Thursday, October 1, 2026
Island Park officials unanimously voted on Feb. 21 to tighten the village’s marijuana laws, prohibiting the retail sale, distribution or offer of consumption of pot in all village districts in anticipation of the sale of marijuana potentially becoming legal in New York.
“Very simply, we’re not selling marijuana here,” Mayor Michael McGinty said. “That’s it.”
The vote came after a public hearing. Trustee Irene Naudus was the only member of the board who was not present for the vote, in what McGinty called an excused absence.
In late December, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that he would back the legalization and taxation of recreational marijuana, a move that is expected to meet with the approval of the State Assembly and Senate, both of which are controlled by Democrats. New York would become the 11th state to allow adults to smoke marijuana recreationally. The consumption of medical marijuana has been legal in the state since 2014.
The Island Park decision came just weeks after Town of Hempstead officials announced a pair of bipartisan bills on Feb. 1 that would restrict the use and sale of pot regardless of whether state lawmakers vote to legalize recreational marijuana.
One of the laws would impose a one-year moratorium on the sale of recreational marijuana within the town’s unincorporated areas, such as Oceanside, and the other would ban smoking or having cannabis out in the open at town parks, beaches and government facilities. Because Island Park is an incorporated village, the mayor and village board have the power to make their own laws.
McGinty said that despite the creation of potential tax revenue, he didn’t see any benefits to permitting the sale of marijuana in the village, which he said has lost too many residents to drug overdoses over the years. Legalizing the sale of what he termed a gateway drug, he said, would only exacerbate that issue.
