Pls ask Assemblymember(s) to vote no on AB 845

CONTROVERSIAL TRASH BILL ONE VOTE FROM BROWN'S DESK
The State Senate reconsidered and passed AB 845 last Thursday 22/14/4; it goes back to the Assembly early this week.

PLEASE, PLEASE CALL YOUR ASSEMBLYMEMBER and/or the list below TO VOTE NO ON AB845 (Ma) - Dump-owners' democracy-vaccination bill, Sacramento phone #'s below or on-line. Addl background and recent news articles below -- David Tam, NCRA Leg Rep, 510 845-5195, Northern California Recycling Association, www.ncrarecycles.org

SIERRA CLUB CALIFORNIA AGREES: I'm writing to ask you to call the following Assembly members and ask them to vote "NO" on AB 845 when it comes to the Assembly later this week. These members are among the 46 who voted for a similar bill (AB 1178) last year. We are hoping they will vote differently when AB 845 is expected to come to the floor on Tuesday or later this week. Following the list and phone numbers, I've provided issue/bill information in this email. If there are other Assembly members you think you should call to urge a NO vote on AB 845, please do so. For the names and Sacramento office numbers for Assembly members not listed here, go to https://assembly.ca.gov/assemblymembers. -- Kathryn Phillips, Director Sierra Club California

Here's the target list:
Beall, 916 319-2024
Blumenfield, 916 319-2040
Bonilla, 916 319-2011
Buchanan, 916 319-2015
Carter, 916 319-2062
Campos, 916 319-2023
Dickinson, 916 319-2009
Eng, 916 319-2049
Furutani, 916 319-2055
Hill, 916 319-2019
Portantino, 916 319-2044
Smyth, 916 319-2038
Williams, 916 319-2035

SENATE PASSES PROPOSED LAW TO OVERTURN MEASURE E
By Barry Eberling, Daily Republic, 8/24/12

GARBAGE BILL THAT AFFECTS SOLANO COUNTY APPROVED BY STATE SENATE
By Melissa Murphy, The Reporter, 8/24/12

CONTROVERSIAL TRASH BILL ONE VOTE FROM BROWN'S DESK
By Ben van der Meer, Appeal-Democrat.com, 8/25/12
Pending one more vote in the Assembly, a bill closely watched — and opposed — by Yuba County officials will be on its way to the governor.

Assembly Bill 845, by Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, D-San Francisco, would bar a city or county from passing any ordinance affecting trash from being imported into the city or county, if the ordinance is based on from where the trash came.

Though bill proponents said it was designed to get around voter-approved initiatives on landfills in Solano County, Yuba County officials have said the affect is greater.

Yuba County is reviewing elements of a plan, already approved in San Francisco, in which trash from the Bay Area city would be shipped by train to the Ostrom Road landfill near Wheatland, beginning in 2015.

Though the landfill has capacity for San Francisco trash, county officials have said they fear the bill's passage will affect how much say they will have over the conditions for allowing the project to proceed.

"It just doesn't seem morally fair," said Yuba County Supervisor Roger Abe, explaining while cities like San Francisco haven't bothered to go through the process to establish a landfill, the bill punishes places like Yuba County that have.

Rick Paskowitz, a watchdog on Ostrom Road operations, said the bill clearly harms local control in favor of big-city influence.

"For beside the legacy of sneakiness will be the legacy of 'pre-emption of local authority,' Paskowitz said in an email sent Thursday, after the state Senate approved the bill on a 22-14 vote. Yuba-Sutter area state Sen. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, voted against the bill and was the only Republican to do so.

Ma will be known as taking away local control, taking away the power of the people," Paskowitz said.

In addition to opposing the bill, Paskowitz and others also objected to how it moved forward, after another bill with the same language, AB 1178, was stalled in a state Senate committee earlier this year.

Using a process known as "gut-and-amend," Ma stripped out language from a bill already on the state Senate floor — AB 845 — and replaced with the language from AB 1178.

Because the bill's language was vetted by the committee, it was fair to bring the bill to the full chamber for a vote, according to bill proponents.

After Thursday's vote, Ma's office hailed the advancement, saying in a press release the vote recognized garbage was a statewide issue.

"Thirty-nine California counties ship their waste to other jurisdictions or will need to export waste in the future. Not every city and county can have its own landfill and local jurisdictions should not put initiatives on the ballot that discriminate against out-of-area garbage," she said in the release.

Because of the change in number, the bill will have to be approved again in the Assembly before it goes to the governor, a vote likely to happen next week. Gov. Brown's office has not indicated a position on the bill.

Abe said he wouldn't guess as to how the governor will vote, though he and others will certainly raise the county's concerns with his office.

"It's just not real well-defined," Abe said of AB 845. "It's just a question of how you want to interpret it, or how the courts will interpret it."

BACKGROUND:
AB 845, a gut-and-amend bill introduced by Assembly Member Fiona Ma within the last two weeks (it was formerly AB 1178), would directly undercut Sierra Club's effort to protect voters' ability to limit the amount of waste that can be imported into their communities for disposal into a local landfill. In 1984, Solano County voters voted such a limit on waste importation. Many years later, the Solano County Board of Supervisors refused to implement that limit and moved to allow a private landfill owner to bring in more waste from San Francisco. Sierra Club sued the board. The Club won in the lower court, and now the issue is on appeal.

AB 845 would remove existing voter-approved limits on waste importation and ban any future voter-approved limits on waste importation. This could discourage counties and cities that export waste from imposing strong recycling and waste reduction measures. It would also make it harder for communities that have landfills from controlling the size and impact of those landfills.

AB 845 is the same as AB 1178, which the Club helped stop last year. Last week, despite a strong effort by a coalition of environmentalists, county and city governments, and waste reduction advocates, the new bill narrowly passed in the Senate. On Tuesday, it will be eligible for an Assembly concurrence vote. It is usually very difficult to stop a bill on concurrence, However, we believe that at least 6 of the 46 Assembly members who voted for the bill last year, may be persuaded to change their vote this year and vote NO if they hear from enough people. The bill needs 41 votes to pass.

If you are interested in reading the bill itself, go to https://www.leginfo.ca.gov and type in ab845 in the bill information section.

If you are interested in reaching out to more or other Assembly members to encourage them to vote NO on AB 845, you can find a full list of names and phone numbers at https://assembly.ca.gov/assemblymembers.

Kathryn Phillips, Director
Sierra Club California
801 K Street, Suite 2700
Sacramento, CA 95814
916 557-1100 x 102
[email protected]
https://www.sierraclubcalifornia.org