The political animal: Joe Rossi’s journey through Albany’s cannabis maze

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Albany is a strange city.

It’s visually impressive yet nondescript. Grand 19th-century legislative chambers and tall office buildings populate a downtown that bustles during legislative sessions but can feel empty in the summer.

Most of the city evinces the aura of an emptied-out mill town – or any standard-issue secondary city on the East Coast – and it’s easy to forget that this is where New York’s power brokers bob and weave; bicker and simp; negotiate and execute key policy decisions for the Capital of the World: New York.

Joe Rossi, the managing director of Park Strategies’ cannabis practice group, has made it his business to learn this town inside and out.

The cannabis-focused lobbyist’s Talmudic-like study of Albany’s power centers appears to have paid off, too. After a monthslong public campaign to nudge lawmakers into taking a closer look into the Office of Cannabis Management, Gov. Kathy Hochul dismissed the agency’s inaugural leader and ordered an overhaul – following an investigation that proved right many of the criticisms Rossi and his clients had spent nearly two years highlighting.

“Some of the ways we got here were unlike anything I’ve ever seen before,” Rossi said, while sitting in Park Strategies’ sixth-floor conference room a half-mile away from the State Capitol building, as colleagues popped in and out for brief chats. “It became a quagmire, and then it became worse than anyone thought, then trying to dig out from that made it worse.”

In person, Rossi comes off as a regular guy from Central New York with some minor connections in state politics and local media. But behind the scenes, Rossi has played a lead role in shifting the dynamics of New York’s cannabis industry rollout, as well as stakeholders’ willingness to publicly criticize moves by regulators.

An alumnus of Andrew Cuomo’s pre-gubernatorial rise, Rossi became a staunch proponent for legal cannabis in earnest around the time the 2018 Farmer’s Bill legalized hemp and recreational cannabis legalization turned into a fait accompli, as then-Governor Cuomo committed to establishing a legal adult-use market.

Colleagues and counterparts describe Rossi as a “strong advocate” who’s not afraid to make noise when necessary and a “dog with a bone” when he wants to make something happen. Ironically enough, much of Rossi’s success in advocating for cannabis clients seems to be informed by the knowledge and relationships he made working for a famously cannabis-skeptical Democrat.

As such, Rossi has become an important supporting character in New York’s legal marijuana rollout – for better or worse, depending on who you talk to. That was only possible with the Albany-insider’s wisdom of coalition building, knowing how to influence decision makers and understanding at which point burning bridges is worth it.

“I’ve just been a political animal since I can remember,” Rossi said.

Born in 1976, Cicero native Joseph Paul Rossi came by politics honestly. His mother, Patricia, and father, Dominic, each served terms chairing the Cicero Republican Committee before his mother was elected town clerk.

Politics was always part of home life, Rossi said. He read extensively about politics as he grew up, enrolled at SUNY Cortland as a political science major and found a political home in the Democratic party.

Both of Rossi’s parents died before he graduated college. When he decided to make a career in politics, he chose to find his own path rather than using his parents’ connections to his benefit.

“If I was going to get involved politically, I wanted to do it my own way. But also, I didn’t want to harm their reputation,” Rossi said. “I wanted to start at the bottom.”

After graduating college in 2000, Rossi went to work as a field organizer for the liberal Working Families Party. He ran for a State Assembly seat for the New York City-adjacent District 121 as a Democratic, Working Families Party candidate in 2004, when he was 28.

Republican Jeff Brown defeated him in the race, but after a campaign in which Rossi took 40% of the vote, the SEIU offered him a job as political director for their Upstate New York operations.

While Rossi was already well versed in the arts of campaigning and messaging at that point, it was his position at the SEIU that taught him to direct and operationalize energy, rather than just create it.

He started learning how to play chess instead of checkers.

Working his way up

On an interpersonal level, Rossi gives off a kind of unflashy charisma. The 47-year-old, 6-foot-2 Italian American is one of those people who never seems out of place. In conversation, he meets people where they’re at. He makes his presence known without being memorably conspicuous.

Early in his career, Rossi traveled almost strictly in liberal and Democratic professional circles, but he recognized the value in making and maintaining connections with Republicans as well.

Ryan Moses, a partner at Park Strategies, met Rossi at a Republican clambake in 2004. Moses, a Republican, was working for then-Governor George Pataki.

