Yesterday, OCM posted an update on their application tracker and I wanted to take a minute to help understand what’s being communicated.
As of today, OCM has reviewed 1,214 applications. All but 12 of those applications are from the social equity pool. They started reviewing social equity applications in late 2024 leading up to the canceled lottery. Since the last update last week, it appears that they’ve reviewed zero new applications.
What does this mean? Well, the lottery date is three weeks from today. In order to hold the lotteries, OCM needs to process at least 593 more applications.
Here’s what the data looks like broken down:
Cultivator:
Processed: 45
Remaining: 50
Mezzobusiness:
Processed: 187
Remaining: 80
Manufacturer:
Processed: 33
Remaining: 46
Retailer:
Processed: 313
Remaining: 417
All Lottery Categories:
Processed: 578
Remaining: 593
All Non-Lottery Categories:
Processed: 576
Remaining: 1,427
Social Equity Applications:
Processed: 1,199
Remaining: 152
General Applications (non social equity):
Processed: 12
Remaining: 1,730
Three things stand out to me in this data.
First, they’ve processed a significantly higher ratio of lottery licenses compared to non-lottery. This makes sense because the lottery is the real deadline right now, and it’s typical to focus effort on the critical path of the deadline.
Second, in the several months they’ve been processing applications, they’ve completed reviewing only about half of what needs to be completed by June 5, 2025. In other words, the rate at which they are processing applications has been significantly slower than is required.
Third, since the general application window closed eight weeks ago, they’ve reviewed twelve general applications. That’s not a typo. Over 2,000 applicants were submitted on March 16. Twelve of those have been reviewed. There are still over 2,000 to review.
I mentioned this before, but the applications were not simple like job applications. These were in-depth plans requiring many days to complete for the average applicant. If OCM is fair to the review process, I’d guess an average trained processor could review 3-5 applications per work day. So, ten processors could potentially review up to 250 applications per week. Additionally, there will definitely be applications that require follow-up from the applicant before OCM can hold the lottery.
What we’re being told is that OCM has essentially not processed any applications in the past eight weeks but that they’re going to process over 500 (from just the lottery pools) in the next three weeks. I’m not here to say that hurdle is impossible. However, it’s concerning, especially given the past from this department.
According to the published application fees applied to the specific applications that were submitted, I calculated how much money OCM has received to fund this project. By March 16th this year, OCM had taken in $6.65 million in application fees from the first wave of applications. Applicants are entitled to a reasonable process - this is not free or subsidized from other departments or functions. We directly paid for this specific service that has, thus far, provided nothing in over two months.
I’ll try to keep trusting the dates they’re providing. It's possible they're batching the applications - not responding to any one candidate until they're ready to respond to all of them. If that's true, or if there's any other type of data lag, we'll see that in the next two weeks of updates. But we need to be realistic about how quickly this system needs to progress if we’re actually going to have a market this year. The lottery is step one. Steps two through ten are much more complicated than step one. Everything needs to move much faster, dramatically faster, dates are going to continue to push further.