Capitol Hill would have been perfectly happy paying a 20-cent plastic grocery bag tax — much of the rest of the city, it turns out, would not have. A Seattle Times analysis shows which neighborhoods supported Referendum 1 and which neighborhoods were part of its defeat. Here are the neighborhood results mapped out courtesy of the Times — the darkest greens represent areas where Ref 1 was supported by 60% or more, the darkest red, where it was rejected by 60% or more.
Download PDF (Image: Seattle Times)
You might recall that about $1.4 million was poured into the campaign by a chemical industry trade group to help defeat the tax.
CHS also looked at how Capitol Hill’s election night votes broke out in the primary mayor’s race.
probably had little to do with this being defeated.
The tax was just that, another stupid tax and a poorly developed one at that considering the exemptions it had.
If the bags are that bad, they should be banned.
Both plastic and paper have negative environmental consequences as well, they just happen at different points in the chain.
seem to include both the very poor (SE Seattle, White Center, Georgetown) and the very rich (Broadmoor, Magnolia, Blue Ridge), not to mention the zero people who live legally in Seward Park (us oldies remember when there was a caretaker’s house next to the fish hatchery, but they’re both long gone).
Remember the horribly written law was support by all the political establishment leaders. Only Drago said no.
The public had more sense that the highly paid city council or mayor.
Richard Conlin, council president, can’t write a good law it seems.
Will they do better next time. I doubt it. New council people might help, but, now even greater power resides in the same people who wrote this trash law. Stay tuned. Glad if failed, it was a wreck in progress.
If you don’t get your way, find the biggest and richest person/organization you can, and blame them.
If Hill residents want to impose environmental-impact taxes on everyone, perhaps we should start with the dozens of batteries in those hybrids and all-electric cars. I can find way more than 20 cents’ worth of damage caused by all the heavy metals in those things.
I wonder if there’s a relationship to areas where people drive (and therefore do large grocery buys) and areas where people might not have a car, and therefore do smaller grocery buys, and the defeat of the bag tax. If you have to drive to the grocery store, you don’t buy one-two bags worth of groceries at a time, you buy a week’s worth. I can see those types of shoppers deciding that the bag tax was a really, really bad idea — having to carry around 20 bags would be a pain. People who live in more dense neighborhoods who don’t drive to the store, generally only buy two-three bags of groceries at a time. For them, it wouldn’t be that much of an inconvenience.
The household sizes in the areas that voted for the fee, generally, are very small. Or density of good restaurants? I’d like to see all these maps overlayed!
This is a perfect example of how elitest the Capitol Hill environmentalists are. It is absolutely offensive to make consumers pay for the harm of a corporations’ product. It’s like asking ME to pay for Firestone’s faulty tires while they keep making the faulty tires. It was an absolutely ridiculous notion and just goes to show how out of touch with reality these liberal environmentalists are. 20 cents may not mean much to someone who can afford yoga, dance classes, and the perks of middle classness, but to the single mother who has to make five trips to the grocery store per week on the bus, it adds up. I’m glad I voted against this bag tax. Liberal enviros: FAIL. Try again, this time by targeting the ones CAUSING the pollution.
if this fee didn’t target the ones “causing the pollution” (I assume you’re referring to the the plastics industry) why would they put $1.4 million in to stop it?
That said… I’m not heartbroken that this didn’t pass, we should’ve done an all out ban like Edmonds, it just makes so much more sense in the long term.
cheesecake: was the tax aimed at bag makers? NO. It was aimed at you. Businesses that are smart are willing to pay a little to continue to make a lot. Find out how much bag makers make in profit and you’ll probably find that 1.4 million dollars is a good business investment. this is exactly the lack of common sense that is holding up true environmental protections. by the way, i work for an environmental law firm that DOES sue polluters.
I thought the tax was stupid, but I voted for it based soley – and I do mean soley – on the ridiculous anti bag tax radio ads that played on both AM 1090 and KIXI (the two radio stations I listen to)
God, I hate being treated like a moron – and that ad did it so succinctly. I totally expected that insipid couple to complete a suicide pact over how awful a stupid bag tax would be.