photo by: Associated Press

This file photo from Aug. 3, 2009, shows a clerk bagging groceries in plastic sacks at the M Street Grocery in Seattle.

The question of whether the City of Lawrence should ban or otherwise limit the use of disposable plastic bags will once again be up for debate.

After state legislation to prohibit municipalities from banning plastic bags did not come to pass, Vice Mayor Lisa Larsen asked her fellow commissioners at their meeting Tuesday about bringing the issue of plastic bags back up. Other commissioners agreed they’d like to consider the matter, with Mayor Courtney Shipley adding she was very interested in the topic.

The city has previously discussed banning plastic bags altogether or creating a bag fee, and Larsen later told the Journal-World she was not advocating at this point for one option in particular, but instead for the city to restart that discussion. Larsen, a retired environmental geologist, said addressing the issue of plastic bags would continue the city on its path to becoming a more sustainable community.

“Anything that we can reasonably do to continue to provide protections for the environment, I think it’s good to look at those, have a discussion and decide if that’s a route we want to go,” Larsen said.

Larsen noted that one of the goals of Plan 2040, the Lawrence-Douglas County comprehensive plan, is to become a more sustainable community. The City of Lawrence has also set goals related to the use of renewable energy and other sustainability initiatives.

The ability to discuss regulations for plastic bags at the local level was nearly denied. Earlier this year, Kansas legislators passed a bill to prevent cities and counties from banning, limiting or even taxing plastic bags, straws and food containers, as The Associated Press reported. Business owners argued that complying with a patchwork of local rules would increase their costs, while environmentalists stressed the worldwide issue of plastic trash and the ability for cities and counties to set their own policies. On April 12, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, who said she was an advocate for local control, vetoed the bill.

The conversation regarding plastic bags was initially brought to the City Commission by a group of Kennedy Elementary fourth graders in May 2018, as the Journal-World reported, and soon after became a priority of the city’s Sustainability Advisory Board. Such bans, as well as opposition to them, have only become more common since that time, when California had the only statewide ban. Now eight states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon and Vermont — have banned single-use plastic bags, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. At the same time, prohibitions against bans also rose, with 18 states now having laws preempting bans.

Instead of trying to control such decisions, Larsen said that state legislators needed to let local municipalities have an opportunity for home rule.

“That’s to me another sign of a little bit of overreach, if they do this without allowing the local communities to govern themselves,” Larsen said.

Following the presentation from the Kennedy students, the commission at the time requested that the Sustainability Advisory Board look at a ban for plastic bags, straws and other plastic products in July 2018. The board subsequently undertook research and focus groups regarding the issue, and a year later advanced a recommendation to charge a 16-cent fee for single-use bags. The city then began conducting additional research and collecting feedback about both options in the latter half of 2019. However, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw some grocery stores temporarily prohibit reusable bags, waylaid the efforts.

According to Sustainability Advisory Board meeting minutes, the pandemic “created uncertainty about moving forward” with a city ordinance, and the item was moved to the “future agenda items” section of the City Commission agenda in 2020 and 2021. Larsen said after delays due to the pandemic and the potential for state legislation prohibiting such bans, it was time to restart the conversation.

“We had told the community that we would bring it back up,” Larsen said.

Interim Sustainability Director Kathy Richardson, who is also the city’s staff liaison to the Sustainability Advisory Board, said that per the commission’s direction on Tuesday, she was reaching out to the board chair to discuss adding the topic to the agenda for the board’s next meeting on June 8. The board discussed revisiting its previous recommendation for a bag fee in October 2021, and Richardson said what direction the board would go with its recommendation would be determined as the conversation started again.