NYC Starts Rolling Out 5-Cent Plastic Bag Fee, Defying State Officials

By Kings County Politics News Service

NEW YORK, NY — The City’s Department of Sanitation this week began sending out notices to stores throughout the city, reminding them that the coming five-cent fee on all plastic bags will become law on Feb. 15, 2017, and that they need to post signage to notify customers.

The City Council passed the fee in May. It was originally supposed to go into effect this October.

However, after lawmakers in Albany pushed back against the ordinance — the state Senate outlawed it unanimously, and the Assembly was poised to do the same — the city agreed to wait until February to put the law into effect, in the meantime amending the law's wording more to state officials' liking.

The ordinance passed the City Council, 28-20.

While City Council Member Brad Lander (Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Kensington) was a prime sponsor of the bill, a majority of the Brooklyn delegation voted against it, 8-6. In fierce opposition of the measure were councilmembers Inez Barron, Robert Cornegy Jr., Chaim Deutsch, Mathieu Eugene, Vincent Gentile, David Greenfield, Darlene Mealy and Mark Tryeger.

State Sen. Simcha Felder, representing Brooklyn's heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park, sponsored the measure in the senate to outlaw the five-cent fee. He has argued the fee is nothing more than another tax on the poor and working class. Sen. Michael Cusick, a Democrat representing Staten Island, then sponsored the measure in the Assembly. He appeared to have enough support to cancel the nickel fee — until the city came to a last-minute agreement with Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie to postpone the blockade.

“It is clear that the vote to delay this bag fee was just a political ploy by the City Council to silence the widespread criticism of this additional tax on New Yorkers. They lied and deceived us,” said Bob Capano, spokesman for the Gristedes supermarket chain and a Republican candidate for Gentile’s term-limited council seat next year.

“In February, hard-working families and seniors on fixed incomes will now have to shell out more money just to take their groceries home," Capano said. "My customers are irate about this law. All of these ‘progressive’ policies are progressively bad for New York."

Lander said while the plastic bag got a short reprieve, its days of littering our trees, parks and oceans; clogging our storm drains and recycling equipment; and filling our landfills with tons of solid waste are numbered.

“We thank the Assembly for refusing to go along with the Senate’s anti-environmental overreach, and look forward to working with them toward thoughtful implementation,” he said.

But Cusick's spokesperson, Andrew Crawford, said while there has been discussions with the Assembly on amending the city ordinance, an agreement has not been reached.

“If there is no agreement reached, both Sen. Felder and Assemblyman Cusick will re-introduce their bills in January,” Crawford said.

Cusick believes he has enough support to outlaw the ordinance, Crawford said, as there is a “ton of overlap” between the number of progressives in the City Council who voted against the ordinance and assembly members who feel the same way.

A version of this article originally appeared on the Kings County Politics news site.