Editorial: The Sideshow

“New York will create a bureaucracy out of anything.”

So wrote one of this newspaper’s Facebook followers after reading a post about the state’s new “Office of Cannabis Management,” set up as the agency tasked to regulate legal weed and its derivations. The Office was a long time coming; ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo had stalled his appointment of potential agency leadership and then he stepped down. His successor moved (relatively) quickly and, voila, we have a new state agency.

The appropriately snarky observation came after we shared the Office’s announcement of its CANNABIS CONVERSATIONS. “Let’s talk about the new law and next steps for cannabis in New York,” they say, setting a series of online events between now and February 21.

For a new agency, they’ve got the cadence down pretty well. This feel-good “let’s talk” business is an old trick they think suggests to New Yorkers that they’re genuinely interested in what we have to say. But no, it’s a sideshow, a make-work project in the foreground while those in the background toil away at what they want to come from the “conversations.”

It’s not that public outreach doesn’t lead to any good ideas; on the contrary. Public discussions generally bring about the best, most practical ideas. An example: “Why don’t we open dispensaries the way they did it in Massachusetts?” Those, however, are words that grind the gears of any New York State agency wonk who wants to make sure that we do things here just one notch differently from everywhere else.
Take a look at this week’s news about the state’s Farm Laborer Wage Board pushing a 40-hour overtime threshold. Otsego County Assemblymember Chris Tague saw the writing on the wall weeks ago when Governor Kathy Hochul said she’d propose tax credits to help the state’s farmers pay overtime wages. The Wage Board nonetheless plowed ahead through three scheduled “conversations” to take testimony — 70 percent of which came from farmers urging the Board to reject the plan to drop the overtime threshold from 60 hours to 40 hours per week. The Board had so many people registered for their “conversations” that they had to schedule an overflow session for last Friday.

And then at the end of that session, they voted 2-1 to reduce the threshold. The Farm Bureau’s representative to the Board was reportedly surprised that his colleagues moved to vote so quickly on the heels of the “conversations,” and his was the sole dissent.

The Board’s recommendation at least follows a 10-year phase-in that won’t start until 2024, but that’s small comfort to farmers in Otsego County and across the state who now have to spend the next decade trying to figure out how to reconfigure their businesses all while tending to the backbreaking work of keeping their farms alive.

There’s no possible way that the Wage Board — moments after closing its final “conversation” — could have genuinely weighed the comments on their merits and immediately dreamed up a complex, delayed-start, 10-year phase-in to hand over to the Labor Commissioner and Governor. No, they followed the model of the “let’s talk” canard while those in the background toiled away at coming up with something that would sell to the preponderance of the electorate who will head to the polls in November.
Sadly, it has precious little to do with farming.

But as our Facebook friend implied, it’s all part of the bureaucracy that makes New York work, or not work, depending on how you look at it.