...IfNewsom's logic were practiced fairly and across the board, then
virtually any product could be hit with this kind of fee to justify its
later removal. How about chewing gum, the product that often comes out
No. 1 on city litter surveys? A new surcharge would bring new meaning
to the term "Double your pleasure." How about cans and bottles of juice
and soda? You bet. That goes doubly for cans and bottles of beer and
booze -- not only are the receptacles left around the city, we're stuck
power-washing the resultant urine out of vast swaths of San Francisco. ...
In fact, the good people over at the SF Appeal took it one step further. Perusing the city's litter surveys -- which reveal which items are cluttering our streets and ostensibly require point-of-purchase "fees" to offset the cost of their removal -- they noticed that "Muni transfers" are a significant source of blight. Sure, it sounds ridiculous to bandy about the idea of a "Muni transfer litter offset fee" -- but it's just an extension of the same logic used to justify the cigarette fee and the potential gum fee.
The DPW will now commission a survey to determine if certain types of litter really contribute to more time and effort being spent cleaning the city's streets. Let's slip on our Carnac hats once again and predict: A. They'll find that it does, justifying these fees, and; B. It'll be another case of molesting the numbers to get what you want.
The math backing up the cigarette fee went a little like this: Cigarettes
made up X percent of all the litter we surveyed, we spent Y dollars
cleaning up all litter, so we spent X(Y) dollars cleaning up cigarettes
-- so the numbers were crunched to create a per-pack surcharge that'll
generate approximately X(Y) dollars.
As we noted before, it just doesn't follow that workers spend 10 percent of their time cleaning up 10 percent of the trash -- life is never so neat. And it also stretches the limits of credulity to believe that if only it weren't for cigarettes, or Muni transfers, or any single item, workers could kick off early and save us all money. In short, I eagerly await the results of this survey.
Finally, litter abatement expert Dan Syrek told SF Weekly that a cigarette fee could lead to disgruntled smokers shrugging their shoulders and tossing their butts on the ground with impugnity. After all -- why not? They're paying for those butts to be picked up anyway.
Obviously, the same line of reasoning applies could apply to chewing gum, perhaps even more so. In any event, watch where you step, San Franciscans.
