A Dispensary Near a Daycare? The Fight Over Croton's First Cannabis Shop

The application arrived without fanfare: a change-of-use filing with the Engineering Department to convert a convenience store into something the village has never had before. If approved, the Dairy Mart at 370 South Riverside Avenue would become Croton-on-Hudson's first cannabis dispensary. The applicant's identity has not been publicly disclosed by village officials, a point that has drawn criticism from local press. What is known is the location: a C-2 commercial zone in the Harmon section of the village, along the busy corridor that runs parallel to the Metro-North tracks. What is also known, and what makes this application immediately contentious, is what sits across the street. The Daycare Question Happy Hearts Take Two, a licensed childcare center at 365 South Riverside Avenue, serves children from six weeks old through age twelve, five days a week. It operates across South Riverside Avenue from the proposed dispensary site, approximately 200 feet away. New York's cannabis law prohibits dispensaries within 500 feet of school grounds. The critical legal question is whether Happy Hearts qualifies as a "school" under the statute. Village Manager Bryan Healy has stated publicly that New York State determined the proposed location meets applicable distance requirements. But the regulatory landscape is shifting. In February 2026, Albany changed how the 500-foot buffer is measured, switching from property lines to building entrances on the same street. At the time of this meeting, Senate Bill S7275 proposed adding child daycare centers to the list of protected facilities. The bill remained in Senate committee. Its Assembly counterpart was subsequently amended to remove daycare centers, parks, and playgrounds from the buffer requirements and to apply only to new licenses issued after enactment. Residents commenting on the Croton Chronicle's coverage have raised the question of whether the village could proactively amend its own zoning code to add daycare centers to the list of restricted locations, rather than waiting for state legislation. Why Croton Said Yes (By Saying Nothing) The backstory stretches to 2021, when New York gave every municipality a binary choice: opt out of cannabis retail by December 31, or accept it permanently. Croton's Board of Trustees took a split approach. On September 20, 2021, they voted unanimously to ban on-site consumption lounges. But they deliberately chose not to opt out of retail dispensaries. The reasoning behind that decision has not been extensively documented in public minutes. Trustee Stacey Nachtaler, who joined the Board in December 2025, has noted in public comments that the opt-out decision predated her service. But she and every future board will live with its consequences: the village cannot revisit the decision. Cannabis retail is permanently permitted in Croton's commercial zones. The Revenue Mirage Proponents of cannabis retail often point to tax revenue. New York imposes a 13% retail excise tax on adult-use cannabis, and three of those percentage points are returned to the municipality where the sale takes place — three cents on every dollar rung up at the register. What that is worth in practice depends entirely on sales, and Croton has no dispensary and therefore no sales history of its own to reason from. The closest local evidence comes from a different municipality. In Peekskill — a city of roughly 25,000, not a village like Croton — cannabis receipts have come in far behind plan, which its comptroller attributed partly to only two dispensaries operating where six had been anticipated. The city comptroller's first-quarter review in 2025 cut the year's expected cannabis tax revenue from $550,000 to about $128,000, a drop of nearly 77 percent, the Peekskill Herald reported on April 26, 2025. Valley Greens, one of that city's first dispensaries, made $3,000 in profit in its opening month, owner Shane Jackson told the Herald in a report published November 18, 2024. Jackson objected that Peekskill was licensing too many competitors: "Everyone is misinformed about how profitable these businesses are." That is Peekskill's experience, not Croton's, and it describes a larger market with more storefronts. For scale on the other side of the village ledger, Croton’s FY2026 property-tax levy was $13,332,122. The Croton Native Who Went to Ossining There is one more wrinkle worth noting. In November 2025, Ryan LoGiudici, a Croton-Harmon High School graduate, opened "Up the River" at 34 Main Street in neighboring Ossining. He described it as a "full circle moment of returning to the place and community where I was born and raised." But LoGiudici opened in Ossining, not Croton. Whether that reflects the village's regulatory environment, available real estate, or personal preference is unclear. But the fact that a hometown entrepreneur with a decade of cannabis industry experience chose to set up shop one town over raises its own questions. What Happens Next The Planning Board was scheduled to take up the application on April 14. Under Croton's zoning code, cannabis shops are a permitted use in C-2 districts. The change-of-use review is procedural, not discretionary, meaning the Board's latitude to deny the application may be limited. Public comments can be directed to Planning Board Secretary Karen Stapleton at kstapleton@crotononhudson-ny.gov. The question is not whether Croton will eventually have a cannabis dispensary. The village settled that in 2021 when it let the opt-out deadline pass. The question now is whether this particular dispensary, at this particular location, across the street from this particular daycare, is where the story begins.