The sample accounting projects 589,439 voters would like to see the bag law put to a vote, according to an analysis of the early sample by CalWatchdog.com.

Counties can provide early random samples of signature validations before the due date of Feb. 25. Several counties, including Los Angeles, Contra Costa and Fresno, have not yet competed their samples.

The plastic bag industry submitted petitions with 809,000 signatures in December, more than the required 505,000 needed to force a referendum in Nov. 2016.

The law was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in Sept. 2014. If it goes into effect, larger stores would no longer be able to use the bags beginning this summer. The ban would begin for smaller volume stores in July 2016. 

If if the repeal initiative officially makes it onto the Nov. 2016 ballot, its qualification would delay the bag ban’s summer 2015 implementation until voters decided whether to keep the ban, or throw it out.

Records show advocates for the proposed referendum to overturn the ban have $3.2 million. A large number, $1.7 million, came from Hilex Poly, a South Carolina-based plastics firm, according to its latest campaign finance filing. The company was recently absorbed by NOVOLEX.

Hilex Poly donated a total of $1.8 million last year in California. The expenditure also included $40,000 to the Democratic State Central Committee of California, which has received Hilex money in the past.

Donors

Financing for the effort to overturn the legislation has come primarily from out-of-state donors like Hilex. Of the $3.2 million raised from nine donors, two are from California: Tustin-based Durabag gave $50,000 and Crown Poly in Huntington Park gave $12,000.

Additionally, the American Progressive Bag Alliance, a lobbying group for the plastics industry, continues to take in cash from large plastics companies. That cash infusion includes $680,000 from three Texas-based manufacturers in December alone.

“It’s expensive to fight, but California is important,” said Jon Berrier, a spokesman for the American Progressive Bag Alliance. “It’s one of those states where a policy is adopted and other states will look to it and see if it is something they want to do.”

Berrier said plastic bag manufacturing represents 2,000 jobs in California and 30,000 jobs nationally.

The major foe of the referendum is a conglomerate of environmental and grocery groups led by Californians Against Waste, which has formed a 501(c)(4) group, Protect the Plastic Ban, which reported $19,000 in donations in its first filing on Monday.

PPB’s largest donation so far is $2,500 from Chicobag, a Chico-based maker of reusable bags.

Groups

Another group launched Monday, California vs. Big Plastic, was funded with $9,000 from Californians Against Waste.

“We fully expect this to go to a vote, based on the signatures that were submitted and the numbers we are hearing,” said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste.

Murray expects to need $10 million even to stay competitive with what he projects will be $40 million raised by repeal supporters.

“We will be relying on big environmental donors,” Murray said.

The referendum shapes up as a contest between two titans of respective industries – environmentalism and plastics – and all the formidable money and politicking each is capable of.

The law is the first statewide ban on plastic bags in the U.S., although 150 municipalities in the state have imposed their own prohibitions.

Other towns, cities and counties around the U.S. have passed bans, including Austin, Tex.; Chicago, Ill.; Washington, D.C.; and Montgomery County, Md.

The majority of the bans were put into place by a vote of elected officials, rather than a popular vote. Challenges such as the one in California have had mixed results.

Challenges

Voters in Issaquah, Wash., rejected a challenge to a city-approved bag ban in Feb. 2014, one of the few places the ban has been put on a ballot.

City councils in Homer, Alaska, and Basalt, Colo., enacted plastic bag bans in 2012, which voters turned back in both cities.

Voters in Durango, Colo., also voted down an ordinance approved by the city council that required grocers to charge 10 cents for a plastic bag in 2013.

California, though, has seen relatively clear sailing on municipally imposed bag policies. Most of the bans in place in the state cover grocery stores. But some also extend to drug stores and restaurants. Many require or allow a 10 cent charge for paper bags.

A ban on plastic in Los Angeles County was met with legal action from agents of the plastics industry. Four residents and Hilex Poly sued the county, claiming a bag ban requiring merchants to charge for a paper bag amounted to an illegal special tax because it was not approved by voters as required by state law. They lost the case.

The city of Huntington Beach banned plastic bags in 2012. But a new city council is working to repeal that ban.

