GREENFIELD — The plastic bag ban could go to the ballot box in a binding referendum, if Councilor Isaac Mass’ suggestion to the City Council is adopted, although the council president doesn’t want to see it be pushed off any longer.

A bag ban proposed is slated to come before the council at its next meeting on Jan. 16, when the council could adopt the ban on its own.

“I don’t support the plastic bag going to a townwide vote, because it’s ready to be voted on by the council,” City Council President Karen “Rudy” Renaud said Friday. “That’s our job. It’s what the voters elected us to do.”

Councilors could instead adopt Mass’ recommendation and avoid making the call themselves.

Critics of the ban often cite a 2015 non-binding referendum as an indication of the will of the people. At the time, 53 percent of residents said they opposed a ban, but the margin was decided by a couple hundred votes.

“I am very interested to let voters who have said ‘no’ to have the option to say ‘yes’ before we shove things down their throats,” Mass said.

The ban would prohibit plastic bags from most businesses in Greenfield and potentially levy a cost on paper bags, too.

“There’s almost no reason anymore to have a plastic bag unless you’re trying to save it for a thousand years,” