City amends bag ban to allow thick plastic

After a third round of revisions, a city ordinance that would ban plastic bags now allows some.

In giving the nod to amendments to an ordinance that will ban single-use plastic bags at store checkouts, the City Commission apparently moved Tuesday to appease both the paper and plastic industry.

The commission approved the ordinance last January, to take effect this coming January.

The commission held the first of two required public hearings on the amendments and also gave the first of two required approvals. The amendments will be part of the ordinance after a second reading and vote slated for Sept. 21.

Residents spoke both in favor and against the proposal.

“This is so stupid,” Tere Flores said of the measure, telling the commission that it should be working on bringing industry, “instead of worrying about stupid bags.”

Rose Timmer with Healthy Communities of Brownsville told the commission that the ban on plastic bags “is a good idea for Brownsville.”

“Plastic bags is not the way to go,” she said.

The ordinance goes into effect Jan. 1, 2011, and while banning the lightweight, single-use plastic bags, the amendments now specify that besides bags made of cloth or other durable material, reusable plastic bags would be allowed, but they must have a minimum of four millimeters in thickness.

Reusable paper bags also would be allowed but with a minimum of 65 pounds in basis weight. Both the reusable plastic and paper bags must have handles.

Furthermore, “the bag must be able to withstand a minimum number of 200 reuses,” the amendments noted.

Regular paper bags can still be used by convenience stores, restaurants for food carryout, pharmacies, veterinarians, and liquor stores.

Lightweight, one-time-use plastic bags would be allowed to prevent contamination from cooked, chilled or frozen food.

Dry-cleaning businesses would be able to continue using the plastic bags for laundered garments.

The amendments also provide that if a customer requests the use of single-use plastic bags and doesn’t have, buy or request a reusable bag, the establishment will charge the customer an “environmental fee” of $1, with 95 percent going to the city for recycling efforts and five percent to the establishment as an administrative fee.

Duro Bag Manufacturing Co., which opened its plant at the Port of Brownsville in 1969 and employs some 150 people, feared that the proposed amendments, as initially worded, would also ban paper bags, but Assistant City Attorney Allison Bastian indicated that the current revision was satisfactory to that firm.

And there could be more revisions.

“It’s not perfect, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t go back and tweak it,” Mayor Pat M. Ahumada Jr. said of the ordinance.