Office of Cannabis Management’s Felicia Reid talks about adopting an agency in turmoil, and moving forward
Reid Reshapes New York's Cannabis Future Amidst Turmoil.
Felicia A. B. Reid has been at the helm of the Office of Cannabis Management for six weeks after adopting an agency in turmoil and transition.
Before Reid’s appointment, Gov. Kathy Hochul called New York’s cannabis rollout a “disaster.” An investigation into the agency following lagging target goals and complaints found rampant inefficiencies, inexperience and mismanagement. The agency’s founding executive director, Chris Alexander, stepped down shortly after the review, and Hochul replaced him with Reid.
Since her time in office, OCM’s senior leadership has changed and the agency is experiencing a moment of reorganization. Reid spoke with NY Cannabis Insider about the agency she has adopted, how it is reshaping itself and its goals over the next 12 months.
Walk us through a week in the life of the acting executive director at the OCM during this transitional period for the agency.
I’m about to answer the last six weeks, not just the last week.
I come from a background where we are public facing, public serving, public collaborators, but it has a lot of structure, a lot of: if this happens, this is what we do; if this is how this process goes, it’s very coordinated. There’s a lot of communication, there’s a lot of centrality in terms of a team.
My process of understanding where I need to go is sitting down with as many folks as possible on what their experience has been, what they would like to see happen, what’s good, what’s bad, what’s ugly, and then figuring out, ‘What’s the low-hanging fruit that we can accomplish on our own?’
What’s been interesting is that a lot of the issues that I’ve seen at OCM are well within our controlled change. Of course, that change is not going to happen overnight, but it’s really a matter of having a center, a structure, an understanding of expectation and consistency, which I think hasn’t been as pervasive as it needed to be.
Now, let me just say, before this comes across as if OCM isn’t doing the most – the people at OCM (I’ve said this even to my old team) have an unparalleled amount of passion for this work. Where I came from (Office of Children and Family Services) was one of the older state agencies and all the issues that come with an older state agency in terms of its culture, in terms of its viewpoint and in terms of its ability to adapt to right now. OCM is filled with people who know their statute inside and out. I wish I had that at OCFS. Folks here know what they’re about and what they show up to do and they so deeply believe in the potential and the success of cannabis in New York that it’s honestly refreshing to be in that kind of environment and to be tasked with leading that kind of environment forward.
Some of the sacrifices that staff have put in, whether it’s coming from other industries where they were compensated at high, better rates than state pay rates, or just completely upheaving their careers to work for cannabis, I’ve just never seen anything like it.
It’s wonderful to be here, frankly.
What are you hearing that is ‘the good, the bad and the ugly,’ and what are the low-hanging fruit? Can you be as specific as possible?
I will start with the communication piece. I did juvenile justice, either directly or relatedly for about six years. One of the things that I always thought was incredibly important is – it doesn’t matter who is reaching out to you; it doesn’t matter who they are, where they’re coming from, or their perspective – If they’re calling you out by name as an agency, you respond to them and you respond to them meaningfully.
I think government gets accused of this more than anything else, treating the public – even though we serve the public – at arm’s length because we can wrap it all around with a bunch of bureaucratic red tape, and it becomes very Kafkaesque. But for me, I want to make sure that however we’re communicating as an agency, whether it’s to an applicant, whether it’s to one of the labs talking about compliance, whether it’s a processor, a cultivator, a community member, a legislator, that it is a response that has information and that has a center so that folks can understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, when we’re doing it, and how we’re doing it.
I think the agency has not been good about letting some of that necessary information out. I get the concerns around litigation but I think we also have to remember that we are humans responding to humans at the end of the day, and humans with a particular interest. So that’s one of the low-hanging fruit that I think we can really address much better, is figuring out, ‘What are all the communication stop points in the agency?’ I have to say, for an agency this size, we’ve got a lot of mailboxes, too many mailboxes. Let’s streamline that a little bit. But also, what are we saying? How are we saying it? If it’s the same rote answer that we’re giving for everything, people talk and people understand that that’s just us being distant. So I don’t want to keep going with that.
