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DCist: D.C. Aims To Make Plastic Bag Recycling Easier
“The whole point of this is really to get these kinds of plastics into the recycling process,” says Council member Mary Cheh (Ward-3), who sponsored the bill. “We can’t do it in the conventional way because the machinery that we use gets all mucked up with with the plastics.”
In 2010, D.C. was one of the first jurisdictions in the country to adopt a bag fee to cut down on plastic bag litter and waste. Other local counties in Maryland and Virginia have followed suit in recent years. The idea is to encourage consumers to bring their own reusable bags, rather than using disposable plastic ones, but there are still millions of plastic bags used in D.C. each year.
Last year, the District collected nearly $2 million from its five cent bag fee — meaning D.C. retailers handed out roughly 40 million disposable bags. A big number — but a fraction of the 22 million bags handed out per month before the bag fee went into effect. Money from the bag fee funds numerous environmental initiatives to improve the health of the District’s rivers, including stream restoration, green infrastructure, trash traps, and watershed education.
“We have a lot of bags out there,” says Cheh. “Also, people get a lot of materials from stores that has plastic wrapping and other kinds of plastics connected with it.”
Washington City Paper: Mary Cheh Is Steaming After Anita Bonds Neutered Her Bill Aimed at Combating Senior Hunger
Let’s back up: Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh has been working on the issue for well over a year now, convening a work group on food insecurity, then introducing legislation last October to better coordinate the city’s efforts to feed seniors. Her bill would push a variety of city agencies to better utilize federal programs that could get food to older people, and create an interagency task force that could pull together all the disparate programs across the D.C. government and make them work together.
Cheh’s bill picked up seven co-introducers and scored a hearing back in February, where it earned near unanimous support from advocates, two good signs that it was on its way to passing. Yet the legislation has languished in Bonds’ committee ever since, even though she was among the lawmakers to introduce the bill. Bonds’ panel primarily deals with housing, but a recent change to move the decidedly unrelated issue of “executive administration” under her purview ensured that she also has oversight of the Department of Aging and Community Living, which Cheh’s bill is primarily aimed at changing.
In mid-September, Bonds suddenly changed course, introducing her own “Senior Nutrition and Well-Being Equity Amendment Act” without moving Cheh’s forward. Besides lacking the snappy title of Cheh’s “No Senior Hungry Omnibus Amendment Act,” it stripped many of the new requirements for agencies and axed the interagency panel in favor of a “community-led task group” of seniors to advise DACL. Advocates were particularly galled that the bill leaves in references to a “Senior Food Security Plan” that appeared in Cheh’s legislation, but doesn’t actually require anyone to produce such a plan. That would’ve been the interagency task force’s job, but with that section removed, the plan simply floats in the ether...
...“I don’t even want to say it’s a pale comparison to the bill that we put forward because it’s useless,” Cheh says, noting that the latest data suggest that D.C. still leads the nation with 13 percent of its seniors living with food insecurity. “Maybe she wants to have a bill of her own making to make some claims about what she’s doing as she’s in a reelection campaign. I don’t know.”
Bonds spokesman Kevin B. Chavous argues that his boss is a “full supporter” of Cheh’s bill and is only moving this other legislation because she had trouble getting necessary data from DACL and other impacted agencies to the Office of the Chief Financial Officer, which is required to estimate the fiscal impacts of Council legislation. Since any bill that doesn’t pass before the end of the year will need to be re-introduced (as the Council period ends), Chavous says Bonds saw it as “crucial to get some version of legislation passed in order to address the problem.”
“This is not an indication of her not supporting the original bill, it’s more so about doing something that’s achievable right now in the face of the agencies not being responsive,” Chavous says.
Bonds herself made similar arguments at an Oct. 11 hearing she convened on her senior hunger legislation, claiming she worked for “many months” to get a fiscal impact statement finished on the bill, to no avail, and her alternative was “proposed in earnest to at least move the ball forward.” Cheh finds those claims “completely disingenuous.”
“It’s just an excuse,” Cheh says. “I have introduced and passed bills of far greater complexity, with challenges in obtaining the fiscal impact statement, and we would get it. She has had months and months and months to do that. And she said, ‘Well, I’ve been trying.’ Well, not hard enough … She’s covering for the agency that doesn’t want to have additional responsibilities. It’s the agency’s apathy.”...
...Chavous says Bonds is “certainly going to push” to add elements of Cheh’s bill back into her legislation, should fiscal impact estimates make it her way. But otherwise, Bonds seems intent on moving her bill forward, not Cheh’s—it will likely need a committee mark-up before it heads to the full Council, which would have to take two votes on it before the end of the year.
If Bonds does so, Cheh says she will use some parliamentary maneuvering to bring her original bill back up for a vote, perhaps by moving it as an “amendment in the nature of a substitute” to Bonds’ bill, swapping in her language instead. That’s an aggressive move, but she suspects her colleagues would support her, since her legislation has already been vetted and attracted the full support of advocates. It’s also a bit of a legacy issue for Cheh, who has been hoping to get this bill done before she retires at the end of the year.
“I’m leaving, so I don’t matter anymore, and she’s probably staying, so maybe my colleagues don’t want to go to a full-court press on this,” Cheh says. “I don’t know what the dynamic will be. But I’m going to try.”
Huston certainly hopes she succeeds. If she doesn’t, Huston is not sure where advocates will turn instead. She doesn’t expect working with Bonds will be all that productive, considering that her office “wasn’t communicating with the advocacy community” about the status of Cheh’s legislation for months before introducing her own bill seemingly “under cover of night.” She may well need to cast about for a new champion on the Council, and find someone who isn’t quite so daunted by the challenges of wringing information from city agencies.
