A bill for an ordinance amending Chapter 48 of the Denver Revised Municipal Code by adding Article IX entitled Fee on Disposable Bags. A bill for an ordinance amending Chapter 48 of the Denver Revised Municipal Code by adding Article IX entitled Fee on Disposable Plastic or Paper Bags and amending Chapter 24 by adding conforming amendments. The last regularly scheduled Council meeting within the 30-day review period is on 1-6-20. The Committee approved filing this item at its meeting on 12-3-19.
Madam Secretary, please close the voting, announce the results. 1212 Eyes Accountable. 1289 has been published. All right. That brings us set last to our final courtesy hearing of the evening. Councilwoman Torres, will you please vote count about 1176 on the floor. I move that council bill 19 dash 1176 be ordered published. Thank you. It has been moved and seconded. The courtesy public hearing for council bill 1176 is open. We have one, two, three, four, five, six people signed up to speak on this item. So if you have come to speak on this, this is the bill on the fee on disposable bags. If you have signed up to speak for this, I will ask you to come up to this empty front bench right by the microphone. And then when I call your name, step up to the podium. First up is Nolan Gaul. We? Hi. My name is known call. I a third grader, a student at Ashley Elementary. I want to be. I want plastic bags not to be a part of America. My sisters also sea turtles. And now they're dying from plastic bags. Sea turtles eat plastic bags thinking they are jellyfish. Plastic bag from Colorado travel to the oceans with big storms and winds. Please ban plastic bags in Denver to show the world we care about our sea life and oceans. We want sea turtles to exist for a long, long time. Thank you. Thank you. Next up, Randy Moorman. Good evening, Mr. President, and members of Denver City Council. My name is Randy Moorman and I am the community campaigns director at Echo Cycle and the vice president of Recycle Colorado. I'm here to speak in favor of Bill 19, Dash 1176 on establishing fees for disposable plastic and paper bags. We have a plastics pollution problem and virtually all the plastic ever created. About 8.3 billion tons still exists on planet Earth today. 315 million tons are produced annually, and that amount is projected to quadruple within 30 years. Only 9% of plastic ever produced is recycled. The rest persists somewhere in landfills or as litter in our environment. The problem is that plastic never completely goes away. Plastics always break down when exposed to the elements, but they never completely go away. They simply get smaller and smaller. And the toxic chemical additives used to give them their desirable characteristics are released into the environment. Getting into our water, soil and ultimately in the food we eat. Both paper and plastic bags have negative environmental impacts. Plastic bags are made from nonrenewable. Natural gas, are more easily littered, will not biodegrade and pose a threat to wildlife and ecosystems. Americans currently throw away 100 billion plastic bags every year or 300 bags per person. We use these bags for just an average of 12 minutes, but they continue to persist in our environment. Paper bags, however, also have negative impacts. They require more water to produce, consume more energy during transport and contribute to deforestation. Reusable bags help us reduce these environmental impacts throughout the life of the bag. Denver residents pay for the litter and pollution caused by disposal bags to their tax dollars, paying for litter, cleanup on our streets, at our parks and open space and along our rivers. Disposable bags, clog sorting equipment and contaminate materials at recycling centers and local composting facilities, adding to processing costs and reducing the value of outputs. Placing a fee on the use of any disposable bag, paper or plastic sends a clear message that one type of bag is not better than the other, and that the larger problem is the use of single use disposable packaging. Bag fees are a proven strategy to significantly reduce the use of all disposable bags in other cities. 300 cities across the country have some sort of ordinance regulating disposable bags. A dozen of those cities are now here in Colorado. Disposable bag use in the city of Boulder decreased by 68% within the first year of its disposable bag fee. Similarly, Washington, D.C., salary reduction of over 60%. The bag fee is an important and impactful first step toward reducing plastic pollution and climate change. And therefore, I encourage you to support this bill. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Next up, Duane Gal. My name is Dwayne Gall. I've been a resident of Denver for 50 years, and plastic bags have always been one of my concerns. You've heard previously testimony from my grandson. His generation is going to be impacted by plastic and the use of plastic more than my generation. I would like to share an experience I recently had. I just returned from India a few weeks ago and in India they have been planning plastic bags in some of their states for over 20 years. There is a huge push now within India and legislation is being passed to ban single use plastic in the entire country. We saw many posters and other promotions advocating this. We had many purchases we bought in India from various sources of the smallest vendor to the bigger stores. We never received a plastic bag. We received some very creative cloth bags, other kinds of materials. So it's very inspiring to me to say that of a country like India, with all the struggles they have in their economy and their society can ban plastic bags, that certainly Denver ought to be able to come up with a plan. Thank you. Thank you. Next up, Mohammad Khan. Good evening, counsel. My name is Muhammad Khan, I I'm president of Council nine and I work downtown as a Denver resident and a workforce member of Denver. I think we have a plastic problem. You. The problem with plastic is it never goes away. It will break down