“We hit it off,” Moses said. “While we were on different sides of the aisle all the way through, I just enjoyed Joe’s personality … he’s a bulldog.”

Rossi’s family roots in local Republican politics and professional roots in leftist politics proved to be a winning combination in 2006. He came out as a strong supporter of Andrew Cuomo, who was running in a four-way primary for New York Attorney General. After the centrist scion of Mario Cuomo won that election, he brought Rossi along.

“It was an incredible year for me,” Rossi said. Cuomo “offered me a job to go into the Attorney General’s Office, and that changed my life.”

Political skills are pretty transferable. Coalition building and policy proposals are as important to people trying to legalize drugs as they are to people trying to require prayer in public schools. But working inside the government gave Rossi a behind-the-curtains view of how high-ranking politicians operate.

While working for Cuomo, Rossi made connections with many people at the highest ranks of Empire State political power. He also learned that his hard-charging labor union advocate persona is useful, but not the whole game.

“Union world likes one-dimensional: you’re either with us or against us, you either stand with the working man or you don’t,” Rossi said. “The experience going into the Attorney General’s Office taught me, certainly, to have less sharp elbows – but I learned that from Andrew Cuomo, who’s got sharp elbows.”

Rossi’s time working in the state AG’s office served as a training ground for a career in government relations. After two years, he’d learned enough about Albany’s inner workings, and gained enough credibility in the Capitol, that he decided to leave state government and try his hand at lobbying – a more lucrative career to support his growing family.

As a lobbyist with Empire Advocates – a subsidiary of the law firm Barclay Damon – Rossi began racking up a respectable client list, including Kinney Drugs – which, at the time, provided all pharmaceutical services to New York’s Department of Corrections. By 2011, he was interviewing for a job with Park Strategies, a lobbying and consulting firm founded by the Republican former U.S. Senator representing New York, Al D’Amato.

The decision to bring Rossi on at Park Strategies was primarily an economic one, said Dave Poleto, a partner at Park. Rossi had a client list that could bring a lot of money to the firm, Poleto said. Additionally, Rossi’s experience and connections in state politics bolstered his ability to get things done in Albany.

“We all agreed that Joe would be a good fit. Lobbying is a political game, and Joe is a political guy,” said Poleto, who also noted that Rossi can be as “subtle as a hand grenade.”

Entering into cannabis

By 2018, New York had legalized medical cannabis – much later, and much more conservatively, than other East Coast states – and Congress had passed a Farm Bill that legalized the hemp and hemp extracts industry nationally.

It was around then when Rossi met Allan Gandelman, founder of a Cortland organic vegetable business called Main Street Farms. Gandelman and partners were interested in launching a hemp extract company – Head & Heal.

At the time, Rossi was trying to learn more about the newly legal hemp industry, and Gandelman was in the early stages of building what would become the New York Cannabis Growers and Processors Association.

“It was new across the country, and there wasn’t a lot of information on how to regulate … especially CBD oil,” Gandelman said. “Just talking with Joe about the industry, it became clear that he was someone who knew the government of New York State, knew the process, knew how to get laws passed, knew how to work with regulatory agencies.”

At the time, Gandelman and others forming the group wanted to do legislative groundwork for the hemp market, which would translate to the adult-use cannabis market if and when New York legalized it, Gandelman said.

Gandelman and associates working to form the NYCGPA – which was later renamed the Cannabis Association of New York, or CANY – hired Rossi as their inaugural lobbyist when they officially formed in 2019.

Before New York legalized adult-use cannabis, Rossi said the early version of CANY scored an important early victory with his help. During the 2019 legislative session, then-Gov. Cuomo’s administration wrote the Cannabis Regulation and Taxation Act (CRTA), which many believed would legalize adult-use cannabis in New York that year.

Using Rossi’s connections with pro-cannabis state legislators like Sen. Jeremy Cooney and then-Sen. Donna Lupardo, the group persuaded lawmakers to add a slate of cannabinoid hemp regulations into a budget bill, which included cannabis legalization. By the end of the 2019 session, it became clear that legislators didn’t want to pass legalization via a budget vote, which would mean the hemp regulations would also die in the legislature.

