As much as most consumers take them for granted, plastic shopping bags retailers dole out by the dozens are a scourge to the environment and local infrastructure. They aren't biodegradable, they're detrimental to wildlife and they break recycling equipment because so many consumers think that they're recyclable (but are very much not). St. Petersburg is a coastal city, which means they often wash out into the bay and the gulf. So the city's more forward-thinking electeds want them gone yesterday.
“The irony is, we chose to live in an environmentally sensitive place because we liked it. So with that comes some obligation to not make it a garbage can,” said Councilman Karl Nurse, who is confident the proposal will move forward on Thursday, July 26, and that it's got a pretty good shot before a full council.
“It would surprise me if we had fewer than three of the five votes we need just at hello,” he said.
If all goes well, St. Pete would be on pace to become the second city in the state to pass a plastic bag ban, following Coral Gables. For environmental groups like Surfrider Foundation that are pushing for these bans, especially in coastal communities, getting such a policy passed in one of Florida's largest cities would obviously be a huge victory.
The fact that only one city has such a ban in effect isn't so much a matter of political will being lacking than it is an arguably lopsided power dynamic between local and state government. You see, when Florida lawmakers (or the big-business lobbyists who are calling the shots) don't like something cities and counties are doing, they pass a bill that negates whatever it is a municipality wants to do — so for years cities were barred by Florida law from banning plastic shopping bags despite public support for doing so.
But Coral Gables, in defiance of state law, adopted a plastic bag ban (with exemptions for trash bags, bags for transporting pet waste, dry-cleaning, prescriptions as well as previously used or biodegradable bags). The city prevailed in ensuing litigation.
“Because of the way the law was written, it set up a set of laws for municipalities that had passed bans around a certain date and there was only one, Coral Gables, that had passed it in a certain time frame, and so they were the only local entity whose law was invalidated by the state statute…and that's why they ruled it unconstitutional,” said Mike Alfano, campaign manager of the Campaign to Defend Local Solutions, a group that is leading the fight against state-level preemption.
(Though Florida Retail Federation, Progresso and the State of Florida appealed).
With the plastic bag preemption now struck from the books, environmentalists in St. Petersburg see now as the best time to pass such a measure — and, possibly, other measures banning ecologically harmful substances from the city, like Styrofoam or plastic straws.
![]“At the moment, I think that this is our best shot, that this is the one where we have the strongest legal chance of success,” Nurse said of the plastic bag ban. “The state has preempted us from dozens of things, but this is the one where…our lawyers think this is our best opportunity to push back. So if we were successful, there could be others. It's really sort of staggering, how the legislature considers cities to be the enemy. This is the most hostile legislature we've had to cities in the 40-odd years that I've been [engaged in politics].”
Yet even if local governments are emboldened to bar items that are objectively a threat to local waterways and wildlife (not to mention the local aesthetics inarguably essential to tourism), there always looms on the horizon specter of the next legislative session, when lawmakers could devise a plan to out-maneuver communities.
Alfano cites Missouri as an example. There, a court said St. Louis — which has a higher cost of living than most areas of the state — could set its minimum wage higher than that of the rest of the state despite having been preempted from doing so. Then, state lawmakers there turned around an, as Alfano put it, “fast-tracked a preemption bill to essentially invalidate and overturn the St. Louis minimum wage.” That was after the new wage had gone into effect, which means that workers' pay got cut and there was nothing they could do.
So it's feasible that something similar could happen with Coral Gables and, if the plastic bag ban passes, St. Petersburg.
“I think that there's a mentality that folks at the state legislature think that they know better than local communities and want to have that control put in place,” Alfano said. “And a lot of times this is motivated, that we've seen across the country, by special interests advocating for the laws.”
Meanwhile, on the local level, officials in St. Pete are engaging in a public awareness/input campaign as they embark on finalizing their version of the ban.
On Thursday, they're starting with the Coral Gables version and hoping to fine-tune it to make it as easy as possible for retailers and consumers alike to get used to it. There will likely be a year-long grace period, Nurse said, so that stores can get rid of their plastic bag inventory and transition to another means of transporting goods (and training consumers on alternatives like reusable bags).
“To me, this is this year's version of recycling. There was some reluctance [people thought] it would never work,” Nurse said. “Now we see that two-thirds people in St. Pete who now have access to recycling use it regularly. It's just a transition.”
This article appears in Jul 20-27, 2017.
