Virginia Bails on Bag Bill, Tries to Ban Free Floating Balloons

Plastic-bag bill dies in state Senate

The desire of localities across Northern Virginia to tax single-use plastic bags has died its annual death in Richmond.

A measure by state Sen. Chap Petersen (D-Fairfax) to impose a 5-cent-per-bag tax on customers in retail outlets was “passed by indefinitely” – sent to a kind of legislative purgatory – on a 14-1 vote in the Senate Committee on Finance.

Funds raised from the proposed legislation would have been earmarked for efforts to protect the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Had Petersen’s measure made it out of the Senate, it would have faced an uphill climb in the House of Delegates. All previous efforts to either impose a bag tax, or allow localities to do so, died in past sessions of the General Assembly.

While I encourage those who want to to use reusable bags, I don't think it needs to be made mandatory. In some cases, reusable bags actually increase the chance of illness (being a fine way to spread and breed microbes). We use them, but we're not fanatics about it.

Today we dropped into a grocery store after exercise class, and Georgia did not have bags in the back of my car. To bag about 7 items took the checker 3 bags. Utterly unnecessary.

In other Virginia nanny state news, a Virginia lawmaker proposes ban on releasing balloons into atmosphere

A Virginia lawmaker says banning the release of helium balloons into the air could help save wildlife on land and in the water.

Balloons are fouling the state's beaches and can be deadly to wildlife, says Republican Sen. Jeff McWaters of Virginia Beach, who is sponsoring a bill to prohibit releasing lighter-than-air balloons into the atmosphere.

His bill would ban the intentional release of balloons inflated with helium or another lighter-than-air gas and require more than five minutes' contact with air or water to degrade.

Violations would carry a civil penalty of $5 per balloon, with proceeds going into the Litter Control and Recycling Fund.

The measure would supersede an existing law that bans release of 50 or more balloons in an hour.
McWaters' bill cleared the Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources Committee on a 9-6 vote Thursday and is headed to the full Senate.
. . .
Mark Swingle, director of research and conservation at the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center in Virginia Beach, called balloons an insidious form of litter that can travel great distances to remote stretches of Virginia's shoreline. A recent survey found as many as 150 balloons per mile of beach, he said.

Ed Clark, president of the Wildlife Center of Virginia in Waynesboro, said sea turtles are especially vulnerable to deflated balloons because they mistake them for jellyfish. "They ingest them, and that's the end of them," he said.

In addition, Clark said, balloons are often attached to nylon or plastic strings that are slow to degrade, and birds get entangled in them.

While I occasionally find loose balloon floating on the Bay or washed up on the beach, I look askance at the estimate of 150 per mile of beach. I've never seen anything approaching that. While these balloons do pose a mild threat to wildlife, I'd like to see some reliable estimate of the mortality from balloons compared to from other sources. I would guess it's trivial at best.

And what about enforcement. How are you going to detect and slap your $5 per balloon tax on the three year olds that inevitably let go of their balloon and start wailing about it?