May 4, 2008
Opinion
Let's put these bills out of their misery
by Jim Baron
Every year in the General Assembly there are good, thoughtful, worthwhile pieces of legislation introduced and passed to the betterment of the Ocean State.
And every year in the General Assembly there are truly lousy, ill-considered and meaningless or even counter-productive bills that are introduced. While many of these die a well-deserved, ignominious death in committee, others actually manage to become law, diminishing and demeaning this great state by their very existence as blots on our lawbooks.
Let’s talk about a few of the measures that are currently stinking up the Rotunda in the hope that drawing attention to them will lead to their quick demise. (Don’t bet on it, though.)
We Don’t Need a Bottle Bill. Just when you thought this horrible idea had been buried in the landfill forever back in the 90s, its bony hand reaches up from the grave to grab unsuspecting shoppers by the ankle, just like in that Stephen King movie. Perhaps all you have to know about this awful bill is that officials expect that there will be approximately $6.8 million in unclaimed deposits annually and the state is poised to scoop 75 percent of that or about 5.1 million for the general fund, leaving a paltry $1.7 million to the quasi-governmental corporation running the Johnston Landfill, the RI Resource Recovery Corp. (RIRRC).
The other thing you probably have to know is that it is sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Teresa Paiva Weed and any bill with heavy leadership support has an overwhelming chance of passing, its merits notwithstanding.
We already have to sort and categorize and arrange our rubbish, parceling it out to blue bins and green bins and some in the big green bags. Now we’re going to have to subdivide, once again make another collection of cans and bottles, that we will then have to put in our cars and return them to the store where we bought them, or one of several collection facilities the deficit-plagued state would have to build. Do you really want to be made to put a couple of dozen smelly old beer bottles in your back seat and drive them to the recycling center?
We already have a perfectly good law that requires recycling and allows the state to make money on the recycled materials. If that law was properly implemented and adequately enforced, we wouldn’t need a bottle bill, which was the reasoning when we passed the current law.
When we talk about state government nickel and diming us to death, what more literal example could there be, with 5 cents added to the cost of every beverage container you buy? A 12-pack of Pepsi or Budweiser? That will be an extra 60 cents on your register receipt. Two dozen bottles of Poland Spring? Add $1.20 to the store’s price.
I see where the state would benefit by skimming off the lion’s share of the unclaimed deposits, but I’m not really sure where Mother Nature would benefit.
If people aren’t adequately sorting recyclables in their own home before they put them out on the street, do you really expect they are going to chauffer their beer and soda bottles back to the store? Really? With gas costing what it does, how many bottles are you going to have to store up somewhere in your house or garage before it is worth going back to the store to get the nickels back on each of them?
This is either one of those well-intentioned, do-gooder bills that is never going to work the way its sponsor expected, or else it is a cynical attempt to raise money for the state by charging Rhode Islanders a deposit they aren’t going to redeem, thereby working exactly as its sponsor expected.
Either way, this bill should be hauled off to the dump.
...[Bottle Bill unrelated content removed]...
Those are just a few of the obvious clunkers in the legislative hopper. I’m sure there will be more before the session comes to an end in late June.
