How does the GOP-led legislature fail NC? Let’s start with plastic bags | Opinion

The new North Carolina state budget is a Pandora’s box of skewed spending and bad policy, but one item tells the whole story of the Republican leadership’s disregard for fairness and public policy.

It’s a provision that prohibits counties and cities from banning single-use plastic bags or Styrofoam containers, such as those used with takeout orders. The language blocks a move by Asheville and Buncombe County to impose such a ban. Durham was considering doing the same.

The counter move on bag bans may seem a minor issue compared to the Republican-led legislature’s extended starving of public schools, its extreme gerrymandering of election districts and its radically changing election laws to disenfranchise voters.

But the move exemplifies several of the legislature’s most serious flaws. Consider the ways:

Using the budget to block local plastic bag bans is an end run of the legislative process. This tactic makes law without public review or debate. Tying it to the budget, which also includes much-needed Medicaid expansion, made it all but impossible for Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to veto it.

This item was inserted to please the North Carolina Retail Merchants Association. It’s another example of how special business interests get what they want in Raleigh while public interest gets ignored.

Blocking the ban overrules local governments despite overwhelming support for the measure. Republicans once said that the government closest to the people governs best. But this legislature keeps a short leash on local governments, especially Democrat-dominated cities and counties.

Stopping a local effort to reduce plastic waste is bad for the environment, particularly when the effects of climate change are clearly upon us.

This same legislative majority wants to add another natural gas pipeline in North Carolina to support the burning of fossil fuels far into the future. It has stripped protections from millions of acres of wetlands while shielding the polluting industrial hog farming industry. Meanwhile, it has severely underfunded the Department of Environmental Quality.

Now it’s blocking local efforts to keep plastics from polluting waterways, clogging storm drains and jamming recycling equipment.

It’s not as if liberals in Asheville and Buncombe County were proposing something extreme. Five states and more than 500 localities have adopted plastic bag bans.

Asheville and Buncombe County reviewed how those bans were designed to make ordinances that avoided others’ mistakes. Plastic bags and containers would be banned and the paper bags that replaced them would need to be made of 40 percent recycled content. A survey in which 7,000 Asheville residents responded showed 80 percent approval.

Anna Alsobrook, a member of Plastic-Free WNC, told WLOS news last May: “This is not a radical thing. We are quite behind the times in pushing something like this forward.”

And it’s a successful thing elsewhere. In Connecticut, plastic bag bans started with municipalities and led to a statewide ban in 2021. The use of plastic bags was phased out to bring down store inventories. Customers who used a plastic bag during the phaseout were charged 10 cents per single-use checkout bag

Samantha Dynowski, state director of the Sierra Club’s Connecticut chapter, told me, “Pretty much overnight people figured out how to bring their own bags. It was amazing. The 10-cent fee was enough to make people change.”

Unfortunately, North Carolina is being blocked from going down the path to less plastic polluting waterways, littering roadsides, harming wildlife, impairing recycling machines and filling up landfills.

Instead, North Carolina will stay on the path of hiding unpopular policy in the budget, encroaching on local autonomy and treating the environment like a trash can.

But, despite those costs to democracy and the environment, North Carolinians can still get and discard millions of plastic bags for free.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett @ newsobserver.com