← City Council · 2020-04-06 · City Council Remote Meeting
Public Comment
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▶ 2:47 Speaker 1: yeah councillor Stewart councillor Thomas so Chimitose yes president Grigoraitis?
▶ 2:57 Speaker 1: Anonymous?
▶ 2:59 Jen Grigoraitis: OK, we have 11 yeses, so the motion passes. This time, we're going to move to public comment, which is where any member of the public wishing to speak regarding any item on tonight's agenda may do so. And just for those following along at home and my fellow counselors, I want to clarify how public comment is working in this format. We have encouraged members of the public to email citycouncil at cityofmelrose.org in advance if they plan to speak and the city clerk has a list of residents that have indicated they would like to do so and will then cue them accordingly to speak if you are watching from home and have not indicated that you would like to speak but wish to do so please utilize the chat feature in webex to let us know that if you have difficult to using that feature but would like to please send an email to city council at city of melbourne.org for real-time tech assistance at this time i'll entertain a motion to enter
▶ 4:04 Jen Grigoraitis: into public comment motion open public comment we have a motion made by councillor stewart seconded by councillor Migliorelli to enter into public comment madam clerk can you please call the role
▶ 4:31 Speaker 1: Thank you. We have entered into public comment.
▶ 4:41 Jen Grigoraitis: Madam Clerk, can you please cue the public commenters?
▶ 4:48 Speaker 1: Yes, the first public comment will be given by Gina McNeil. Ms. McNeil, I'm making you a panelist right now. Give us a minute for it to display.
▶ 5:05 Speaker 3: Hi, it's Gina. Can everyone hear me?
▶ 5:09 Speaker 4: Yes.
▶ 5:10 Speaker 3: I guess I should also ask, am I on video as well?
▶ 5:14 Speaker 1: Not right now.
▶ 5:16 Speaker 3: Okay, good. Good to know in terms of making funny faces. Thank you, everyone.
▶ 5:24 Speaker 1: Can you just give your address for the record also, just a normal comment? Thank you.
▶ 5:29 Speaker 3: Absolutely.
▶ 5:32 Speaker 5: So, Gina McNeil of 97 Maple Street in Melrose.
▶ 5:36 Speaker 3: And I'm here this evening to comment about the resolution to amend the state bottle deposit
▶ 5:42 Speaker 5: law.
▶ 5:46 Speaker 5: First, I just want to thank the Council for putting forth this resolution.
▶ 5:49 Speaker 3: I think that this is an example, we've seen it many times, where it takes a lot of persistence and effort at the local level to see action at the state level.
▶ 6:03 Speaker 5: So I appreciate that Council taking a leadership position in bringing this resolution forward.
▶ 6:07 Speaker 3: So the Bottle Deposit Law is something that's been around for a long time, since 1983. i want to comment in my um my comments are in support of the resolution tonight and
▶ 6:20 Speaker 3: one of the reasons i support it is um uh because the the bottle deposit law while it's been around
▶ 6:26 Speaker 5: since 1983 is just as relevant and critical to the current and future um control of our waste and in massachusetts and nationally as it was when it was was when it was first introduced 1983 so i just want to provide a little bit of context around that um i think that with uh
▶ 6:50 Speaker 5: something like a local resolution it's easy to maybe think of it as a small thing but it's actually part of something that's really big and important um and that's because the bottle
▶ 6:59 Speaker 5: deposit law is part of an example of a policy that falls under the broader umbrella of extended producer responsibility also called EPR. So EPR is kind of the essentially believed to be like the
▶ 7:12 Speaker 5: way forward to deal with a lot of the waste disposal and recycling challenges that we have in the U.S. and the world today. So I'm just going to take a minute and explain what EPR is and why
▶ 7:28 Speaker 5: it's useful. So essentially under the idea of extended producer responsibility, the producer is given a significant responsibility for how the product and the packaging they create are disposed of post-consumer so right now with the exception of bottle deposit laws there's essentially no responsibility put on producers or products to about how their products can be disposed of so that's why we have lots of products that can't be recycled or reused really at all there's no processes for doing that we have excess packaging and excess packaging that then can't be recycled in our curbside programs there's really sort of unfettered uh producer leeway on on how they do this and what's happened is that as we're getting more and more of this material produced the cost of disposals that well all along the cost of disposal has been borne by us right the local municipality and the taxpayer that's funding that municipality and what we're seeing now is you know more and more products being produced often highly disposable products that have short lifespans and and create even more waste and we're also seeing the cost of waste disposal go up quite significantly so i'm sure everyone's seen how recycling programs are getting more and more expensive some municipalities can't be for them anymore same is happening with trash and landfill or landfill and incineration costs in massachusetts and around the country and we know that in melrose when our contract with jrm is up next year we're going to see it's almost guaranteed we're going to see a significant increase in the cost of our trash to be incinerated and our recycling program to take it so we kind of have this situation where um without laws like better deposit laws and broader extended producer responsibility we're going to have producers making more and more products that create more and more trash and our costs are going to keep going up significantly so really have to it's we've gotten to this point where we really have to act as a country at every level to do something about it and that's really where apr comes in producers or consumers and policy makers need to push producers to take responsibility for the waste that their products create. And just to point out an example of that, some of you may be familiar with federal legislation that our own Congresswoman Catherine Clark unveiled back in February of 2020 called the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, which, and I quote, will