Trashing their own city
Call them the dirty dozen: The craven state senators from the five boroughs who rushed to steal power from their city in order to puff up their own, as emptily as a discarded plastic grocery bag. Such is the small-change crusade led by Brooklyn Sen. Simcha Felder, and aided by Sens. Joe Addabbo, Ruben Diaz, Jeff Klein, Michael Gianaris, Diane Savino, Toby Stavisky, Roxanne Persaud, Jose Peralta, Marty Golden, Tony Avella and Leroy Comrie.
Last week, they voted as part of a Senate majority to block a New York City law requiring retailers to charge a nickel fee for each plastic or paper bag dispensed, set to go into effect next month.
As with similar fees set for Suffolk County and Long Beach, L.I. — and already in effect in California, Washington, D.C., and Seattle — the City Council intends to give consumers a nudge to bring their own reusable bags instead. Don’t want to pay the fee? No one has to. With city consumers currently discarding disposable, extruded-petroleum bags by the billions, too many of which find their ways into trees and bodies of water, the measure shows promise to clean up our filthy act.
Felder’s flunkies instead listened to loud voices decrying the fee as a regressive tax. They ignore that those paying with public assistance funds are excluded, that free giveaways of reusable bags are part of the program, and that grocery stores can still bag poultry and other potentially unsanitary items in plastic, free of charge.
Adding offense to injury, the city senators voted to slap down the NYC bag fee while letting its Long Island counterparts stand.
More than two dozen city Assembly members are part of the push against home rule. On their behalf, Speaker Carl Heastie raises concerns about a provision allowing stores to charge more than 5 cents, intended to facilitate sale of reusable bags, even as he says: “You don’t want to take away the locality’s autonomy.”
All who bigfoot the City Council will be saddled with the shame of subverting a duly elected government body — and the untimely liability, as the new Congress weighs blocking state legislatures on matters such as gun control, of having no high ground to stand on.
Council members approved the measure last year by a healthy majority and even agreed to delay the nickel charge until Feb. 15. In further goodwill and good sense, the Council also required the Department of Sanitation to study the fee’s effects, allowing for future adjustments or even the fee’s abolition based on the facts.
Pfft, who needs facts when proud ignorance backed up by bully tactics can do the trick.