Backers of expanding the state bottle bill, who insist they have the majority support in the state Legislature, will have to wait at least another year before the measure can come up for a full vote after the committee charged with reviewing it voted to kill it.
The Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy moved to send the bill to study – a death sentence for bills – with some members saying the measure would cost businesses too much money, and that there are other ways to achieve its environmental purpose.
The Legislature has “taken the prudent course on not increasing fees, and on not increasing taxes, at this time,” said Rep. John Keenan, Democrat from Salem and the committee’s House chair.
The bill would have added a 5-cent deposit to water bottles, sports drinks, iced teas, and similar beverages not currently subject to the mandatory deposit. Opponents of the bill, who include some bottling companies and grocery stores, say it would cost retailers almost $58 million more per year in operating costs to handle the influx of recycled bottles.
But bottle bill advocates, who have been fighting for passage of the expanded bill for 14 years, say that the committee put business special interests ahead of the democratic process. At a rally on the steps of the State House earlier this week, MassPIRG and the Massachusetts chapter of the Sierra Club had called for the committee to report it out for a vote by the full Legislature – where the groups believe they have the votes lined up to pass it – instead of keeping it bottled up in committee.
“Welcome to the Massachusetts Legislature, thwarting democracy for 14 years,” said James McCaffrey, director of the Massachusetts Chapter of the Sierra Club. “Some of these folks missed a civics lesson where the Constitution begins with ‘We the people.’”
Pam Julian, legislative director of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, said the committee vote shows that the legislative process needs reform. House Speaker Robert DeLeo has publicly opposed the bill, and refused to consider including it in next year’s state budget. With the House chairman and all Democratic members of the committee directly appointed by and accountable to the Speaker, all it takes for a bill to be defeated is for top leadership to be opposed to it, Julian said. Legislators, specifically in the Democratic majority, are afraid to defy leaders or else they risk losing their status in the leadership’s inner circle.
“The leadership can block a vote,” Julian said.
It wasn’t just Democrats who opposed the measure, however. State Rep. Randy Hunt, Republican from Sandwich, said he opposed the bill because its environmental goals can be achieved in other ways. Hunt pointed out that curbside recycling programs are being expanded to more state residents, and that making people sort through their bottles to find the ones that can be redeemed for coins “actually complicates things.”
Keenan suggested he would be willing to revisit the bill in a future session if financial conditions are better and if other legislation currently being worked on in the Legislature to expand recycling programs doesn’t succeed. “I hope it is filed again,” Keenan said.
Phil Sego, of the Sierra Club, says Keenan can count on that and supporters remain committed to seeing it brought to the floor for a vote. “The bottle bill is not dead,” he said.
Homepage photo by Klearchos Kapoutsis and published under a Creative Commons license.