Coalition presses bag-fee bill

With Earth Day just days away, environmentalists and retail merchants made a last-ditch effort Thursday to convince state lawmakers that a bill that would impose a statewide 10-cent fee on disposable plastic and paper checkout bags deserves to be heard and voted on.

"We’ve built this huge coalition of supporters, so we’re just asking the legislators, particularly the House leadership, to let the people vote on this; let the legislators vote," Stuart Coleman, Hawaii coordinator for the Surfrider Foundation, said during a news conference Thursday on the grounds of Iolani Palace.

The bill would not pre-empt any current or future plastic bag bans passed by any of the counties.

Hawaii’s first lady, Nancie Caraway, attended the news conference in support of the bill.

"Gov. Abercrombie and I are very anxiously awaiting the passage of this important, progressive, groundbreaking legislation," Caraway said. "It represents a rather unusual bringing together of environmental groups, concerned citizens and the private sector; (and) these kind of configurations don’t often happen in political life."

Although the governor strongly supports the bill, it is not part of his administration’s official package of priority legislation.

Retail merchants have testified throughout the session that they support the bag fee bill rather than plastic bag bans because neighbor island consumers have largely switched to using more-expensive paper bags.

The bill has been called a "money grab" by the Hawaii Tax Foundation and some state lawmakers because a majority of the revenue generated would go toward watershed protection — one of the governor’s priorities.

There are two other bills alive at the Legislature and scheduled for conference committees that propose funding for watersheds, through either allocating general funds or issuing capital improvement bonds.

"While we’re grateful for that interest, those are truly one-year allocations of funding for fiscal year ’13, whereas the bag fee (bill) goes on," said Mark Fox, director of external affairs for the Hawaii chapter of the Nature Conservancy.

Earlier this month the Senate Energy and Environment and the Ways and Means committees opted to "gut and replace" House Bill 2483 (originally written to amend the state planning act) to save the bag-fee bill after it became clear that House support was waning. Now it’s back before the House in a new incarnation, but no conference committee has been scheduled.

"As far as we can tell, there’s no opposition, and we’re wondering who is this invisible opposition and why aren’t they standing up, and what is stopping this from moving?" said Joy Leilei Shih, a Ph.D. candidate in the Oceanography Department at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

When asked who she thought the "invisible opposition" could be, Caraway responded that she thinks it’s "really more useful and fruitful to focus on the support."

"The end of session is always tense and full of creative issues that come up," she said. "I really don’t think there’s a cabal out there against it; I think folks just need to understand that we are correcting a negative and making a really strong positive."