Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-Texas) issued letters Monday to 11 Texas cities that the Texas Supreme Court identified as banning plastics bags in violation of state law. These letters inform the cities of the court's recent decision that declared Laredo's bag ban illegal. The Texas Supreme Court recognized that state law forbids cities from imposing their waste management duties and expenses on citizens and retailers.
"It's a very appropriate move and good move by the attorney general," Bryan Mathew of the Texas Public Policy Foundation says about the letters. "The point is that cities are not above the law. The [Texas] Supreme Court came out with a recent ruling showing that state law prohibits plastic bag bans at the local level; therefore, because there is a straight prohibition, cities should not be passing these kinds of ordinances as they have been doing."
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"... [Attorney General] Paxton is doing the only thing that he can do, which is to inform the cities that their ordinances are now unconstitutional under Texas law. The Supreme Court found the correct decision. "We have a big debate going on right now in Texas over this issue of local control and that is, how much is up to the municipalities ... and how much gets determined by the state legislature? And in this case, the state legislature had clearly passed a law that governs these sorts of things. You have this dynamic a lot of times ... where the cities are actually being run by people who are more politically liberal than, say, the general population of the state or even the city. And so you end up with a lot of these ordinances and regulations that are designed to limit people's freedom or to enforce some sort of environmental law or something like that. And in our system, the state government sits atop the system. The state government creates municipalities, and the state government has the right to limit the authority of the municipality because the state government created the municipality in the first place." Tom Giovanetti, president |
To put it another way, Mathew says the attorney general is "totally justified" in notifying them that they're not complying with state law.
But what about the environment? Plastic bag bans are meant to help reduce waste and keep single-use plastic bags from ending up in bodies of water.
"The best way to answer that is to keep in mind that even if we ban single-use plastic bags, folks still need to get their groceries home somehow, whether through cotton tote bags, denser plastic bags, or paper bags – and each of those materials has an environmental impact," says Mathew.
"Some [alternatives] might be better in some areas like reducing damage to marine life and worse in other areas like energy consumption," he continues, "so that's why a 2015 report by the City of Austin, which has a plastic bag ban, showed that the net effect of their ... ban was an actual increase in the amount of plastic in the solid waste stream. So it's not effective at preserving the environment anyway."
The Texas Public Policy Foundation filed a brief in the Texas Supreme Court case that led to Laredo's bag ban being struck down.
"We believe that local governments should not be passing these kinds of ordinances," says Mathew.