The city of Carpinteria was forced to pay attorney’s fees in a case filed by pro-plastic bag activist Stephen Joseph, a Los Angeles lawyer, who sued the city for including restaurants in its plastic ban. He claimed state health and safety codes trump a municipality’s ability to regulate businesses. He was awarded $11,500 in fees and the city rescinded the restaurant requirement.

Joseph, dubbed in a Time magazine headline as “the Patron Saint of Plastic Bags,” has sued several other cities over bag bans.

He declined to speak about the statewide bag ban.

The plastic-bag industry, unhappy with the law’s requirement that they shift to the manufacture of more durable multi-use bags, moved with a degree of swiftness and efficacy unusual in signature-collection campaigns.

Would-be ballot initiatives often rely on relatively unfocused or underfunded operations. But would-be referenda, as the Sacramento Bee reported, come with a legally mandated 90-day window to collect sufficient signatures. That left bag-ban opponents with just 90 days to rack up over 500,000 valid signatures.

But the American Progressive Bag Alliance, an industry group, launched its signature drive right on the heels of Gov. Jerry Brown’s own signature — of Senate Bill 270, the final bag-ban bill that landed on his desk in September. Fully prepared for a swift, successful effort, the Alliance got to work. Now, supporters of the referendum say they’ve cleared the 800,000 signature mark, although the final tally has not been officially counted.

An immediate victory

Cold, hard political reality provided much of the impetus behind the signature-gathering campaign. Not only was a hustle essential to landing the referendum on the ballot. Qualifying for ballot placement puts an automatic freeze on the implementation of the law to be challenged. Scheduled to kick in on July 1 of this year, the bag ban will be put on hold until the results of the referendum are certified.

What’s more, however, the time that delay buys manufacturers will result — at minimum — in an extra revenue boost of two years’ worth in single-use bag sales. As the Washington Post observed, the 16-month freeze triggered by ballot qualification “will allow manufacturers to continue producing plastic bags until voters act. Sales of those plastic bags could amount to $145 million,” according to Californians Against Waste, a pro-ban group that announced its estimate.

It’s a number that adds some perspective to the big industry outlay of over $3 million in signature collection.

An unfree market

The bag industry has not been alone in throwing its weight around over the dollars and cents on the line when Sacramento Democrats determined they wanted to take California’s many municipal bag bans statewide.

Backroom negotiations cobbled together enough support in Sacramento to outlaw the bags last year. Then the coalition of environmental, political and labor interests behind the ban fell apart at the last minute — only to be resurrected after further wrangling.

The result was a failed vote to ban single-use bags, followed swiftly by a do-over that succeeded in placing the ban on the books. What made the difference? Concessions to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which scuttled the first vote by turning against SB270 when it became clear a minimum 10-cent surcharge on bags would be part of the deal.

After cutting a deal with the Safeway grocery chain, dispelling union fears the surcharge would flow into executives’ pockets, not its own, the UFCW switched back to supporting SB270. The bill passed.

Tough sledding

Despite the unglamorous machinations that played out only partially behind the scenes, California’s bag bans — both at the state and local level — have managed to maintain a significant base of public support.

Already, as the Post reported, about a third of the state’s population is within local jurisdictions that have done away with single-use bags. Much of that comes from the ban by the city of Los Angeles that went into effect on July 1 last year.

Add to that Californians outside those areas agitating for a ban, and residents who don’t have an objection to the law, and referendum supporters face a challenging electoral landscape in 2016.

Though there is still plenty of time to shift public opinion, a USC Dornsife poll showed Californians still backing the ban by a 2-to-1 margin.

This year the California Legislature passed the most unsanitary legislation in decades, the ban on plastic bags at grocery stores. An initiative just qualified for 2016 for voters to dump this eco-Marxism from the law books.

I think it will pass.

Not only do “reusable” bags spread germs.

There’s also our little furry friends. The Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown, who signed the law, seem to think dogs are stuffed animals. Or maybe like the mechanical pooch “Rags” in the Woody Allen farce “Sleeper,” who defecates “batteries.”