But after a scramble of phone calls, emails and lots of face time, Rossi was able to convince legislators to separate the hemp regulations from the larger bill and pass it as a stand-alone bill. Lawmakers approved the hemp regulatory bill hours before the 2019 session ended.

Much of the credit for that victory belongs to Rossi, Gandelman said.

“He was just really instrumental in navigating the system, and getting the bill passed,” Gandelman said. “We got that bill done and signed the first time around, which, in Albany, is really hard.”

Rossi said he doubts the young trade group would have survived beyond that bill if it hadn’t passed in the legislature.

While COVID-19 slowed progress for cannabis legalization, especially as New York City became an epicenter for the deadly virus, Rossi, Gandelman and others were in a great position, having established themselves as capable of passing weed-related law in Albany.

The following year, the man who helped change the trajectory of Rossi’s career came under heavy fire. Questions about the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes during the pandemic’s early days grew louder, before a sexual harassment scandal led to even bigger problems.

Cuomo’s intensifying political problems worked to the benefit of left-leaning Democrats in the state legislature, who wrote and passed the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, a more progressive cannabis legalization law than Cuomo’s CRTA. Cuomo then signed the bill into law at the end of March, about five months before he resigned, leaving the reins to his lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul.

Speaking out

Late 2021 was a heady time for cannabis advocates, especially CANY, Rossi said. Newly minted Gov. Hochul made key appointments to the OCM and Cannabis Control Board – moves that Cuomo had slow-walked – and the CCB held their first meeting that October.

“There was an electricity, there was an energy, there was a palpable movement that, ‘wow, every human being in New York is about to get this opportunity,’” Rossi said. “I always hoped I’d be alive at this moment.”

Hochul announced the Seeding Opportunity Initiative, which included three provisional licensing programs that would collectively license cannabis growers and processors who previously operated in the state’s hemp program, and retailers whose lives had been affected by nonviolent cannabis convictions.

On paper, it read like a dream.

In practice, well, nightmares are dreams, too.

“Two things happened: the OCM stopped listening to our public comments around regulations … and then people were legitimately losing their money, their livelihoods, their investments,” Gandelman said. “The OCM took 18 months to launch their regulations, when they were telling us they were just around the corner.”

The under-staffed OCM took longer writing and passing off necessary regulations than most had expected. Government isn’t known for its speed or dexterity. But many of CANY’s members and some of Rossi’s other cannabis clients had already collectively invested millions of dollars in their businesses on the premise that New York’s adult-use market would come online soon.

As time passed, the OCM became less communicative, Rossi said. The situation devolved into one where people couldn’t reach agency staffers for information, and the OCM was ignoring cannabis industry suggestions for the proposed regulations.

It was even more frustrating for people applying for cannabis business licenses.

Paul Suits, CEO of forthcoming Cortland dispensary LakeHouse Cannabis, said that when he was able to reach OCM staffers, they often directed him to the website. But information was often spread across several FAQ documents, guidelines and public statements; many of which were at odds with each other.

“FAQs were contradicting themselves, public statements were contradictory,” Suits said. “It made you want to go to a space where you think maybe we’re not going to be able to do this.”

By September of 2022, Rossi’s efforts to work with regulators behind the scenes reached a breaking point, when Chris Alexander, at a public meeting in Yonkers, told a crowd that the license application period for most hopefuls would begin in the middle of 2023 – a major timeline shift from what the OCM had previously communicated.

About a month later, Gov. Hochul proclaimed, in an editorial board meeting with Syracuse.com, that 20 legal dispensaries would be in operation by the end of the year, and the state would see 20 more open each month. By Jan. 1, 2023, only one dispensary was operational, and today there’s about 130.

A frustrated Rossi began meeting with clients to feel out their comfort level in taking a more adversarial approach toward regulators.

“After a while, Lucy with the football goes only so far in New York – people don’t fall for that over and over again,” Rossi said. “If you are not responding to me on an important matter, I will use different tactics.”

Rossi began encouraging CANY members and other stakeholders to speak out during the public comment portions of the CCB’s monthly meetings. Month after month, licensees and applicants spoke publicly about the financial struggles they endured because the market was taking so long to open. They said they invested life savings in their businesses based on commitments that the OCM had made publicly, but never came to fruition.

