Mayor Jim Kenney doesn’t often veto legislation, but he may do so at least one more time before he leaves office next week.
Among the final measures City Council passed before ending its work for the year was a bill requiring supermarkets and other stores to charge customers 15 cents for paper bags to carry their groceries home.
Sought by environmentalists for more than a decade, the bill aims to build on a plastic bag ban that passed four years ago. Advocates want more people to switch to reusable shopping bags and totes rather than single-use bags of any type.
“We’re revealing to you, the customer, that you have been paying for a [single-use] bag, and now you have the option to refuse that by bringing your own bag,” said Maurice Sampson, Eastern Pennsylvania director for Clean Water Action, who helped write the bill.
Council approved the law Dec. 14 in a 13-2 vote. When a bill passes by such a wide margin and the mayor vetoes it, council often votes to override and the measure becomes law.
Once every four years, however, the mayor can kill bills in a way that makes them harder to resurrect.
Since it’s the end of City Council’s four-year term, Kenney can simply decline to sign bills, which will result in pocket vetoes. There’s no opportunity for overrides and any unapproved bills are dead. They would have to be reintroduced by the new council, which will be seated in January and may have other priorities.
The Kenney administration has criticized the bag-fee bill, arguing it would hurt low-income residents and small shops.
“I do not expect him to sign it,” Sampson said. “All the signs that we’ve been reading are telling us that he’s not going to.”
Meanwhile, the administration isn’t saying if Kenney will give his approval or let the measure expire on Dec. 31.
“The mayor has until the end of the year to sign any outstanding bills,” spokesperson Sarah Peterson said last week. The bag bill “is under review.”
Why another bag bill?
Kenney signed the city’s plastic bag ban almost exactly four years ago. Councilman Mark Squilla, the main sponsor, said it would help keep trashed bags off the streets and out of the waste stream, and prevent plastic from entering the environment.
Squilla had originally proposed a ban on thin plastic bags and a 15-cent fee on paper and thicker plastic bags, but the fee was axed over perceptions that residents would see it as yet another new tax.
At the time, the soda tax, Kenney’s signature legislative achievement, was less than three years old and still being hotly contested. The mayor was opposed to any kind of bag fee.
Sampson and others praised the bill but predicted that the lack of a fee and of enforcement provisions would limit its impact. Squilla acknowledged the flaws, but following years of failed efforts to ban plastic bags, said it was best to pass something and fix it later.
Once the law went into effect in 2021, plastic bag use at 10 stories in a city-commissioned study fell almost to zero. Use of paper bags jumped from 18% to 46%, and use of reusable bags rose from 22% to 42%.
However, the study did not look at the city’s hundreds of corner stores or at businesses like food trucks, which continue to routinely give out cheap plastic bags.
In addition, because of confusing language in the bill, some markets concluded that thicker plastic bags are not covered by the ban and simply switched to those, Sampson said. Others gave out technically reusable but low-quality bags that quickly degrade and become trash, he said.
Concerns about cost and equity
If Kenney signs the bill into law, after 90 days retailers will be barred from using most single-use plastic bags and non-recyclable paper bags, regardless of their thickness. There are a few exceptions, including handle-less bags meant for certain uses inside markets, such as wrapping meat.
After 60 days, businesses that want to provide recyclable paper bags will have to charge 15 cents apiece and indicate the fee on a receipt. They’ll also have to post signs informing customers about the fee.
The Kenney administration has argued the bill raises equity concerns, as it could burden low-income residents, allow stores to price-gouge customers, and harm small stores, Metro Philadelphia reported.
The fee “may ultimately push Philadelphians to shop outside of the city limits to avoid this added cost or push businesses outside of the city,” said Télyse Masaoay, a staffer at the the city’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, at a council hearing earlier this month.
She also suggested the fees should be collected by the city and go toward environmental justice initiatives, but Squilla said the administration had told him that would not be feasible, per Metro Philadelphia. “The goal of the legislation is not to have people pay for bags. It’s just to bring your own bag,” Squilla said. “This is not a revenue generator.”
In other places, a quick adjustment
Concerns over the fee’s impact on lower-income households are misplaced, according to Sampson and other advocates. They say those residents stand to gain the most from the law, since they live in neighborhoods most impacted by plastic trash on the street.
Rather than paying the fee, they will quickly realize the benefit of switching to reusable bags, which is the intent of the law, Sampson said.
“People say, ‘oh my god, you’re giving all this money to supermarkets,’” he said. “That’s not going to happen. People are not going to buy bags, because they’re not stupid.”
“After these bills are passed, the experience has been in other places that the low-income community adjusts first,” he added.
He also said shoppers are already paying for single-use bags through higher costs at businesses that provide them. Under the new law, stores will no longer have to deal with the hard-to-control cost of stocking up on bags, and are likely to pass on the savings by limiting future price increases for groceries and other products, Sampson argued.
Attaching a cost to all single-use bags — even plastic bags — is ultimately better than banning them because it provides shoppers with some flexibility and helps prevent certain perverse outcomes, he said.
New Jersey strictly banned disposable plastic bags this year, as well as paper bags at larger stores. But as a result delivery services started routinely providing reusable totes and some people have already accumulated large numbers of them, Sampson said.
“They are now seeing reusable bags in their litter. When people have no options, they now buy a reusable bag. There are people that will have hundreds of reusable bags, because all their delivery comes in a reusable bag,” he said. “If a bag is free, it becomes trash.”