to smaller and smaller elements and exist as microplastics which exist in our water and our food and even in our body. Plastic impacts wildlife and ecosystems. Plastic bags are made from nonrenewable natural gas, and they cause a litter problem which a city residents pay for. On my way here from Capitol Hill, I saw four plastic bags flying in the air. Paper bags are not a good solution either. They are also meant for single use. And as Brandy said already, we average you each person use on average one bag every day. Having a fee is important and impactful for a step towards reducing plastic pollution and climate change. And Boulder is an example for us. Some people might believe that having this fee would not be a good suggestion. I can assure you at my company we started a program where we where we went to zero waste in two years just by providing activities where people were rewarded for good behaviors like reusing their bags. Please support Councilwoman Black's back fee ordinance as a key first step towards climate change that we have talked about a lot. Thank you. Thank you. Next up, Chairman Sekou. James the Ku Klux Klan movement. Self-defense. Come on. Yo. Are you kidding me? I expect more creativity than charging people for plastic bags so they can get them. I'm gonna give you a living example. In the last election. What we did as candidates who were poor is that we went to our constituency and told them, give me, give us all your plastic bags sitting in your house. They said, What are you going to do if we put our campaign material in the bags tied to their door and used it? It had no value. We got the bags for free. The poor people had to be creative in what we do. Yeah. That requires creativity. Not sitting up here trying to figure out another way how to pass on taxes to poor people. Now, we had to charge for the bags. We can't afford to buy no bed. Well, we take the bad guys, bus it, and then we put it inside another bag. So that other bag is used to carry the groceries home. Especially now those who can't be walking around with these heavy bags on the books trying to get home. So this is definitely an act for the privilege and not the poor. And that's what we need to be up there. To think about other folks other than your own class interests. So I suggest you think about this. So you think about it and be creative. Learn how to take a lemon and turn it into lemonade. Because even if you pass this. What you gonna do with the bags? It's already here that you get out of town. And the corporations who give you the money to run to do this mess. No, no, no. The platter is us, is the people. And what we do with the resources that we're getting and the technology that we got because it is about the bags. And we need to put a fee on the bags that we need to put up big on city council so that we can eliminate government so we don't have them and then will pay you not to get up there. Because this is straight up bullshit. Thank you. Next up, Jesse Pierce. Jesse Pierce represented for Denver Homicide Low Black Star Action, more for self defense, positive action to Movement for Social Change as well as the Universal African People's Organization and Unity Party. Colorado. And I'll be your next mayor in 2023. We are in favor of this, despite the fact that it is going to affect so-called minorities and poor people of color and marginalized and poor communities. We have a crisis, as we already know about the housing, but we're being told we have a crisis with this climate change. Now, my question is, the planet goes under, we're still on the bottom. So how is this benefiting poor people, how this is benefiting black people, houses benefiting so-called people of color, minorities in the city? We are going to we already have enough taxes. We're paying we're paying for sales tax. We're paying for other taxes. We are not seeing any kind of benefit from these sales tax. We are and I can't even afford to live in the city. So you want to taxes some more, maha some plastic bags. My question is, is this going to pertain to oh, shoot, this is going to pertain to all grocery stores, all food chains, all places where you get plastic bags. This is Wal Mart. This is Target such as Walgreens, such as all Safeway, King Soopers, all these places. Is this going to be applied to every single development department store where you get these plastic bags and then are you going to replace these plastic bags with the green sustainable bags which are for reuse? You can use them multiple times. Those are the questions I had. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes our speakers on this item. Are there any questions from members of council? Councilman Flint. Thank you. I have I have some questions for our city attorney and. I already set her up for them. So this will be a sort of a back and forth colloquy. I know that the Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that the bag fee in the Aspen case was a fee and not a tax in the city of Chicago. They just went out and went ahead and called it a tax. Knowing going into this that it is already been decided that it's a fee. I'm not going to argue that it's a tax, but I am still troubled by my own thought process. He's saying that this really is a tax because it's unlike any other fee tabor exempt that we have. And so I just had some questions for Christian Crawford, our counsel, to maybe walk me through the reasoning behind the Aspen decision, because when we charge every person in the checkout line, whether they're poor or rich, they charge they pay the same $0.10 we're paying that. The customer is not paying that to us. So it's not our fee. They're paying it to the store and then the store remits 60% of it to us. That's exactly how they do sales tax. That's exactly how the gas tax works. I. So why why what was the court's reasoning for saying this is not a tax? I guess what I was working up to and I didn't I didn't get to the committee and and and so but my thinking was that if we put this on the ballot, if we made a referral and said, can