shift the burden of waste to where it belongs on the corporations that produce this waste. And bringing it back to tonight's agenda, one of the key points in this legislation is a $0.10 national refund, national deposit program for all beverage containers. So any type of material, no matter what's in that container, $0.10 refund on it. So I mentioned this as an example to say that auto deposit laws are just as important and just as relevant today as they were when ours was first introduced in Massachusetts in 1983. And we know that the policy in Massachusetts works right over the 37 years that it's been around it has literally diverted billions of containers from landfill and being littered so we know this policy works it just needs to be modernized to fit the kinds of beverages that we have today when it was introduced in 1983 and this law has not changed since 1983 there just weren't plastic water bottles and nips containers being sold by the millions in massachusetts every year so again i really commend the council and i hope that you'll vote tonight to pass on this resolution um you know it's a small part of what is really a big and important solution that we need in the state and the nation today so thank
▶ 11:26 Speaker 1: you thank you madam clerk next up is mr stubbs can we see him don't see him let's try that again
▶ 12:08 Speaker 1: oh that's not who i want very good um somehow he uh does not appear to be here anymore i don't know
▶ 12:16 Speaker 2: if we lost him in the process of shifting him over i mean i i he's i see he has a square
▶ 12:20 Speaker 1: oh he got there okay it just was like really slow okay um hold on yeah he should be here okay sorry
▶ 12:33 Speaker 2: about that i think it's just really delayed i think his mic is muted there we go okay sorry
▶ 12:46 Speaker 6: about that mr stubbs can you hear me now yes okay thank you um yes my name is george stubbs and i live at 111 warwick road here in melrose uh i'd like to thank the council for the opportunity to voice my support for a resolution in in favor of amending the bottle redemption law in Massachusetts. In my experience, there have been a variety of claims made by those who oppose expanding the bottle redemption law, but two general categories of claims seem to come up over and over again. One, that the bottle
▶ 13:23 Speaker 6: redemption law that exists today is archaic. Two, that we now have curbside recycling programs to handle polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, bottles which is what as I understand it an expansion of the bottle redemption law would be primarily designed to address with regard to claim one it's not clear that to me anyway what is meant by archaic as miss McNeil pointed
▶ 13:50 Speaker 6: out our bottle redemption law here in the state has been enforced for quite some time to be sure but it is working the bottles covered under the existing law are returned to retailers at high rates or making their way into curbside bins and are not littering our roadsides fields parks and waterways as for claim
▶ 14:14 Speaker 7: to regarding curbside recycling programs an abundance of evidence suggests that a
▶ 14:17 Speaker 6: significant volume of pet bottles is not being captured by these programs to take one example of this evidence in its recently released 2020 state of curbside recycling report uh the recycling partnership that's a national partnership that that that serves to help boost and support the improvement of curbside recycling programs uh in this report the partnership reported that uh measured in terms of participant material capture rate by weight curbside programs are covering only 55 percent of pet models measured in another way in terms of whole city capture rate by material weight that capture rate as the recycling partnership
▶ 15:05 Speaker 6: founded for pet bottles is about 40 percent now as noted these figures are by weight other studies using different methodologies or parameters put the recycling rate for plastic water bottles
▶ 15:14 Speaker 6: at around 30 percent and sometimes the figures are even lower um the bottom line here is that a very large number of plastic bottles are not captured by our recycling system as it is currently structured i've sort of focused my remarks here now on the litter problem other studies show that recycling pet bottles at a higher rate would have other environmental benefits such as reduced energy use and greenhouse gas emissions the point is something needs to be
▶ 15:44 Speaker 6: done to substantially improve our recycling system as it relates to pet bottles and bottle redemption
▶ 15:55 Speaker 2: laws have proven to work thank you thank you mr stubbs madam clerk do we have anyone else in the
▶ 16:00 Speaker 1: queue we had another resident indicating their interest in speaking but i do not see them in
▶ 16:13 Jen Grigoraitis: the queue do we have anyone else who's indicated their wish to speak in public comment i'm checking
▶ 16:21 Speaker 1: one last time to for our email just to make sure that no one has sent in a request i just checked Amy there's nothing in the email okay then motion to close public comment
▶ 16:35 Jen Grigoraitis: we have a motion to pose public those public comment by counselor Stewart seconded by counselor Eccles madam clerk can you please call the roll
▶ 16:46 Speaker 1: um counselor Sinella yes counselor Eccles yes counselor Garipay yes counselor Jamaluddin
▶ 17:04 Speaker 1: counselor Jamaluddin can you unmute your mic
▶ 17:17 Speaker 1: Yes. Councilor McMaster. Yes. Councilor McNaught. Yes. Councilor Migliorelli. Yes. Councilor Stewart. Yes. Councilor Thomas. Yes. Councilor Tramontozzi. Yes. President Grigoraitis.
▶ 17:36 Speaker 1: 11 yes.
▶ 17:38 Speaker 2: Madam President.
▶ 17:39 Speaker 4: Yes.
▶ 17:40 Shawn M. MacMaster: At this time, I would make a motion to add the citizen correspondence that we received relative to this order, order number 2020-66 to the record.
▶ 17:51 Jen Grigoraitis: okay we have a motion by council mcmaster to add some correspondence we received seconded by councillor thomas do we have a discussion okay madam clerk can you please call the roll
▶ 18:02 Speaker 2: Yes.
▶ 18:06 Speaker 1: Sinella? Yes. Eccles? Yes. Garrapay? Yes. Jamaluddin? Yes. McMaster? Yes. McNaught? Yes. Migliorelli? Yes. Stewart? Yes.
▶ 18:22 Speaker 4: Thomas? Yes.
▶ 18:23 Speaker 1: Tramontozzi? Yes. Grigoraitis? Yes. 11 yes. 11 yes.