In terms of the good, everyone’s got that real drive toward the equity mission. I think it is incredible the way the MRTA has been written and what it demands of the agency. I think that there’s so much more we could be doing, externally and internally, around equity coming from a juvenile justice background. If we’re doing it the right way, we are constantly concerned with an equity mission, if we’re going to be really serving communities and responding to them. What else can we be thinking about? What partnerships can we be having? Everyone is on board for how far we can go and I’m excited about that.
The bad, and I’ll loop the bad with the ugly, which is being better about listening to staff but also making sure that this agency has a body of policies and I know that’s really boring, like, you want to do policy? Yeah, I do.
The policy practice needs to be incredibly fleshed out. There are things that I’ve been surprised by that I would expect as normal agency policy, and they don’t quite exist here. Going back to that piece of listening to staff. I’ve done two town halls with staff so far. I have my last one in New York City this week and everybody raises the same thing, which is that we need to have a policy practice around the things we do so we’re all doing the same thing and we all know what’s expected.
I’m going to sound way too much like my parents, and God, don’t let them hear this but a lot of folks strive for some degree of structure. Working with the kids and the families that I’ve worked with at OCFS, the biggest thing for them is, ‘What can we expect?’
And if there’s not that, then everyone’s just trying to make it work and it feels unmooring. So getting that staff feedback in terms of how we’re operating, and letting that inform our practice because I’m not going to come in from out of the blue and all of a sudden have the answers to everyone’s problems. In fact, the thing that I experienced, no matter where I go, is the people who work in that agency know what the answers are to their problems. So using that and leveraging that feedback to make system improvements.
Is there an example of a policy change internally that can be done or is being done to streamline operations?
I’m sure you’ve heard about our licensing challenges. Coming out of the task force report, the task force identified that as an area where we needed to improve. So the question then becomes, ‘What does licensing look like, what can it look like to better serve the mission,’ which is getting more licenses approved but also ensuring that folks have an understanding.
If they’re applicants, they understand how they’re moving from being an applicant to being a licensee, or if they don’t end up becoming a licensee, where are they in all of that? We’ve done a lot of work around a single point of contact. Folks’ experience was: I’m an applicant and I got Wes assigned to me, right? And then they call back two weeks later, and it’s Taylor Randi, and two weeks later, Felicia, and it just keeps bouncing around and those folks don’t seem to talk to each other.
That’s really frustrating, to be able to see the agency’s seams and cracks from just getting in the door. So a lot of the task force in terms of the outcomes for the agency has been getting that single point of contact, making sure we have systems in place so that no matter who somebody is getting, they can get good information and they know information across the application process so that we’re never saying things like, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I have to check with the supervisor.’ That’s really a challenging practice for the cannabis community. That is one thing that we’re being very, I keep using the word aggressive, but we’re being really aggressive about doing much better.
What issues or objectives have you identified with growers and processors that are on your radar right now and ways you could support those sides of the supply chain?
Farming at a state level but also writ large is an incredibly challenging industry to be in over the last, I would say 20 to 25 years. I’m tangentially aware of it, because this is where I get real dorky, I’m a master gardener for my county and so part of what we do is work with homeowners or farmers, but the master gardener program in every single county works with the community on some of the challenges they’re having and having that feedback loop.
When it comes to growers I think cannabis offered an opportunity, but what’s difficult about that is that it’s still a market, and so in that market, navigating it can certainly be difficult. One of the things that we’re looking to do as an agency is hearing back from growers, cultivators, processors – what can be most supportive of your work long term?
I think we can take all the short-term measures we want, but really, how do we think about what this industry looks like in two years, five years, 10 years, and what needs to be in place in order to make that successful for as many people as possible while also understanding that not everyone’s going to be successful at it? So it’s really trying to keep our ears to the ground on that feedback piece, also that projection piece. As I’ve learned in the last six weeks, the cannabis industry, if you’d asked me as a layperson what the cannabis industry is, I’d say it’s ‘money, money, money, money, money.’ But it’s actually much more dynamic than that, especially as different interests start to intersect with some of the state priorities. That is, we talk about the illicit stores and undermining the market. So it’s a challenging piece to be sure but I think the agency is certainly interested in how we can be better partners to cultivators and processors.
