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January 25, 2007
Bottle bills shape up for House, Senate
By Mannix Porterfield
Register-Herald reporter
CHARLESTON — Is this the year, under new House leadership, that the beverage
container deposit bill doesn’t get bottled up in committee without a hearing?
A longtime supporter, Delegate Ray Canterbury, says he hopes that is the case.
“I’ve been on this bill perhaps three of four times in the past,” Canterbury,
R-Greenbrier, said Thursday. “But it’s never been on the agenda. It gets
assigned to committee and usually dies in committee. That’s what happens. We
have new leadership. We might get a hearing with a new chairman. So it will be
interesting.”
The bill’s intent is to affix a 10-cent deposit on all containers — bottle and
can — as a means of discouraging highway littering since the fee is redeemable.
Canterbury’s name appeared on a bill that surfaced Thursday on the House list,
but Linda Frame, program director for West Virginia Citizen Action Group,
emphasized that was merely a holdover from the 2006 session.
A newer version, ironed out during the interims session, is expected to be
offered soon by Sen. Brooks McCabe, D-Kanawha, with Delegate Barbara
Fleischauer, D-Monongalia, as the lead sponsor in the House.
“We’ve got some problems from last year’s bill, so we can’t run that one,” Frame
explained.
In general, Canterbury wholeheartedly supports the concept of the deposit fee,
saying it would provide an incentive in diminishing the amount of trash thrown
on roadsides.
“People would return the bottle to get their money back and wouldn’t throw them
out,” he said.
“If they did throw them out, somebody would pick them up, take them back and
redeem the deposit. It would be a way to control litter on the highways.”
Canterbury dismisses criticism that the deposit is a polite word for a tax and
says the elderly cannot be used as a reason to oppose the measure.
“I imagine someone would probably help them get to the recycling center,” he
said.
“Presumably, if they (seniors) had the Cokes, somebody helped them get to the
stores, so I’d say they have some means of redeeming. I don’t think that’s going
to be a huge problem.”
Since the deposit can be redeemed, it cannot be considered a tax, Canterbury
said.
“You’re not actually forfeiting any money to the government if you bring them
back, so there’s no tax involved,” he said.
Litter is a nuisance that is evident across the state, the delegate said, and
one case in point is a tract of land he and his father own along the Greenbrier
River, just outside Ronceverte.
“People are throwing stuff down and we have to pick it up,” he said. “We have to
pick up garbage there about every year. That’s one of the most annoying things
in the world, having to pick up after litterbugs.”
— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com
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