Austin mayor to push ban on single-use plastic bag

Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell and two other council members will introduce a resolution at the next council meeting Aug. 4 calling for the “phase-out of single use plastic check-out bags” in the city.

The bags “cost Austin taxpayers a significant amount of money,” Leffingwell wrote. “In fact, Austinites use about 263 million plastic bags annually, costing the city about $850,000 per year for collection, litter clean-up, landfill management and recycling contamination. This figure does not include the cost to our environment.”

Makes you wonder what impact single-use plastic bags have on the meager City of Dallas budget. Dallas needs to join such cities as San Francisco; Portland, Ore.; and Washington, D.C., in outlawing these things. Hey, aren’t we supposed to be this super-duper “Green City” or is that, like so much else, just a lot of talk?

Leffingwell said Austin engaged in an 18-month voluntary “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” campaign with Whole Foods, Target, Walmart, Walgreens and Randalls (Tom Thumb to those of us here) hoping to achieve a 50 percent reduction of plastic bags sent to the landfill. The campaign resulted in only a 20 percent reduction, however, and that simply wasn’t good enough for Leffingwell. Hence his push for an out-right ban.

“Our resolution calls on the City Manager to conduct a stakeholder process and develop an ordinance to bring back to Council this November,” Leffingwell wrote. “Concerned citizens and affected businesses will have a chance to help shape the timeline of a phase-out and determine if any exceptions should be made for certain types of businesses or situations.”

Anyone listening on the Dallas City Council?

Another reason to love Austin

The Austin City Council has declared Thursday Austin Lounge Lizard's Day in the state capitol and to mark the occasion the Lizards will be playing a couple of tunes during the Council's meeting that day.

Now that's what I call having your governmental priorities in order.

The city is getting together to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the band's formation. The climax will come with a Feb. 20 concert at the Student Union Auditorium on the University of Texas campus.

If you are unfamiliar with the Lizards, it is a satirical bluegrass band, a union of Stan Freeberg and Ralph Stanley. One of the band's more priceless songs is Dallas, Texas that ends each chorus with "So I'm going back to Dallas, Texas, to see if anything can be worse than losing you" and a bridge that contains the line "Most cities have soul, but Dallas must have been at the bank when they were passing it around."