The Kansas House on Monday approved a bill barring local governments from regulating grocery bags made from plastic and other material, a measure that may very well be headed to a veto showdown with the governor.
The House voted 72-51 to pass the bill, which is 12 votes short of a veto override. The bill only received 74 votes last year when it was approved by the House.
The governor later vetoed the bill, and the House didn’t move for an override since it was 10 votes short. The governor said the issue should be left to local governments to address when she vetoed the bill.
The bill now goes to the Senate, which was able to override the governor’s veto last year.
Supporters of the bill said it was necessary to prevent a mish-mash of local rules and regulations regulating containers, including plastic bags.
Some say it was needed to keep cities from imposing costly green regulations on businesses, particularly restaurants if they were forced to move to paper products.
“If a municipality forces restaurants to start using paper straws, paper boxes, paper plates, and all those things, it will devastate local restaurants,” said Republican state Rep. Pat Proctor of Leavenworth, who owns a restaurant.
Opponents said that the bill would infringe on local governments’ ability to make decisions for their community.
“You know how much you hate it when the feds do stuff like this to us,” said Democratic state Rep. Boog Highberger of Lawrence.
“Well, my constituents feel the same way when we do it to them. I say this is an overreach,” Highberger told the House chamber.
“I think it’s an infringement on local control. Let the people decide. Your community doesn’t have to do this,” he said.
The bill was backed by Republican state Rep. Adam Thomas of Olathe, who said the legislation is intended as a check on local governments and to keep them from adopting policies that could drive up costs for local businesses.
“We do not want bankrupt our small, local businesses,” Thomas said.
“There are fifth-generation Kansans that own a small shop that are being told if your county does this, you either pay the cost or just move your stuff up on out of town and go somewhere else,” he said.
“That is not fair. It is out duty to protect the very taxpayers that fund our state,” he said. “I believe this bill does just that.”
Others saw it as a potential violation of cities’ constitutional right to home-rule authority.
“Locally elected officials are in the best position to understand the needs of their communities, and citizens have a right to local self-governance,” Republican state Reps. Bill Clifford of Garden City and John Eplee of Atchison said in a joint statement.
Supporters of the bag legislation said that when cities try to limit or ban certain types of containers, it leads to a “hodgepodge” of regulations that vary from one jurisdiction to the next and cause confusion for businesses.
“Regulatory compliance is costly and burdensome,” said Dan Murray, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business.
“Having a patchwork regulatory framework throughout Kansas most certainly complicates regulatory compliance for small businesses,” Murray said in written testimony.
The League of Kansas Municipalities called the bill “reactionary legislation to a nonexistent problem” that ignores the constitutional home-rule powers for cities to make those decisions for themselves.
The league also said the bill wasn’t necessary.
“The number of cities considering product restrictions is limited and this is not likely to become a trend,” the league’s lobbyist, Spencer Duncan, told lawmakers in written testimony.
“There is no certainty that the few cities considering restrictions will act, and if they do, it will be limited,” he said.
