the second shop owners to take a decidedly patient approach to securing the approval of Southampton Town for their shop. Over the last two years, they navigated the town’s notoriously laborious and costly commercial site plan process.
The town had still not actually issued The Hamptons Collective a certificate of occupancy — the final sign-off of compliance — for the building as of this week, but Goldberg said that the partners have met every requirement of the town’s site plan conditions, including more than $250,000 in improvements to the parking and driveway, and that the CO issuance is merely an administrative formality. And the company wanted to get open ahead of Monday’s 4/20 celebration.
“It’s a process that we wanted to comply with, because we want to be good members of the community,” Goldberg said. “We did feel like we were put through this whole process for no good reason, when Charlie Fox was allowed to open, but we want to have a good relationship with the town.”
Requiring cannabis shops to comply with the town’s site plan review process has been a hot-button issue, with implications statewide.
Charlie Fox and Brown Budda, the first two state-licensed dispensaries to open, both in Tuckahoe, appealed to the State Office of Cannabis Management last year, which said the demands being made on dispensaries by the town were “unreasonably impracticable,” because they restricted where dispensaries can operate and imposed requirements that went beyond the authority left to local municipalities in the state’s Cannabis Law. Charlie Fox was issued a certificate of occupancy last fall by the town after a truncated review by the Planning Board under the threat of a Suffolk County Supreme Court justice, who had imposed an injunction on the dispensary, possibly changing his stance.
The towns of Southampton, Riverhead and Brookhaven have sued the Office of Cannabis Management for what they say is the state either overstepping its power to supersede local zoning. The owners of would-be dispensary in Hampton Bays have sued Southampton Town for barring them from operating by first stalling their application then changing the zoning on their property.
Southampton Town officials have said that the state grossly misled local governments about what authority they would have under the law, as it is now being interpreted, prior to them opting in to allowing sales.
Just four of Long Island’s 13 towns chose to allow cannabis sales, and none of its 90 incorporated villages did. East Hampton Town and all of the eight incorporated villages on the South Fork — seven in Southampton Town — chose not to allow cannabis sales, despite the potential for millions in tax revenue from the 4 percent local excise tax on cannabis sales.
Many local officials specifically said distrust of the state and its vague explanations of how towns would be allowed to steer where and how dispensaries operated was why they chose not to support allowing sales.
Critics from within the cannabis industry have said that the fights over rules like those in Southampton — which all other businesses must comply with — are hamstringing the industry’s growth, especially on Long Island.
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