Rossi also spoke out – and encouraged everyone to speak out – on social media, and to reporters at outlets like NY Cannabis Insider and The City. Over time, larger news outlets that had mostly run positive stories about the cannabis rollout began to cover it more critically.

That year may have been the nadir for New York’s cannabis market. The slow-roll of regulations kept the market from fully opening, and dispensaries licensed under the Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary program were few and far between. Then, in August, a state Supreme Court judge placed an injunction on the CAURD program, preventing most new CAURDs from opening until the case was settled in December of 2023.

To add insult to injury, the lawsuit was filed and the injunction placed based on legal weaknesses in the CAURD program, about which stakeholders had warned regulators – and the regulators ignored.

In January of 2024, Gov. Hochul had publicly declared New York’s cannabis rollout a “disaster.”

A target of ire

By early 2024, Rossi had become the target of ire among some regulators, he said. He was increasingly at odds with OCM Chief Equity Officer Damian Fagon – a former CANY board member – who, Rossi said, regularly called him to ask him to take down LinkedIn posts critical of the OCM.

Fagon, who joined the OCM in June of 2022, had been pretty accessible and open in the beginning of his tenure, Rossi said. But over time, Rossi felt like he stopped listening altogether.

“You could tell his power grew inside there, and it almost became, ‘there’s nothing to talk about, we know what we’re doing,’” Rossi said.

Fear of retaliation from regulators became palpable, Rossi said, which began to alienate him from CANY, the organization he helped start and which had grown into the best-known New York-based cannabis trade group.

By March of 2024, Jenny Argie of cannabis processing company Jenny’s sued the OCM, alleging the agency issued a public recall of her products out of retaliation, after she had made public allegations of retaliation and “selective enforcement.”

Days later, the OCM put Fagon on administrative leave. At a recent meeting, OCM Chief Operating Officer Patrick McKeage said there is still an active investigation into Fagon’s actions.

In May, state Office of General Services Commissioner Jeanette Moy released a report of an inquiry she led into the OCM’s operations. The report found inefficiencies and mismanagement have slowed the state’s legal marijuana rollout. Upon the report’s release, Hochul announced a revamp of the OCM, including firing the agency’s executive director, Chris Alexander.

With Hochul appointing Felicia A. B. Reid as interim OCM director, and commitments to revisit some programs and policies, Rossi thinks things are now heading in a better direction. And he believes the public advocacy in which he and other cannabis stakeholders engaged helped move the needle.

“I’m not saying I had everything to do with it, but it was a gamble in a sense, because if they doubled down on the. .. CAURD program, if they doubled down on all this and Chris Alexander’s leadership, I would have been f*cked,” Rossi said.

However, not everyone in New York’s cannabis space agrees that the ouster of Alexander was a positive development for the industry.

Reggie Keith, CEO of Canna-House, a Buffalo-based cannabis club and resource center, believes that Alexander accomplished much for social equity in the cannabis industry.

Keith is far from the only person who holds this opinion – in fact, Gov. Hochul’s office released a statement in April that highlighted data showing New York is outpacing every other legal cannabis state when it comes to minority-owned businesses.

New York has “almost doubled the percentage of majority minority-owned dispensaries nationwide” and “11 percent of NY’s adult-use dispensaries were majority Black-owned, while the nation is at 2 percent,” the statement said.

Recent criticisms by Hochul and others supportive of replacing Alexander have been tone deaf, bordering on insulting, Keith said.

“I think the railroading of what he did, and kind of belittling the job that he did – the amazing accomplishments that he made initially in his tenure – is really what I took offense to,” Keith said.

Keith said he’s hopeful but not convinced that new OCM leaders will improve the agency. It doesn’t help, he said, that the governor’s office hasn’t taken much responsibility for troubles at the OCM.

“The [OCM] still answers to the governor’s office – so at the top of the food chain is her, and I’ve never heard the office really offer any apologies, or say they made any missteps,” Keith said. “For me, that’s a telltale sign of bad leadership from the top of the food chain.”

Right or wrong for the industry, Rossi’s advocacy has inarguably driven change in New York’s cannabis industry. And he did it with the lessons he learned working for unions and politicians.

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease; if you don’t ask, you don’t get; lean in, don’t back down,” Rossi said. “That’s my philosophy in life.”