The interior of Monteverde NJ on its first full day of recreational marijuana sales. (Photo by Brian Donohue. Click to enlarge.)
By BRIAN DONOHUE
Call it the highs – and the lows – of Red Bank’s budding marijuana marketplace.
As one licensed cannabis seller excitedly opened its doors and became the first to sell recreational weed, another has frustratedly vacated its shop and moved to another town.
The former home of Scarlet Reserve Room at 3 West Front Street sits vacant after John Marchetti, below, and his partner threw in the towel. (Photos by Brian Donohue and John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
Monteverde NJ, which had been selling medicinal marijuana from its shop at 45 North Bridge Avenue, opened for recreational sales Tuesday, at almost exactly – and appropriately – 4:20 p.m., according to Brad Shelly, general manager of operations. The fanfare of an end-of-prohibition ribbon cutting ceremony attended by borough officials is slated for Saturday.
“We’re very excited,’’ said Monteverde NJ CEO Liz Egan, adding it took six years to get the business up and running.
“I’m hoping the town is excited,” she added. “We’ve talked to many people and I know they are.”
Meanwhile, Scarlet Reserve Room, a cigar lounge at 3 East Front Street whose owners had once appeared to be at the front of a long line of pot sellers looking to open up here, vacated their shop in December and sold the business.
Issued a license to sell cannabis last week by the New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission, the owners said they plan to use that license at a new location in Englishtown instead.
“We’re going to go where we are wanted,” said owner John Marchetti. “We kind of had no choice,’
In the end, he and co-owner Will Rivera were unable to the navigate the thicket of zoning rules and lawmaking chaos that marked the implementation of Red Bank’s cannabis laws last year, Marchetti said.
He said they felt whipsawed: despite being the first of 14 would-be retailers granted a proclamation by the council attesting the legality of their plan, the pair wound up unable to get approvals as laws changed mid-process.
“We opened that store to get ahead of everybody else, put down roots, market ourselves. We wound up spending a year in purgatory getting nothing done,” he said. “It was a shit show, to be honest.”
Scarlet Reserve Room had opened in October 2021 as a cigar lounge in the storefront on East Front Street, but cannabis was always a key part of their plan.
Marchetti and Rivera touted it as “one of the first public, upscale, retail ‘tasting room’ concepts where customer can purchase CBD and consume it in the same location, alongside our cigar smoking clients.”
Marchetti applied to the borough zoning office to convert the store to a retail cannabis dispensary, but was rejected on the grounds that it was too close to the playground in Marine Park.
His appeal to the council for a change in the 2021 ordinance that would allow them to open instead sparked an overhaul that did the exact opposite.
In April, 2023, the council amended the local law to create a Cannabis Review Board, while also limiting the number of “class 5” retail licenses at three.
The change was drafted behind closed doors by a council subcommittee, and drew threats of lawsuits from entities who claimed they’d lose hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in would-be cannabis businesses.
Marchetti was among them, calling the changes, “just crazy” and predicting he would have to pack up and leave town.
Supporters of the tougher new ordinance were swept from office in last May’s election.
But the total number of retail licenses issued stands at three. And Mayor Billy Portman said there are no immediate plans to increase that number.
“In the future we might add more, who knows?” Portman said. “Right now that’s all speculation. “
The other two local license holders are Canopy Crossroad, holder of a conditional license from the state CRC, which plans to open at 9 West Street, next door to Red Bank Liquors; and Frosted Nug at Red Bank, which received its state license on January 17 and plans to open at 20 North Bridge Avenue in the complex that now houses a Wawa and Crates Liquors.
Scarlet Reserve’s state license was included in a list of 20 approved by the state CRC that put the number of recreational licenses issued statewide over the milestone of 100. New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission Executive Director Jeff Brown also cited another big milestone for the industry:
“We are headed toward a billion-dollar market,” he said at the commission’s meeting in Trenton last week. “2024 is the year New Jersey does a billion dollars in sales.”
Under state law, local municipalities like Red Bank will receive levy a tax of two percent of all sales in their towns.
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