Have you ever overseen a public-private fund before, and are there any working plans to replace the DASNY fund for a lot of these equity cardholders who could really use an influx of capital?
I have not overseen a public-private fund before. I found the agency – and I don’t want to say just the agency because this is also with DASNY as well – but I find sort of the stand up around that interesting.
I am certainly very sympathetic to the hardships that folks have conveyed to me directly about being part of that fund. I think what we’re looking at right now is to keep a conversation with DASNY on how we can resolve things in a way that is most beneficial to folks who are in that pool. From the bit that I understand, it has certainly been challenging on several fronts, but for the sake of just really being supportive, I want to be very considerate in the options that we are looking at that can really be most beneficial to folks who are sort of stuck in this limbo.
We all watched the last board meeting. Where do you think the agency is at? Are we at a spot where licenses are being processed in 60 days or are we still processing licenses from November and December?
We’re still processing from the November queue. There are so many folks in that bucket. And as we’re going through an application I think we all wish the process was linear but when it comes to aspects of applications that need curing or more feedback for more follow up, I think the timeline is kind of all over the place. I do want to get to a place where we are efficient enough that we can get through the backlog in a way that is responsive to community demand but we’re still working our way through that November queue.
You mentioned equity and equity partnerships. What’s it like for an equity-focused agency to be operating without a chief equity officer for, going on four months now, and any updates on the status there?
So to answer in reverse, we’re still waiting to hear back from the Inspector General on the disposition of that. You know that we can’t, as an agency, move forward until we get a conclusion on that, and I don’t have a good sense of where that’s at.
Here’s what I will say about equity without a chief equity officer: the world that I come from, and the world that I actually love being in, is one where equity is in every part of the agency. I think that it can be spearheaded and led by a particular individual, but what we always want to make sure of, and I have Angelica Kang at OCFS to thank for this particular perspective: how do we ensure that regardless of the action we’re taking, regardless of what we are saying, that we are constantly coming from an equity standpoint?
So the question then becomes, how do we educate ourselves internally? How do we educate ourselves externally? And what needs to change in our structure to make sure that equity is at the center of everything that we do? If you’re looking at the officer and you’re looking at it by statute, you’ve got that public education piece, you’ve got that social and economic equity (SEE) plan and ensuring that we are operating in a place where the SEE plan is real. But like I said earlier, I think there’s so much more we can be doing internally and externally as an agency and so really it’s about making sure we’re having the right communications, the right collaborations, and really being honestly humble.
I think to do equity well is to have a degree of humility and vulnerability that allows you to say, ‘Alright, this might work for me, but it’s not working for this person. And why might that be?’ And is that rooted in aspects of inequity, right?
For now, it’s really talking with the leadership team, talking with everybody in the agency around, ‘What does equity look like in your world? How can we make it real for more people than not?’
What does the next 12 months look like at OCM and what are the goals?
In terms of the next 12 months, I am interim executive director and I think it’s been quite an eye-opening experience for me, so far. My history is that I like to get down in the weeds with my team, get my hands dirty, be thinking about implementation, what that looks like, and how that can happen, and what we can do.
I’m a practice and process person so I’m looking forward to wrapping my arms even more around this agency and figuring out what are the things that are coming that we might not even anticipate yet and getting ahead of those things, and what are the ways in which the agency’s scope and practice needs to broaden in order to have as meaningful a footprint as possible in the work we do?
I think there are so many opportunities we have, because of the mission of the agency, that we could be much more present in, and I’m looking forward to exploring that more, while also making sure that the regulations and the processes are where they need to be and as responsive as possible.
So that was very broad, but I’ve got big dreams.
