Ban or fee? Tacoma council faces couple of options on plastic bags

A ban on disposable plastic bags in Tacoma appears headed for passage next month.

On Tuesday, the City Council forwarded the ban – which would prohibit carryout plastic bags and impose a nickel fee on paper bags – to a final vote July 12. But not before a councilman suggested the city take a less aggressive approach.

Joe Lonergan proposed the city allow plastic bags but charge the same five-cent fee for both paper and plastic. Lonergan’s measure also would have redirected the fee to city coffers to help fund the law’s enforcement rather than letting grocers keep it.

Lonergan’s proposal was backed by Councilman Conor McCarthy, who voted against the ban in April when it passed out of a council committee.

“The biggest change with this proposal is that instead of the fee being collected and kept wholesale by the retailer, the fee goes to address the problem we’re trying to address with this legislation,” McCarthy said Tuesday. “The problem, as I understand it, is we have a litter problem in the community, people who aren’t recycling, and ... a problem with people using single-use bags more than they should.”

Although the majority of the council appeared to still favor the proposed ban, dubbed the Bring Your Own Bag law, Lonergan said he will offer his proposal as a substitute when the council votes next month. Both proposals have this in common: They would give fee exemptions to families receiving food stamps and other kinds of assistance.

Michael Johnson, an owner of Tacoma bag manufacturer Poly Bag, told the council Tuesday that a ban would hurt local business and displace commerce, warning that shoppers “will take their business outside of the ban area, and you will suffer more loss of revenue.”

But the majority of people who addressed the council Tuesday spoke in favor of a ban, citing environmental concerns about the bags clogging up landfills and being swallowed by marine wildlife when they drift into waterways.

Karen Povey cited the uproar over a proposed methanol plant at the Port of Tacoma. To have rebuffed a company’s attempt to build the plant to supply methanol for Chinese plastic production and then “not to take any substantive steps to reduce our consumption of plastics, especially single-use plastics, would be disingenuous,” she said.

Strickland said that any legislation should get at the root cause of the problem: plastic bags that end up in landfills.

“If our goal is to reduce the number of plastic bags in our waste stream, then we need to deal with the root of the problem: the fact that they’re available,” she said.

McCarthy countered that the root cause of the problem isn’t bags, but human behavior.

“This will not have the effect of banning all plastic bags,” he said of the bag ban ordinance. “It simply proliferates the production of a thicker plastic bag and use of more paper bags.”

The council’s July 12 meeting and all subsequent council meetings through September will take place in the Tacoma Public Utility Auditorium located at 3628 South 35th St. as Tacoma’s city hall gets a makeover.

There will be no City Council meeting on July 5.

This story was originally published June 28, 2016 at 9:11 PM with the headline "Ban or fee? Tacoma council faces couple of options on plastic bags."