Vernon voted for legal marijuana, so let’s reap the revenue

To the Editor:

Seventy percent of Vernon voted in favor of legal recreational marijuana. There’s no reason to ban it. We are a resort town with a lot of short-term visitors. Slap the max-allowed town sales tax on it, and same with Airbnbs if you haven’t as well. Then lower our property tax or use the revenue to improve our schools. Actually both.

It’d be stupid to let a neighboring town take that opportunity from us. The state law allows it to be delivered to people in Vernon if we ban the sales!

Had New York not followed us on making it legal, we would have been in an even greater position to really make money off the New York City vacationers. Closest ski resort to NYC and legal marijuana for sale.

And I personally have a transportation job with regular drug testing, I can’t even use the drug but still have this stance.

This is a no-brainer. It’s going to be state legal regardless of how much you don’t like it. Why ban business in this town, our town is already dull enough compared to what it could be, i.e., Warwick. We need to get proactive, create revenue streams and use them to further improve this town which will create future additional revenue streams.

We lack any real downtown, we lack any culinary draw, we lack any breweries/wineries/cideries, and we lack crowd-drawing bars. Why is Vernon surrounded by all these booming businesses yet we can’t seem to get even one right?

People are driving through here to do all these things. We can’t let our town regulate yet another opportunity. Hardyston will love taxing the Vernon residents who order their marijuana for delivery. Not to mention all that traffic that passes through Vernon, including the vacationers coming here, they too all will stop in Hardyston to buy in Hardyston, pay the tax in Hardyston, and still legally smoke here in Vernon, because the consuming in private in Vernon, you can’t stop no matter what. That ship has sailed.

Rick Thompson

Vernon Township