Huntington Beach, where I’m a denizen, has banned plastic bags for more than a year now. You would think a “conservative” city in “conservative” Orange County would shun such eco-Marxism. But the city council is dominated by busybody elitists.

The result is my local friends with dogs all complain about not having enough plastic bags. Sure, you can buy them at a pet store. But that’s tedious, and costs money in an incredibly expensive city in a preposterously expensive state. Can’t government let us save money somewhere?

Getting plastic bags with your groceries is oh-so-convenient for taking care of Fido’s business. And sanitary, too.

But not when it comes to efforts to roll back the newly enacted ban on single-use plastic bags:

The Attorney General of California has prepared the following title and summary of the chief purpose and points of the proposed measure:

REFERENDUM TO OVERTURN BAN ON SINGLE-USE PLASTIC BAGS. If signed by the required number of registered voters and timely filed with the Secretary of State, this petition will place on the statewide ballot a challenge to a state law previously approved by the Legislature and the Governor. The challenged law must then be approved by a majority of voters at the next statewide election to go into effect. The law prohibits grocery and certain other retail stores from providing single-use bags but permits sale of recycled paper bags and reusable bags.

That looks pretty neutral to me. Good for Kamala Harris.

Sac Bee spreads the green religion

Meanwhile, the propagandists are at it again, pretending that the case is overwhelming for the ban, instead of extremely mixed. This is from a sneering Sac Bee editorial:

It’s a true if gruesome fact that chickens that have been relieved of their heads sometimes run around for a while before they quite realize their irreversible predicament.

That appears to be happening to the plastic bag industry. It would explain why it hasn’t figured out that the ubiquitous single-use plastic grocery bag has just suffered a killing blow. Its days are numbered.

The very day the governor signed a statewide ban on single-use grocery bags, Sept. 30, the industry filed papers to start the process for a referendum. If it qualifies by gathering enough signatures, it will delay the July 2015 implementation of the ban until it can be decided by voters during the November 2016 election.

Then, the industry will spend many millions of dollars to try to trick Californians into thinking that it’s a good thing that billions of single-use plastic bags are clogging up our storm drains and rivers, tangling up in our native flora, filling up the oceans and doing God only knows what other environmental mischief.

The truth is not what Californians have been told

I defer to Jay Beeber’s assault on this green propaganda. This is from Reason’s website in 2012, when a bag ban was being considered in Los Angeles:

Proponents give three reasons for the bag ban. They claim it will reduce the amount of waste entering landfills, reduce litter on streets, and “help protect the environment.”

But banning free grocery bags will not achieve those lofty goals.

First, banning free plastic grocery bags won’t reduce waste. California’s Statewide Waste Characterization Study [pdf] shows that “Plastic Grocery and Other Merchandise Bags” consistently make up just 0.3 percent of the waste stream in the state. That’s three-tenths of 1 percent. In comparison, organic waste such as food and yard clippings makes up 32 percent while construction debris comprises about 30 percent. The effect of eliminating free grocery bags on the amount of waste generated in the city would be insignificant.

Second, despite misleading claims from environmental groups and the L.A. Bureau of Sanitation, banning free plastic grocery bags won’t do much to reduce litter in the public commons. Litter studies from across the country demonstrate that, on average, plastic retail bags make up about 1 percent to 2 percent of all litter.

Even that small amount of litter doesn’t decline when bans are enacted. In San Francisco, plastic bags comprised 0.6 percent of litter before the city banned plastic bags and 0.64 percent a year after the ban took effect [pdf, pg. 35]. Since plastic grocery bags make up less than 2 percent of roadside trash, banning them will affect neither the total amount of litter nor the cost of cleaning it up.

Third, banning free plastic grocery bags won’t reduce our consumption of foreign (or domestic) oil. L.A.’s Bureau of Sanitation claims [pdf] that “approximately 12 million barrels of oil go into the US supply of plastic bags.” But plastic bags made in the U.S. are not derived from oil; they’re made from a byproduct of domestic natural gas refinement. Manufacturing plastic grocery bags does not increase our need to import oil, and banning them in Los Angeles or anywhere else will not reduce US oil consumption.

