Trust the City Council to take a long and winding road to the straightforward issue of banning single-use bags at checkout counters.

What could have been a rather simple prohibition on plastic bags has mutated into a complicated bill to charge businesses fees for the bags — in two steps — and leave a ban unimposed until whenever.

Also, by focusing their attention solely on plastic, Council members appear to be disregarding the burden retailers have had to bear with plastic bag bans elsewhere. On Kauai and Maui, plastic bans have increased expenses for businesses because paper bags cost more and the bulkier sacks require more space for storage.

If the Council’s intention is environmental protection, plastic and paper should both be on the hit list because both contribute to pollution and unnecessary, irresponsible resource use.

The bill a Council committee cleared last week would create enforcement difficulties and incorporate a new bureaucracy to track bag inventory and collect fees. Requiring retailers to pay fees would encumber them with more paperwork, too.

The Council argues that the bill is needed because members doubt that the state Legislature will approve a bag ban, and Hono-lulu is the only county in Hawaii that doesn’t have one. Given the unpredictable nature of legislative workings, there is cause for concern, but putting the Council’s half-baked ban plan in place isn’t the answer. Besides, the measure in the Legislature, which cleared the Senate earlier this week, deals with both plastic and paper. 

The Council’s three-phase proposal would first charge businesses a 3-cent fee for each plastic bag they use for customer purchases. The fee would later go up to 5 cents per bag. After that, plastic bags would be banned completely. There are no time frames yet for each of the phases.

The fees present the Council with another problem. State law does not allow counties to charge them unless the money is used to pay for an official municipal service. So the fee has to be used to support the program, wherein comes the bureaucracy, and though the bill also designates the collected cash for recycling, it is unclear how recycling can be part of a bag ban.

The amount of money the fees will generate will likely be substantial, considering estimates that about 500 million bags are used in Hawaii every year. The loot that would flow into the city’s bank account would be more than enough to support the program, even if enforcement were to involve a corps of gold-plated bean counters.

It would be cynical to think that fees rather than the environment were the goal of the Council’s plan, but you never know.

If nothing else, the bill in the Legislature would funnel some of a 10-cent per bag fee consumers would pay to watershed protection. But the measure should supersede county bans because it would cover plastic or paper. On top of that, it would put the decision to pay or not to pay on customers. As to adding to the state’s bureaucracy, at least consumers will be less confused about where to direct their ire.

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Cynthia Oi can be reached at coi@staradvertiser.com.