Mayor calls for 6-cent penalty on plastic bags

The City Council is considering a bill that would require stores to charge 10-cents for a plastic or paper bag.

(Staten Island Advance/Jan Somma-Hammel)

CITY HALL -- Staten Island Council members want to toss out a proposed 10-cent carryout bag fee under consideration by city lawmakers.

"If it looks like a tax, smells like a tax, feels like a tax -- it's a tax," Councilman Steven Matteo, a member of the sanitation and solid waste management committee, said during a hearing on the proposal Wednesday. "And it's a tax that could hurt our constituents and our businesses."

A law from Council members Brad Lander (D-Brooklyn) and Margaret Chin (D-Manhattan) would require certain stores to charge a fee of at least 10 cents for each carryout bag given to a customer. The fee would be applied to both paper and plastic bags from supermarkets, grocery stores, bodegas and pharmacies across the city.

The businesses would keep the fee.

"It's time for us to start doing real things to reduce waste and reduce our impact on the environment," Ms. Chin said. "Some of these things are not going to be easy and some of these things may take work on all our parts -- but this is about the kind of city we want to pass on to all our children and grandchildren."

Supporters said the fee will help reduce the use of plastic bags, one of the more problematic types of trash. They are hard to recycle and can clog sewers and storm drains. When the bags are properly disposed of, they still can take hundreds of years to decompose.

They can also jam the machines that process the city's recyclables.

"Plastic bags are almost impossible to cost-effectively remove from the recycled paper that we receive," Myles Cohen of Pratt Recycling, which has a paper mill on Staten Island, wrote to Matteo in August. "Specifically, plastic carryout bags are particularly difficult to remove and separate from recycled paper, and reducing the overall number of these bags in the waste stream would help our facility's efficiency, as well as be beneficial to he environment."

The fee is expected to reduce the number of bags used by 60 to 90 percent.

'THE REAL OBJECTIVE'

New Yorkers use and toss about 9.37 billion single use carryout bags every year, according to Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia. The Department of Sanitation collects more than 1,700 tons of such plastic and paper bags per week. Disposing the bags outside the five boroughs costs the city $12.5 million annually.

"The real objective of this or any other legislation around single use bags is to not charge people as much as to really change behavior," Ms. Garcia told Council members.

The city remains undecided on the proposal, but the Sanitation Department wants to reduce plastic bag waste and is open to anything that might work.

"We think that there are many different ways to do this," Ms. Garcia said.

A fee has reduced plastic bag waste for several other municipalities, including Seattle, Wash., Boulder, Colo., and Washington, D.C.

Under the New York City proposal, restaurants, street vendors, liquor stores and emergency food providers would be spared charging the fee. Bags carrying prescription drugs, produce, meat and non-prepackaged food would also be exempt, as well as purchases through public assistance programs.

The legislation comes six years after former Mayor Michael Bloomberg pushed for a 6-cent fee on plastic bags. That proposal, which took five cents for the city, never went anywhere.

The new law currently has 21 sponsors, including Public Advocate Letitia James. A spokesman said Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito (D-Manhattan/Bronx) has not taken a position on the fee.

The proposal is shaping up to be one of the more controversial laws considered by the Council this year. Though supported by some of the body's more progressive lawmakers, many other Council members expressed concerns about implementing a bag fee.

They worried about how the charge would affect small businesses, low income communities and senior citizens. Some Council members, like Matteo, argued the fee was really a tax.

"I'm ashamed to sit here today to talk about actually raising taxes on New Yorkers, making things less affordable," Councilman David Greenfield (D-Brooklyn) said.

ISLAND DELEGATION UNITED IN OPPOSITION

The Council's Staten Island delegation was united in their opposition to the fee.

Council Minority Leader Vincent Ignizio (R-South Shore) said he thought the issue should be taken up by the state, which sets most of the city's taxes. He said the fee would be another reason for city residents to shop for groceries in other states or counties.

"This is just an advertisement for more Staten Islanders to go across the bridge and shop in New Jersey because now you have a 10-cent bag fee that wouldn't apply there," he said.

Staten Islanders can already get cheaper gas and benefit from a lower sales tax in New Jersey. With these additional savings and carpool discounts, paying bridge tolls becomes worth it, Ignizio said.

"When you start to add up and decide, should I take the trip over the bridge, it starts to make more economic sense," he said.

Matteo (R-Mid-Island) added that there are already costs associated with grocery shopping on Staten Island, like gas and rising tolls. Some families, he said, can't do nightly trips to the store and must get a week's groceries all at once, amounting to 30 or 40 bags.

"You're talking $3 or $4 every week -- that adds up," Matteo said at the hearing.

Councilwoman Debi Rose said in a statement that while she has always supported sustainable policies, she couldn't back the carryout bag fee.

"My office has received a tremendous number of calls from constituents and local small businesses who oppose a proposed fee on plastic bags," Rose said. "And at a time when so many of my constituents still struggle to make ends meet, I cannot support adding a regressive fee to their grocery bills."