we charge a ten cent tax per bag in the city or county of Denver that would be overwhelmingly approved. And and almost all of my thoughts that this is a tax would be would be addressed. Kirsten, could you walk us through the court's reasoning in Aspen? Sure. Kirsten Crawford, Legislative counsel, I think backing up one step for everyone's benefit. As you know, in 1992, when Tabor passed, it became really important to understand the distinction between a fee and a tax, because taxes under TABOR require voter approval and fees do not. There is not only the case that Councilman Flynn is referring to that comes from the Supreme Court out of the city of Aspen. But there's also just a plethora of cases that talk about the difference between a regulatory charge and a tax. And taxes are imposed to defray the ordinary expenses of businesses, of business, of the government versus a regulatory fee has to be relate reasonably related to the to the program, not specifically limited to services that the government provides, but a regulatory program. So the cost of administering the program and here the predominant purpose and that's the language out of the city of Aspen case. The predominant purpose of this fee is to alter the behavior in the nature of sustainability and protecting the environment. And so in the case that you're referring to, the city of Aspen adopted a 20% waste reduction fee that was imposed by grocers charge to the customer. And the purpose there, when the Supreme Court analyzed it, was to change the behavior of how race reduction occurred in the city of Aspen. If you compare the case to our proposed ordinance, there are some similarities and we have limited and enumerated the purposes for what our portion of the fee can be used for, which is as a general proposition to reduce the use of single use plastics. Mm hmm. Do we require the retailers to account for because the ordinance sets up rules and a structure for the retailers. They may only use their 40% of the fee for certain things, and they must be related to the reusable bag program and customer education and setting up their systems for collecting in order. Do we have systems in place to ensure that Walgreen's and King Soopers and Safeway and Target and all the other entities that were mentioned are using this fee for that purpose and not for their bottom line profit. And since that's a little bit more policy oriented, I didn't. Warn you about that one, but. That's okay. That's okay. I'm happy to take a stab at it, but I wonder if that would be maybe better suited for the sponsors or even solid ways to answer how. Councilwoman Black We have met with the Department of Finance and so solid waste will be managing the program and they'll work with the Department of Finance to establish the rules and determine how we enforce that. Randy Moorman, who is here from Ego Cycle, talked about the BOULDERS program, which has been very, very effective and we'll learn a lot from how they've been managing it for six years now. Mm hmm. Okay. Charlotte. Do you have anything to add? I'm just curious how the retailers who retain 40% of this revenue will be held accountable for how they use it? Yeah. Charlotte Pit Solid Waste Management. My understanding is once the bill passed, will have the ability to do some rulemaking and put in some processes to look at how we audit that. I don't have an answer for you today, though, but. Will we'll learn. From some of the other communities and put something in place. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Councilman. Councilman Hines. Thank you, Mr. President. I want to thank Councilwoman Black for bringing this forward. This is really important. I think it's critical for our habitability and. We're still in questions. We will have time for comments. And maybe that was a fancy dressed question, but just to make sure. I apologize. I am getting ahead of myself. Okay. All right. We'll get back to you. Thank you, Gotham. And. All right. Seeing no other questions. The public hearing for Council Bill 1176 is closed. Comments by members of Council Councilwoman Black. Thank you, Mr. President. I I'm not sure if I supposed to give my, like, real comments tonight because we're actually voting on it next week. Tonight, we're just moving it forward. We're publishing it. So I'll have some abbreviated comments. But I had a couple of things I wanted to share with you. This is from a report from the United Nations. It says it's estimated that between 1 to 5 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year. 5 trillion is almost 10 million plastic bags per minute. If tied together, all these plastic bags could be wrapped around the world seven times every hour. So while I love it that people repurpose their bags and reuse their bags, we are not repurposing 1 trillion or 5 trillion bags. And so the goal is to reduce the use of the bags. Another fun fact I wanted to share with you is that in 2018, the term single use was Collier's dictionary word of the year. Because worldwide we're starting to recognize the dangers of all the single use packaging and plastics in our planet. And Randy had some great statistics there. They don't go away. Everything that was ever produced is still here on our planet, and much of it is getting smaller and smaller, and it actually becomes more and more dangerous the smaller it gets. To answer some of the questions asked by some of our speakers. It does apply to all retailers. In fact, they are supporting the bill. So it applies to your 7-Eleven, your convenience store target, J.C. Penney's. It does not apply to restaurants. They are all in support of it. It's been a very collaborative effort. Randy, thank you again. He helped me a lot and I drove him crazy. Debbie Ortega had a bill similar in 2013 and she's really kept the flame alive. And a lot of us here are supporting this tonight. I call it a bring your own bag ordinance. Some cities like Chicago or now Washington, D.C., called Skip the Bag Ordinance. Either one is okay, but the goal is to reduce the use. In Denver