Despite claims that plastics threaten our oceans and sea life, there is no evidence that free plastic grocery bags make up any significant portion of the plastic waste found on beaches or in the ocean. In fact, reports from environmental groups doing beach and ocean clean-ups show that plastic bags make up only about 2 percent of the debris.

The Bee acknowledges none of this. When you have a deep commitment to your faith, you don’t sweat the details. And, in the Bee’s case, you mock and taunt the heretics.

At first, I remembered to keep and bring older paper bags. After a while, I thought that too tedious — just another annoyance government imposes on me. I need about one bag a day, so just asking for paper bags costs me about $36.50 a year. For a family of five, that would be $182.50 a year — a substantial sum for the poor and middle class.

The bill also mandates — excuse the governmentese, this is how they write and think:

“a reusable grocery bag sold by certain stores to a customer at the point of sale to be made by a certified reusable grocery bag producer and to meet specified requirements with regard to the bag’s durability, material, labeling, heavy metal content, and, with regard to reusable grocery bags made from plastic film on and after January 1, 2016, recycled material content.”

“Certified” means certified by a government bureaucrat. So it’s more employment for government employees and their unions — at our expense.

Novovirus

In Huntington Beach, I have to put up with shoppers ahead of in the checkout line fumbling to get their reusable bags ready, delaying the line and wasting my time. And ZDNet reported:

Recently, the Oregon Public Health Division released the information that an entire girl’s soccer team was infected with an outbreak of norovirus, a foodborne illness that causes severe symptoms including projectile vomiting and diarrhea. The source: a reusable grocery bag that they passed around and ate cookies from….

The Journal of Infectious Diseases says this represents the first verified occasion in which the virus was transported by an inanimate object, and that, “this also illustrates one of the less obvious hazards of reusable grocery bags.”

Dr. Charles Gerba, a professor in the Departments of Soil, Water and Environmental Science at the University of Arizona who conducts research about the transmission of pathogens through the environment, issued the following statement:

“The latest outbreak of norovirus reinforces the research we have conducted about the propensity of reusable grocery bags to act as hosts for dangerous foodborne bacteria and viruses. In reality, reusable bags are likely at fault much more often than we realize: cases often go unreported and uninvestigated.

“The cause of roughly 70 percent of foodborne illness cases, the norovirus spreads very easily and symptoms include projectile vomiting and severe diarrhea. It can have such sweeping consequences as school and emergency room closures. This incident should serve as a warning bell: permitting shoppers to bring unwashed reusable bags into grocery and retail stores not only poses a health risk to baggers but also to the next shoppers in the checkout line.”

Once again, government’s main function is to make our lives more miserable.

Sounds like another great reason to buy as much as possible online — preferably from another state.

Toxicity

And what about those evil plastic bags? Isn’t it worth risking getting hit with projectile vomiting to clean up the environment? After Los Angeles banned plastic bags in 2012, James Agresti of the Reason Foundation wrote:

In 2011, the United Kingdom’s Environment Agency released a study that evaluated nine categories of environmental impacts caused by different types of supermarket bags. The study found that paper bags have a worse effect on the environment than plastic bags in all nine impact categories, which include global warming potential, abiotic depletion, acidification, eutrophication, human toxicity, fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity, marine aquatic ecotoxicity, terrestrial ecotoxicity, and photochemical oxidation.

Furthermore, the study found that the average supermarket shopper would have to reuse the same cotton tote from 94 up to 1,899 times before it had less environmental impact than the disposable plastic bags needed to carry the same amount of groceries. This wide-varying amount of reuse that is required until the breakeven point is reached depends upon the type of environmental impact, but the median is 314 times, and it is more 179 times for all but one of the 9 impact categories.

For example, a shopper would need to reuse the same cotton tote 350 times before it caused less fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity than all of the plastic bags that it would replace over this period. Given the improbability that the same cotton tote would last that long (its expected life is 52 reuses), in most cases plastic bags will have less environmental impact.

So SB270 will make you sick and the environment more polluted. Typical California politics.