Posted by Project GreenBag, a resident of the Cuesta Park neighborhood, on Apr 13, 2012 at 9:28 am

[Post removed due to promoting a website]

Posted by Kitty Fandango, a resident of the Shoreline West neighborhood, on Apr 19, 2012 at 8:55 pm

Reusable bags are not so expensive that the poor really need to have an uprising about it. You can get a good quality canvas bag for less than three dollars. Given some of the things that I see in the shopping baskets of some of the low income members of our neighborhood, I am sure they can forego a few gallons of coca cola and purchase a canvas bag, but this is off topic now.

Posted by Jim Neal, a resident of the Old Mountain View neighborhood, on Apr 21, 2012 at 6:49 pm

As I also said at the City Council meeting, I constantly reuse my bags, so the bag ban itself is not the problem. I also have a problem with the City forcing the stores to charge people as a way to bypass making it a tax, which people would then have to vote on in order for it to be approved. How can the city dictate how much stores must charge for a product? Can they also decide that sugar is bad and force the stores to charge an extra dollar for every bag of sugar? Can they decide that stores must charge 20 dollars per pack for cigarettes? How about 30 dollars for firewood? Why not? If they can get away with this, what stops them from ordering stores to charge any amount that they want for products that they don't like?

The City should not be run as an oligarchy, where a few people dictate how the rest of us live based on their own personal preferences. We elected the council as our REPRESENTATIVES not our masters! They should comply with the letter and the spirit of the laws, which means that anything that the council wants to do that will raise prices for its citizens has to be put to a vote!

Anyone who wishes to give away their protections guaranteed by our state and federal constitutions is free to do so, but don't try to give away or take away mine. This is a back door tax plain and simple. It is a clear violation of proposition 26. Although the prop 26 argument has been rejected by an LA Court, I am fairly certain that the ruling will be overturned on appeal.

If people in Mountain View are willing to VOTE for the ban and the associated charges, then I am all for it because it will have been subject to the democratic process and people will have had the opportunity to be fully informed about all sides of the argument. From what I have seen in the interviews with local residents, it seems that they think it is only a ban and do not know about the stores being forced to charge for paper.

Posted by Caryn Coleman, a resident of the Castro City neighborhood, on May 23, 2012 at 2:53 pm
Caryn Coleman is a member (registered user) of Mountain View Online

I like the idea of a plastic bag ban.

Nice to see so much clever re-use of the existing bags already going on and I find it hard to understand the accusation of socialism (or maybe they mean totalitarianism?).

The idea of the community banding together to sew bags is hilarious. Next time you are on the street, count the next ten people that go by and imagine them getting together to sew cloth bags from scraps. It's sweet and funny. Come to think of it, when visiting a thrift store in Vermont I saw that had taken T-shirts and sewn a simple seam across the bottom to save the thrift store having to buy bags. Maybe Goodwill could organize unemployed or enthusiastic mountain view citizens to do that instead?

Well, thank you for the ban. I like it!