alone, about 200 million bags are used each year, and that's just in Denver. But based on what we've learned from other cities, we expect that that will decline by 70%, which is just a really big victory. And we will have fewer bags contaminating our compost, contaminating our recycling facilities where they jam machinery and cause costly delays and break the machinery. And we'll have less litter in our world and we will have less of those microparticles that are now being found everywhere. There was just a story on the news that they are have been found in icebergs in the Arctic and they're not sure how they got there. If they came in the air, they're not sure how they got there. But it's a it's a dangerous problem for our world. And the only way we're going to solve it is to reduce the use of single use plastics. And so this is just a first step. Thank you for everyone who supported it. I really, really appreciate it. And I'm excited to see how it turns out in Charlotte. I'm really excited to be working with you. Thank you, Councilwoman. Councilman Hines, did you have some comment? I have a couple of questions. Is now the right time? Yes. Thank you, Mr. President. I do want to again thank Councilwoman Black this time in the in the appropriate period. There's a lot of work that you've done on this on this bill. I think there's you know, it's one thing to accomplish something that is difficult. There is something even harder. The next step beyond that is to make it look easy. And I want to quote the Westword, who's actually quoting us. And and in the Westword, they said that in committee, the biggest argument that was there was a disagreement, a kerfuffle, so to speak, between president, clerk and I about whether dog poop bags are compostable. If we get to committee and the biggest issue is whether dog all dog poop bags are compostable, then Councilwoman Black, you've done a lot of work to make it easy. Easy for us to vote. So the vote is quite easy for me. So thank you for all your hard work. Thank you, Councilman. Councilman Ortega. Thank you, Mr. President. I just want to thank Councilwoman Black for her work in helping to bring this forward. Lots of meetings with people across the city have taken place. But the one thing I want to mention that has not been said, and I think it's important to mention, is that the money that will be collected by the city of Denver will be used not only for education, but to buy reusable bags and to get them distributed across the city so that people who don't already have them and most people already have multiple reusable bags because we pick them up everywhere at various events and in functions that are held where they're given away for free. But these will be free reusable bags that will be distributed more, make sure they're distributed through the schools and to our senior centers and to places where people may not have already picked them up. And so there should be no reason. And since 2013, one of the things we have done in my office is use part of my budget to purchase reusable bags. We distribute them at the mayor's cabinet, in the city meetings and other community meetings that I attend on a regular basis. So we have been doing that, making sure that there's no reason for people not to have more than one, you know, of their own reusable bag that they can take to the grocery store. Or other places. So thank you, Councilwoman Black, for all of your efforts in moving the needle on this. I know Councilwoman Gilmore and Councilman Clark have been part of the the meetings that we have had with different industry stakeholders and community leaders. And so I'm excited that we really have unanimous support across the board to move this forward. Thank you, Councilwoman. Councilwoman Gilmore. Dog poop. Thank you. Councilman Clark, I want to thank Councilwoman BLOCK and Councilwoman Ortega and Councilman Clark for your partnership. Councilwoman Black and I started this journey early this year on going on tours to A-1 Organics, to the Denver and Arapahoe Facility as well. And really, this is just the beginning for us as a city. There's a big push for us to reduce our use of single use plastics throughout the entire city and county of Denver. And so this is one step. And the other thing that I think is important to know is that this goes into effect July 1st, 2020. So there is going to be an outreach and engagement and a media campaign along with it so that we make sure that all of our constituents know that this is coming and can prepare and maybe start to make some of those behavior changes right now. So thank you. Thank you, President Clark. Thank you, Councilwoman Gilmore. See no other comments I will just end with and because I know we have this on final reading next week, so I have some more to say then. But I just want to also say thank you to Councilman Black for your awesome leadership on this. Councilman Ortega for spearheading this and keep your eyes on the prize comes from Gilmore for letting me come on as a co-sponsor with all of you for those very excited about it. And I want to thank all our speakers for coming, but Nolan is still back there. I just want to say you're awesome. You're rock star. We need more third graders showing up and telling us what to do. And your voice is changing the world tonight. And I know you're going to continue to change the world with that voice. Some things are worth staying up past your bedtime for, and this is one of them. So thank you very much. And I just want to thank I heard multiple people say, including Councilwoman Gilmore just said it again, this is just the beginning and I'm excited for everything that's to come. So with that, we are. Madam Secretary, I think we're ready to vote. Roll Call. Black Eye CdeBaca I think I go more I Herndon. I. Hands. Hi. Cashmere. All right. Kenny Ortega. Hi. Sawyer Torres. Hi, Mr. President. Hi, Madam Secretary. Please close voting. Announce results. 1212 hours comes Bill 1176 has been published. Seen no other business before this body. This meeting is adjourned.