NEW LONDON — The Kearsarge Regional High School Sustainability Club spent months campaigning for a plastic bag ban in New London, only to see a nuance in state law stymie their efforts.
Earlier this year, the students gave themselves a crash course in municipal government, researched ordinances in other states, collected signatures on icy winter days and made their case at Town Meeting.
The ordinance that they petitioned onto the town warrant banned single-use plastic bags at retail checkout, with exemptions for produce bags and restaurant takeout.
The club leaders said they showed up at Town Meeting ready to answer difficult questions. Instead, New London residents stood up to support the ordinance, and the students heard congratulations before the vote had even been called.
Sure enough, New London adopted the ban. But it wasn’t long before the students’ victory evaporated.
The Selectboard sent the club a letter on March 31 informing them that the town lacked the authority to establish the plastic bag ban, and the ordinance they’d worked so hard to enact could not be enforced.
“It’s like if you were running a race, and you cross the finish line, and you don’t see anyone in front of you, and you think you’re first, and next thing you know you were actually lapped by everyone,” said Meghan Blood, the club secretary.
“They just keep moving the finish line,” added Madelin Prak, the club president.
Prak led the effort with Blood, vice president Amber Houle and treasurer Jane Anderson, but it was a group initiative on the part of the whole Sustainability Club.
Social studies teacher Ruby Hill helped them and read over their ordinance, but Erik Anderson, the club’s adviser, emphasized that it was student-driven.
Now the students plan to take their advocacy to the state level.
Following Town Meeting, the New Hampshire House of Representatives tabled HB 1119, which would have explicitly given towns the right to regulate paper and plastic bags. It turns out New London wasn’t alone in its failed attempt to ban plastic bags.
Under the New Hampshire constitution, towns do not have what’s know as home rule. That generally means municipal governments only have authorities that have been granted by the Legislature. Without a law such as HB 1119, selectboards in New London and elsewhere do not have authority to adopt their own plastic bag ordinance.
The New London Selectboard encouraged the students to get in touch with their state representatives.
“My town obviously is really interested in having an ordinance on this. I represent my constituents. That (a plastic bag ban) would be something I’d want to see worked on at the legislative level,” said Rep. Karen Ebel, D-New London, who is active in efforts to reduce waste streams and improve recycling in New Hampshire.
The 2022 Town Meeting wasn’t the first time that New London voters voiced support for limiting plastic. At the 2020 Town Meeting, they passed an ordinance that voiced the town’s support for a statewide ban and encouraged local businesses to charge a small fee for single-use bags.
But the students found in their research that this preliminary effort fell by the wayside during the pandemic.
Rep. Dan Wolf, R-Newbury, who also represents New London, said a patchwork of municipal bans across the state could raise problems.
“It could possibly penalize one store over another,” he said. “What happens if you have a Market Basket in New London and a Market Basket in another town that doesn’t have a ban? How do you deal with that?”
There is currently no Market Basket in New London, though there is a Hannaford.
Although he said he is in favor of limiting plastic, he doubted that the state was ready for a ban because he did not feel that “a reasonable alternative” was readily available.
Yet not everyone agrees that towns don’t already have the authority to regulate their own solid waste.
Melissa Gates is the Northeast regional manager of the Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit that protects oceans and fights plastic pollution. The Sustainability Club contacted her as it researched how to pass an ordinance.
She argues that towns in New Hampshire have the authority to ban plastic bags because they have explicit authority to regulate their solid waste.
“To put this in context, imagine the absurdity of every single item disposed of in New Hampshire needing to be explicitly itemized in order to fall under a town’s authority to manage its solid waste,” she said.
To keep up with items sold and thrown away, there would have to be constant administrative oversight and abundant red tape that would have to be updated weekly, she said.
She also cited New Hampshire regulations that prioritize reducing waste headed to landfills for the good of both the environment and public health.
When the Surfrider Foundation testified in favor of HB 1119, it framed the bill as a necessary clarification because ambiguity had already stymied local efforts to limit plastic in other municipalities.
“HB 1119 was the latest iteration of a long line of legislative attempts that the Surfrider Foundation New Hampshire Chapter has helped lead over the last decade in an effort to clarify the existing authority for N.H. municipalities to manage single-use items in the wastestream,” Gates said.
New London would not have been the first municipality in the state to ban some plastic.
Portsmouth has passed ordinances banning some single-use plastic and has enforced them without challenge, said Stephanie Seacord, the town public information officer. One ordinance bans all single-use plastic on city property, and another bans styrofoams throughout the city.
But unlike New London, Portsmouth is a city, not a town, and cities have more power to act independently from the Legislature, which grants them broad authority to pass ordinances for “for the well-being of the city.”
The city is focusing on education and incentives — such as one-time reductions in fees to use sidewalks — to help restaurants transition to compostable food wares, Seacord said. The ordinance also gives the city the right to establish fines.
Meanwhile, members of the Sustainability Club said regardless of the outcome in New London, they are better prepared to participate in government.
“We weren’t sure what we were doing or how to navigate the legal process — we’re still navigating the legal process,” Prak said.
Now, they have gained some hard-earned experience: They learned to always collect extra signatures after a problem with their originally filed petition led to a last-minute scramble following a problem with a signature. And they learned that changing the law takes lots of time and research.
But they won’t be giving up.
“I think if education was enough, more people would be doing it right now,” Prak said. “(Plastic bags) are really bad for the environment. Most people know that. It’s not something that most people deny, but it’s ease over the environment.”
Claire Potter is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at cpotter@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.