Fort Collins repeals disposable-bag fee

FORT COLLINS – Facing a storm of protests from its constituents, the Fort Collins City Council on Tuesday voted to repeal the disposable-bag ordinance it had passed in August.

The ordinance, which would have taken effect in April, would have placed a 5-cent fee on disposable bags used by shoppers at retailers in the city. The council had voted 5-2 on Aug. 15 to pass the ordinance, but later that month a citizen’s group, Citizens for Recycling Choices, filed a notice of protest with the city clerk’s office and started collecting signatures to overturn it. As of two weeks ago, the group had turned in 2,604 valid signatures to force the council to revisit the issue.

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Tuesday night’s 6-1 vote to repeal the ordinance – with Councilwoman Lisa Poppaw dissenting – was one of three options the council had. It also could have put the ordinance on the April 7 ballot or called a special election to decide it.

“We heard our citizens and responded. The disposable bags ordinance is not the way to go,” said Bruce Hendee, the city’s chief sustainability officer, in a media statement. “However, our community has told us that they want us to continue to find innovative ways to increase recycling and environmental sustainability, especially with the Larimer County Landfill filling up.”

With that in mind, the council adopted a resolution directing city staff to expand community-wide awareness of measures to prevent waste from being created, build a new community recycling center next year if funding is approved, and explore a universal recycling ordinance that would improve access to curbside recycling and organics collection for residents and businesses.

The community diverted more than half of its waste in 2013 through recycling, reuse and composting, according to city officials, but Susie Gordon, the city’s senior environmental planner, said the next steps will be more difficult and require a major shift away from outmoded ways of managing waste.

“We will need to think hard about how we can prevent waste from being generated in the first place, look even more closely at finding ways of improving our recycling and organics composting that are convenient for people, and possibly explore further prohibitions on types of materials that really shouldn’t be going into the waste stream,” she said.

Fort Collins’ attempt to impose a bag fee came in the wake of one instituted in Boulder. As of July 1, 2013, all grocery stores in Boulder were required to charge 10 cents for every plastic or paper bag used at the checkout. The stores keep four cents of the fee and the rest is sent to the city to address the impacts of disposable bags.