Buds and bureaucracy: Legal pot seller convinces community board to green light new shop

Keith Delessio, whose family owns a popular Steinway Street pet shop, is opening up a legal dispensary just down the street. Photo via Keith Delessio

By Ryan Schwach

Want to open a pot shop in Queens? Well, you’ll have to go through the community board first.

Less than a week after the first legal cannabis dispensary opened its doors in Queens, another one is looking to get its feet off the ground in Astoria. But before it can, the budding business, still stigmatized in many communities, needed to make its case before the first rung of New York City’s governmental bureaucracy: the community board.

Blaze Astoria, which is looking to open up in the coming months on busy Steinway Street, took questions from the executive committee of Queens Community Board 1 on Monday night as it looked to gain the board’s stamp of approval.

“It's exciting. I'm very enthusiastic about it,” said Keith Dalessio, the owner of Blaze Astoria, at Tuesday night’s meeting. “I'm comfortable doing it and in a town that I love and appreciate.”

Dalessio, who splits his time between Queens and Long Island, is a member of the family that owns Astoria Pets, a pet shop on Steinway Street not far from the location of his new venture at 32-60 Steinway St.

Dalessio isn’t just making a jump from pets to pot, however, a former weed plant cultivator, Dalessio was convicted in a weed related crime. That conviction, along with his previous business experience, gave him what he needed to secure a license to open from the Office of Cannabis Management.

“I think the OCM did an amazing job actually,” he told the Eagle in a Wednesday phone call, admitting the rollout of legal licenses could have been a little quicker.

“What's fast enough, right? Everybody wants things fast,” he said. “This is bureaucracy 101. The state moves slowly. I think they're moving at a reasonable pace.”

“I think they opened the door for legacy operators to come and enter the legal side of it – I think more is to come,” he added.

On Tuesday, Dalessio answered questions from the executive committee of CB1, who can provide a letter of support to the venture with a process similar to how community boards citywide help approve liquor licenses.

Most of the questions revolved around security in and outside of Delassio’s store, particularly as cash-only pot businesses, particularly the numerous illegal shops that have popped up around the city, have become targets.

At the meeting, Dalessio said there will be armed guards in and outside of the shop in the first few weeks, and at least one inside as they get more comfortable, as well as 24-7 security cameras.

“It's almost like a bank,” Dalessio said on Tuesday.

On top of that, the store will close when deliveries are received.

The board members were also curious about signage, which due to OCM’s “stringent” policies, prohibit any large neon signs, depictions of marijuana leaves or products displayed on the storefront.

The board was also concerned about the products themselves. One board member asked what the store will do to maintain the safety of the product and make sure it has not been contaminated by any unsafe materials.

“New York has is called a seed to sale system,” said Dalessio. “They actually track it from the literal seed to the sale through a barcode system. So, the cultivator is going to plant a seed in the ground, each individual seed is going to get a barcode, that seed is going to grow into a plant but the barcode is going to follow the tag and move over to the distributor. The distributor is going to move it over to the retailer and then I sell it.”

Dalessio also said that his employees, or “budtenders,” will be able to educate buyers on the products and their use.

“It was kind of what I expected,” Dalessio said of the meeting. “I think they asked very relevant questions, the same questions I would ask if somebody was opening up a cannabis dispensary in my community, I think they were fair.”

The board voted unanimously to support Blaze Astoria as it moves forward to open in the next three or four months.

Blaze Astoria’s meeting came just a week after Good Grades opened on Jamaica Avenue, becoming the first legal dispensary in the borough, and more are expected to open as the rollout of legal licenses continues.

However, there remains the ongoing battle against the litany of illegal pot shops taking root all over the city, creating the need for enforcement by police and prosecutors, as well as the state’s Office of Cannabis Management. OCM Executive Director Christopher Alexander called the opening of new stores and simultaneous enforcement “priority one, and priority one-A.”

Delessio calls it his number one concern, especially considering at least a few of the illegal stores share an address not far from his new one.

“It's paramount – they have to be shut down in order for us to succeed,” he said. “I know the OCM is going to do their best to get them shut down but I find it very alarming that these places are still open and my hope is really that they stopped because there's got to be at least 10 of them within a mile radius of where my store is. I know there's at least four or five on Steinway Street.”

Delessio said that on top of skirting the tax revenue that is intended to be given to communities negatively affected by the war on drugs, the illegal shops’ cheaper prices and higher quality product – illegal shops have been using weed grown indoors in California, considered by those “in the know” to be a superior product to the state-mandated outdoor crops – could put state-sanctioned shops in a precarious position.

“Better quality products at a cheaper price, simple as that,” he said. “If they're not shut down, we will not succeed.”