Plastic bag, tree ordinances working

Shortly before being sworn in as governor, Greg Abbott called for doing away with local bans on plastic bags, fracking and tree-cutting that he says amount to a “patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.”

Austin has bans on plastic bags and one of the state’s most involved tree removal ordinances. Apart from the political question of whether local-control-minded Republican lawmakers have the stomach to overturn local ordinances, there lingers a more practical matter: Have such rules been effective?

The short answer: looks like they are.

The data on Austin’s bag ban is scant — Austin Resource Recovery has only now commissioned a study of the effect of the ban, but anecdotal evidence from groups that track trash around town suggest it has had an impact.

“In my own community, around Bartholomew Park (in Northeast Austin), we always had an enormous amount of plastic bags that would gather,” said Rodney Ahart, executive director of Keep Austin Beautiful, which educates consumers about reusing plastic bags but didn’t take an official position on the ban. “Now you don’t see the plastic bags anymore.”

No retailers have been penalized or fined, said Emlea Chanslor, a spokeswoman for Austin Resource Recovery.

Fewer than 1 percent of H-E-B’s customers buy $1 emergency plastic bags at the checkout, according to the grocery store chain’s spokeswoman Leslie Sweet, suggesting the ordinance has had the intended effect of getting customers to reuse their bags.

Information is more complete on tree removal rules, which have been far more contentious and occasionally have led to challenges of the ordinance at the Capitol.

For 30 years, Austin has required owners of public and private land to get the city’s permission to fell trees with trunk diameters of 19 inches or more. In exchange, owners must plant new trees or pay into a tree-planting fund.

Tree ordinances

In 2010, Austin added another, stricter rule. It said owners couldn’t cut down so-called heritage trees — those of certain species with trunk diameters of 24 inches or greater — unless they prove the tree is diseased, a safety risk or that keeping it would prevent a reasonable use of land.

City arborist Michael Embesi told lawmakers in 2013, “We have a good relationship with the development community, which would like to remove more trees, and the neighborhood community, which would like us to preserve more trees. Austin is booming, and trees have a storied history in the growth of this city.”

But the ordinance made it “incredibly expensive to plant replacement trees,” said Harry Savio, vice president for public policy at the Home Builders Association of Greater Austin. “Private property rights with respect to trees have become severely limited.”

He predicted efforts to weaken local tree removal ordinances would fail at the Legislature because so many lawmakers come out of city and county government and naturally defer to local government.

The growth of such ordinances means that Texas “is being Californianized and you may not even be noticing it,” Abbott said in his remarks in early January at the Texas Public Policy Foundation conference. He didn’t mean that in a good way.

Darren Hodges, a City Council member in the West Texas town of Fort Stockton, which has adopted a plastic bag ban of its own, had this to say in recent American-Statesman opinion piece: “I don’t know when the new governor was last in Fort Stockton, but it is certainly not becoming like California.”

This story was originally published February 15, 2015 at 3:20 PM with the headline "Plastic bag, tree ordinances working."