CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2016, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“PLASTIC BAG BAN REPEAL: AN IRRELEVANT VOTE?”
What if California voters repealed a
law, but it remained the law anyway?
That’s a situation the state may soon
face if a yet-unnumbered proposition aiming to repeal a 2014 statewide ban on
plastic grocery bags should pass in November. The statewide law also requires
stores to offer paper bags for at least 10 cents each.
The bottom line on this referendum
measure, which qualified for the ballot within a mere five months of when
legislators passed the plastic bag ban, is that it likely won’t matter much.
In fact, there’s little effect from
the fact that the state ban is not in force today, almost two years after it
passed. Any law challenged by a referendum gets suspended until the outcome of
the vote is official.
There’s a pretty simple reason why
neither the vote nor the law’s suspension matters much: Many local governments
have their own bans in place, 146 cities and counties – about one-third of all
California communities, containing a large majority of the populace. Repealing
the state law would not affect those laws.
Try to get a supermarket plastic bag
in any of California’s largest cities. Can’t do it in Los Angeles. Nor in San
Francisco, nor anywhere in Los Angeles County, nor many others.
This infuriates makers of plastic
bags, which have pretty much disappeared from the shoulders of major highways
they once littered.
Grocers at first opposed the plastic
bag bans, protesting the inconvenience to themselves and their customers from
forcing consumers to bring their own bags or buy paper ones at checkout
counters. They’ve been converted and now support the bans.
“Early polling is that consumers are
adapting to no plastic bags,” Ronald Fong, head of the California Grocers
Assn., told a reporter. “It’s really unfortunate that out-of-staters are
sinking millions of dollars into telling us that we’re wrong here in
California.”
Altogether, more than $4 million has
been raised to fight the statewide plastic bag ban, only a small fraction of it
raised in California. An industry association, the American Progressive Bag
Alliance, which represents the plastic bag industry nationally, raised more
than $4 million from its members shortly after the state ban passed. None came
from California.
Contributors
were led by South Carolina’s Hilex Poly ($1.9 million), with companies like
Superbag (Texas), Advance Polybag (Texas) and Formosa Plastics (New Jersey)
also among big donors.
“We believe California voters share
our concerns and will make their voices heard at the ballot box,” the
pro-plastic alliance’s director, Lee Califf, said in a statement. The statewide
ban, he said, threatens thousands of jobs and will have “no meaningful effect
on the environment.”
While removing the statewide ban would
not kill any of the local ones, it could perpetuate some confusion, as the
state law was intended to standardize regulations that differ slightly among
localities.
What’s more, say backers – state and
local – the bag bans are taking millions of unneeded bags off the street. “When
they have to pay, customers avoid buying the bags,” Mark Murray, executive
director of the group Californians Against Waste, said recently. He cited
figures showing the number of grocery customers buying no bags (usually because
they’ve brought their own) has jumped from about 10 percent to more than 35
percent.
Califf and the pro-plastic group
maintain the bag ban and fee have been “a massive, billion-dollar giveaway to
grocers under the guise of environmentalism.” The plastics alliance hopes to
qualify a second measure for a November vote, earmarking the 10-cent bag fees
for environmental causes rather than letting grocers keep them. The state
legislative analyst estimates this could provide $10 million or more to such
causes, but nowhere near billions.
The bottom line on this is that aside
from any environmental benefits of banning plastic bags, this has devolved into
a fight between two well-heeled interest groups: Grocers now love the ban on
plastics because it gives them a new revenue source while they no longer must
buy plastics. Meanwhile, the plastic bag companies desperately want back into
the huge California market, something that’s looking more and more like a pipe
dream.
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Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. He has covered esoteric votes in eight
national political conventions. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The
Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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