Breakwater Treatment and Wellness Center

Last month, at a Mayor and Council meeting, a 2% tax on recreational cannabis sales within the borough was passed. This means the council anticipates recreational dispensaries are on the way to Roselle Park, and more importantly, that the borough can monetize the blossoming cannabis market.

“[It] is meaningful revenue for a small town like us,” Signorello III said of the 2% tax. “We will put that back into whatever – paying for cops, paying for streetlights – whatever you can think of we will put back into the operational budget.”

Breakwater Treatment and Wellness went before the zoning board at a March 28 meeting. The company headquartered in Cranbury deals in medical marijuana and does not sell for recreational use. It had hoped to expand and open a third store on Memorial Avenue in Asbury Park.

But board members unanimously rejected the proposal even as members expressed support for marijuana use and the company itself.

The city's Zoning Board of Adjustment rejected an application for a medical marijuana dispensary on Memorial Drive and First Avenue.

Cranbury-based Breakwater Treatment and Wellness proposed opening the medical marijuana dispensary, which would have been the company's third location in New Jersey.

Breakwater's flagship dispensary in Cranbury has been open since 2015 and a satellite dispensary in Roselle Park opened in September, but Breakwater has long planned to open a dispensary in Asbury Park.

City officials described being blindsided by Breakwater Treatment and Wellness' Instagram post Monday night, which they said ran counter to what they've been telling every other business hoping to open a dispensary in Asbury Park.

The City Council has been approached by more than 70 businesses seeking their support for their plans to open dispensaries within the city, Moor said.

Breakwater Treatment and Wellness, whose main location is in Cranbury, has received state approval to open in Asbury Park — though James Froelich, the company's chief of staff, declined to identify an exact location.

It will be located away from downtown Asbury Park and the beach, near the NJ Transit train station on Main Street, he said.

New Jersey officially has more than a dozen medical marijuana dispensaries open, while the state continues to craft legislation to expand to recreational pot sales, too, as approved by state voters this fall.

The Apothecarium Dispensary in Phillipsburg is the first such facility in Warren County and the first New Jersey location for Canadian-based TerrAscend, which also has dispensaries in Pennsylvania, California and Nevada.

Mayor Matt Scott – “We have been thinking about it as a township committee. Voters in New Jersey overwhelmingly passed the mandate. We are following what the legislature is going to do,” he said. “Our township lawyer reached out to the township committee right after and stated that until the final bill comes out we won’t know how it is going to affect us.”

As far as retail recreational marijuana in Cranbury, Scott stated that the township still has the 2018 ordinance, which is not going anywhere.

Existing Market

Publicly traded multi-state operators (MSOs) play a big role aleready in the New Jersey medical cannabis market. Last month, the state added 2 permits, bringing the total number of Alternative Treatment Centers to 11 with the additions of Zen Leaf (Verano New Jersey) in Elizabeth and Columbia Care (NEO: CCHW) (CSE: CCHW) (OTC: CCHWF) in Vineland.

The other nine centers include:

Patients will be allowed to use curbside pickup for medical marijuana at alternative treatment centers, the state Department of Health announced, ridding them of the need to go inside a dispensary during the coronavirus outbreak.

But the dispensaries do not have to offer the service, and getting it up and running will take time. Meanwhile, all 12 operational and pending licensed medical marijuana businesses signed a joint statement, saying they were working out technology to schedule appointments and implement curbside dispensing.

Our New Jersey cannabis industry working group is comprised of representatives from all twelve of the permitted and pending Alternative Treatment Centers in the New Jersey Medicinal Marijuana Program. Although we are at varying stages of operations, and we have individual business priorities that establish competition among us, we see great value in working together to achieve certain mutual policy goals on behalf of the over 70,000 medical cannabis patients that we serve.