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January 10, 2008
County proposes shorter list of bills to lawmakers
by Sherry Greenfield
Frederick County commissioners are placing their bets on a shorter list of bills, in hopes the legislation will win the approval of the Maryland General Assembly during the 2008 session, which started Wednesday.
Concerned that Frederick’s eight-member delegation will be consumed with state budget issues, commissioners submitted just six bills for consideration this year.
‘‘We have a brief legislative package,” board president Jan H. Gardner (D) told Frederick’s state delegation last month when commissioners formally presented the package of bills.
Commissioners cannot pass certain pieces of legislation on their own, each year they must ask the senators and delegates who represent the county in Annapolis to introduce the bills to the General Assembly on the county’s behalf. The General Assembly will then vote on the bills.
The number of proposed bills and legislation in a package vary each year — commissioners have submitted up to 14 pieces of legislation some years.
Two of this year’s six bills address trash disposal issues. Commissioners are again asking for the authority to set up a countywide trash collection franchise. Commissioners believe a new system would eliminate the slew of trash trucks now on the roads picking up and transporting trash to the county-owned landfill on Reichs Ford Road in Frederick.
With this new approach, commissioners also plan to increase the pick up of recycled waste to more households in the county.
‘‘This would allow us to have the ability to control the waste stream, decrease truck traffic and increase recycling,” Gardner said. ‘‘... Our objective is to be more efficient.”
But the bill’s success is uncertain.
Last year, the delegation refused to take action on the bill in response to an onslaught of e-mails from residents and trash haulers opposed to the idea. The delegation advised commissioners to spend the year educating the public on the bill’s benefits. Educational meetings with haulers were held in October and November.
‘‘We attempted to do significant outreach,” Gardner said.
But Del. Donald B. Elliott (R-Dist. 4B) of New Windsor told commissioners that in a recent 36-hour period he received many e-mails from residents and haulers against the proposal.
The second bill addressing trash comes from Commissioner John ‘‘Lennie” Thompson Jr. (R). The bill, which Thompson has tried to get passed each session since 2001, would create a beverage container deposit⁄return system.
Thompson believes this program would reduce the number of bottles that end up as litter or at the landfill.
The bill could have a tough time in the General Assembly, since beverage retailers and distributors strongly opposed the idea in 2001.
‘‘It sounds like it would be very logistically challenging,” said Del. Joseph R. Bartlett (R-Dist. 4A) of Middletown. ‘‘For the consumer to get 5 cents back, somebody at the county would have to go through every bottle. It just sounds very logistically challenging and expensive.”
Thompson countered that a number of states in the country have already successfully implemented this program. ‘‘They do work in states that have them,” he said.
As of 2007, 11 states have bottle return laws: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts and New York, according to the Container Recycling Institute.
http://www.gazette.net/stories/011008/frednew20130_32364.shtml
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