Where Bronx Cannabis Tax Dollars Go: 13 South Bronx Youth and $35M in Grants

On July 30, thirteen young people from the South Bronx graduated from a leadership program you may never have heard of. What makes the PODER Youth Leadership Collective worth your attention, beyond the graduates themselves, is how it was paid for: with New York cannabis tax money.

That makes it one of the clearest answers yet to a question Bronx shoppers ask every time they see 13% added at the register. Where does that actually go? Here is the money trail, from a dispensary counter to a youth program in the South Bronx, and what the numbers say about whether the promise of legalization is reaching the neighborhoods it was written for.

What PODER is, and who it serves

The PODER Youth Leadership Collective is run by Community Connections for Youth, a South Bronx organization. The nine-month program serves justice-involved young people ages 15 to 24. Participants attend biweekly workshops, go on field visits, build personal leadership plans, and get help navigating school and jobs, along with community service opportunities.

The first cohort of 13 was funded by the state's Community Grants Reinvestment Fund. The program builds on the group's South Bronx Community Connections model, which the organization credits with a 33% reduction in recidivism.

Thirteen graduates is not a large number. But it is a real one, with names and families attached, in exactly the kind of neighborhood the equity provisions of legalization were written to serve. That's the point of this whole system, at least on paper.

Follow the money: how the 13% splits

When you buy at a licensed store, you pay 9% in state excise tax and 4% in local tax, added at checkout, on top of a THC-based tax already baked into the shelf price. The 2021 Marihuana Regulation and Taxation Act spells out where those dollars go.

The reinvestment fund doesn't just pay for cannabis-related work. The Office of Cannabis Management's program guide says grants can support housing, childcare, job training and more, and that applicant organizations do not need any connection to the cannabis industry.

The grant rounds, so far

• Round one: $5 million to 50 organizations statewide — $100,000 apiece.
• Round two: $15 million, triple the first round.
• Planned total: $35 million, with another $15 million in development.

The pace has drawn criticism. The first round landed roughly five years after legalization, and Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes, the law's lead sponsor, has argued that routing money through competitive nonprofit grants rewards whoever writes the best application rather than sending dollars directly to the hardest-hit districts. The fund's director countered that New York is the only state reinvesting at the 40% level.

Every dollar spent at an unlicensed smoke shop is a dollar that can never come back to the block as a youth program.

The city's cut is growing — slowly

New York City has its own line in this story. Mayor Zohran Mamdani's February budget projects $24 million in city cannabis tax revenue this fiscal year, rising to $33 million in fiscal 2027 and $43 million by fiscal 2030.

The budget came with a candid caveat: collections haven't grown as fast as store openings, because supplier competition and falling prices are squeezing sales per store, which the city says have declined quarter over quarter since the end of 2025. NYC had 211 dispensaries at the end of December, with about eight opening each month since July 2025. More stores, cheaper product, a thinner slice per shop. That tension runs through everything below. (For the price side, see our August market report.)

One thing the budget projections don't do is earmark the city's cannabis dollars for any specific purpose. If you want local cannabis revenue tied to youth programs in the Bronx, that's a question for your City Council member at budget time.

How equity licenses work in the Bronx

The other half of the equity promise sits on the storefronts themselves. The Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary license, or CAURD, is the state's equity retail license, reserved for people with past cannabis convictions or their family members. State licensing records show 17 of the Bronx's 22 open dispensaries hold one. That's more than three in four, the highest CAURD share of any borough.

Some of those owners' stories are the policy in miniature:

• Bronx Joint in Hunts Point is owned by Alex Ortecho, a Bedford Park native with past possession arrests, and was backed by the Social Equity Investment Fund.
• CONBUD Yankee Stadium is run by Coss Marte and Mario Ramos, both formerly incarcerated.
• Hibernica in Pelham Bay draws about 70% of its staff from Housing Works' CREATE re-entry program. Read our profile of Hibernica at two years.

The pressure on equity owners

Those businesses are under pressure. The Office of Cannabis Management's July data showed per-unit prices down about 7% from January to June, with the median New York store bringing in about $2.6 million a year — thin room for first-time owners carrying rent, payroll and security in a market where 683 dispensaries were open statewide by June. If equity owners can't stay open, the equity promise shrinks with them.

What your purchase does, and doesn't, do

Here's the practical takeaway for a Bronx consumer. The cannabis excise tax is collected only on legal sales. The untested product seized in the third raid on Bud-Zotic in Mott Haven generated no reinvestment dollars for anybody.

If you want your money to support the equity model, the CAURD designation is right there on the license. Our map of every licensed Bronx dispensary shows which stores hold one. Near The Hub, Buddiez Bronx Cannabis Dispensary, a CAURD store on Third Avenue that sponsors the Free Press, is one equity-licensed Bronx dispensary option; its operating company, StoryTellers New York, describes itself as run by NYC-born founders.

What we'll be watching

1. Which Bronx organizations win round-two grants, and how much of the $15 million lands in the borough.
2. Whether PODER, or programs like it, get funded for a second cohort.
3. Whether the city's rising cannabis tax projections hold as prices keep falling.
4. How many of the Bronx's CAURD stores are still open at their first renewal. We track that in our five-year Bronx cannabis scorecard.

Thirteen graduates is a start. The Bronx paid for a lot more than that in the decades before legalization, and it's fair to keep asking when the rest of the bill comes due.