BY DENNIS LYNCH | The state Assembly passed a bill Tuesday to postpone for 270 days the implementation of the City Council’s law to require grocery and bodega owners to charge customers a nickel for every plastic bag they use for their goods. It’s a major hit to proponents, who say the measure will hugely reduce the city’s garbage output.
The state bill has now passed both houses of the Legislature, giving Governor Andrew Cuomo until the end of next week to review it and either veto or sign it into law.
The City Council passed its bag fee bill last summer and it was supposed to come into effect on Oct. 1 of last year. But, after the Senate passed a bill to block the measure, the Council postponed its going into effect till Feb. 15. The Council agreed to use the time to work with state lawmakers to revise the bill before it reached the Assembly, where it likely would have passed and then been codified into law.
The law would only affect businesses in the city, and city lawmakers said it would slash consumption of plastic here. Brooklyn Councilmember Brad Lander said that New Yorkers toss out almost 10 billion plastic bags each year and that the city spends roughly $12.5 million annually to get them to landfills. He said a similar ban in Washington, D.C., cut down the bags’ usage there by 60 percent.
But many opponents contend that the initiative would hurt vulnerable populations, particularly low-income New Yorkers and seniors. Simcha Felder, a Republican-caucusing Brooklyn Democrat, has led the charge against the fee. The city had planned to lessen the burden on New Yorkers by handing out roughly 400,000 reusable bags from Feb. 15 to April 30 of this year.
Felder has also raised concerns over the cleanliness of reusable bags, because some studies have found E. coli and salmonella bacteria can contaminate the sacks’ fabric and thus cross-contaminate foods.
On Wednesday, Cuomo called it a “complicated” issue and spoke to both environmental concerns over plastic bag usage and the fees’ probable impact on low-income New Yorkers, according to Politico.
The New York League of Conservation Voters urged Cuomo to veto the bill. N.Y.L.C.V. President Marcia Bystryn cited both environmental and political concerns.
“This bill takes away New York’s ability to control the 10 billion plastic bags that enter its waste stream each year and sets a dangerous precendent for the preemption of local policy,” Bystryn said. “It puts the onus back on New York City to pass a new law, but not before a new City Council is seated in January 2018, making this a campaign wedge issue and undermining the authority of a popularly elected body.”
Bystryn added that a full ban on plastic bags had mixed results in other cities and that fees tended to work much better.
The back and forth between city and state government has also sparked a fierce debate over their jurisdictions. Opponents on the state level, including Felder, argued that city governments have no power to levy their own taxes. Many of his colleagues against the ban also characterize the fee as a tax, although it is not legally a tax at all. Individual grocery stores would charge and keep the 5-cent fee, so it would never reach the city’s coffers.
Proponents of the bill said that state lawmakers representing constituencies outside the city have no business interfering with the Big Apple’s laws.
