Cohen embraces spirit of bag fee

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Northwest Bronx Councilman Andrew Cohen held an event to give seniors reusable grocery bags at The Riverdale Y last week, after the council last month passed a law mandating fees on plastic and paper bags at grocery stores and other locations. 

The June 17 give-away, where City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito stopped by, came even though the state Senate passed a bill banning fees on plastic bags days after the council legislation passed. The state proposal did not come up before the Assembly before its session ended on June 17.

Mr. Cohen defended the bag fee in a phone interview after his event. He said the new law limits the overuse of plastic bags within the jurisdiction of the City Council.

“New York City residents use 9 billion disposable bags per year,” he said. “The means was not as important to me as the goal. There were a variety of ways we could have gone about it.”

 Mr. Cohen said he still supports the bill and thinks that it will be effective in enticing shoppers to use reusable bags in the future. 

“[The city] pays $12 million a year just fishing [plastic bags] out of water treatment facilities,” he said. “There were talks about bans and there were talks about some other things and some people don’t like that the nickel is going to the supermarket, but I think this was a thoughtful, diligent compromise.”

End-of-session sprint

This year’s state legislature went several days into overtime, with both houses cramming in several late nights to address the major issues of the legislative year.

Laws passed at the last minute included a one-year extension of mayoral control of public schools and a modest ethics package.

Northwest Bronx Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz echoed Mayor Bill de Blasio’s discontent with the short extension and attacked Senate Republicans for what he called partisan lawmaking.

“I’m not in love with mayoral control. Having said that, I think it’s a disgrace it was only renewed one year,” the assemblyman said. “When mayoral control was first being debated in 2003 or whenever it is, there were people who advocated for it repeatedly saying, ‘You can’t judge mayoral control based on whoever the mayor is; this is about doing what’s right for the kids.’ Well, if that is the case, when we had a Republican mayor or whatever card he was that year, the same should be true today.”

The Assembly initially approved a three-year extension, but the stretch was reduced after the Senate voted.

Mr. Dinowitz also criticized a package of ethics reforms that required greater disclosure of  big donors, but fell short of closing the so-called “LLC loophole” — a provision that lets contributors circumvent limits by donating through multiple limited liability corporations.

“There were some reforms that happened and a number of them didn’t,” said Mr. Dinowitz. “The LLC loophole has been claimed, rightly so, by a lot of people to be the cause of a lot of the issues we have in the campaign finance system.”

Andrew Cohen, Melissa Mark-Viverito, NYC Bag Fee, New york State Legislature, Jeffrey Dinowitz, Anthony Capote

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