Sometimes Seattle Gets Stalled… Again

Alas, Seattle! They just want to get some anti-pollution initiatives passed, but it seems like new obstacles keep cropping up at every turn. Today’s particular obstacle is a big one, too: enough signatures have been collected to bring an injunction against the plastic bag tariff that was supposed to begin in January.

More than enough valid signatures have been collected by a group that opposes a new fee on paper and plastic bags in Seattle to keep the ordinance from going into effect in January as planned.

Instead, city voters will decide the fate of the disposable bag fee during an election next year.

The City Council passed an ordinance July 28 requiring a 20-cent green fee on plastic or paper bags at grocery and drug stores, setting off a range of reactions from cheers to outcry. The council also banned plastic foam food and drink containers. That rule isn’t affected by the referendum and will go into effect Jan. 1.

Sponsored in large part by the American Chemistry Council — surprise, I know! — the smoothly-titled Coalition to Stop the Seattle Bag Tax managed to raise 15,099 signatures from disgruntled grocers and customers alike in protest of the tariff. All they needed to stall the policy in its tracks were 14,374.

George Griffin, a spokesman for the Coalition to Stop the Seattle Bag Tax, said the fee is “opposed by a broad spectrum of citizens and stakeholders as unnecessary, placing an unfair financial burden on Seattle’s working families.”

That many signatures “provides concrete evidence that the City Council was not representing the views of many of its constituents in imposing the bag tax,” Griffin said. “You can’t cast them as nonsupportive of the environment; they just think this is the wrong way to address the issue.”

The American Chemistry Council, which hired Griffin for the Seattle effort, is fighting similar proposals in California and Hawaii.

Sadly, a side effect of this very signature initiative may be the city council opting instead to ban plastic bags outright — an option that will likely anger even more people in the long run. Nobody wants to place taxes, but we’re trying to reach a compromise here. The fact of the matter is, for all the “we’ll do better, we swear!” rhetoric, people simply aren’t reusing and recycling of their own accord. So, I hope everyone knows what they’re doing here. This could become quite the battle.

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under The Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.