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Halifax regional council will consider a proposed bylaw Tuesday that would allow residents to just say no to flyers.

The bylaw would ask that an owner or occupant of a residential property who did not wish to receive flyer packages post a sign or notice stating that.

“Some people live for their flyers and they really appreciate getting them,” Coun. Sam Austin (Dartmouth Centre) said Monday. “Other people find them a nuisance. Anything that we can do to make sure that those who want ’em can get them and those who don’t, don’t have to have them. That’s the reasonable place to end up on this.”

Regional council directed municipal staff 11 months ago to draft a flyer bylaw that would provide regulations, some service delivery standards and some possibilities for consequences if delivery standards aren’t met.

The draft bylaw calls for the owner or occupant of the property who does not want flyers delivered to post a sign or notice provided by the municipality or to create a sign that meets certain specifications that includes the phrase NO FLYERS in a font size of at least 38 points. The sign would be posted at the entrance to the dwelling in a visible place. The municipality will design, print and distribute No Flyer stickers.

If you could opt-out of receiving flyers, would you?

The Chronicle Herald is the largest flyer delivery agency in the municipality, contracting several hundred carriers in HRM to deliver paid subscription newspapers, free community newspapers and weekly flyers. At the time council voted for staff to draft a bylaw, the Herald was delivering 132,904 flyer packages each week, including nearly 20,000 delivered inside the newspaper.

Ian Scott, the chief operating officer of Saltwire Network, parent company of The Chronicle Herald, said at the time implementation of a bylaw would not significantly affect Herald delivery costs.

“We are in full compliance and agreement with the staff report,” Scott said at the time. “And we had been in discussions with city staff in terms of drafting their report. We are independently audited by the FDSA (Flyer Distribution Standards Association) and are mandated to adhere to these delivery standards.”

Those standards, he said, already included not delivering to households that indicate they do not wish to receive the flyer product.

Industry standards mandate that distributors display opt-out messaging in their publication and on their website, and that publishers maintain a Do Not Deliver list. Dumping of undelivered materials is not permitted and if a household hasn’t taken in the delivered materials for two consecutive weeks, contractors will stop delivering and notify the publisher so that the address can be removed from the delivery list.

The industry standard for deliveries in urban areas is in a receptacle like a mailbox or flyer tube or in visible sight on the doorstep. In rural areas, if no receptacle or mailbox is available, the flyers should be delivered a minimum of 15 feet into the driveway. Flyers should be packaged to keep them dry and to prevent scattering.

The Herald estimated that 18 to 20 per cent of households in the municipality had requested to be placed on the Do Not Deliver list. All other households, including apartment dwellers, receive flyer packages. Rural newspaper subscribers do not have flyers delivered inside the paper.

The municipal bylaw would reinforce many of the industry standards and impose a penalty for non-compliance to opt-out requests of $250 for the company and $25 for the individual contractor.

Some bylaw exemptions would include election advertising for federal, provincial or municipal campaigns, newspapers delivered to subscribers, community association newsletters and information circulars produced by federal, provincial or municipal governments.

An 18-month flyer box pilot project was launched in the summer of 2018. Six test boxes, servicing 512 households, have been installed and additional locations have been identified. The six locations are Beachstone Drive in Spryfield, Crestfield Drive in Hammonds Plains, Brookview Drive in Cole Harbour, Deerwood Lane in Timberlea, Shore Road in Eastern Passage and Greenridge Mobile Home Park in Eastern Passage.

Some six months into the pilot, the Herald had been able to adjust quantities of flyers for a location based on the numbers taken over the course of the week – replenishing when needed. This reduced paper waste and, because the flyers are protected from the elements inside the box, the use of approximately 26,600 plastic bags can be avoided.

Municipal staff had initially advised council that an outright ban on flyer delivery is not possible, as it would be deemed an infringement on the distributors’ freedom of expression.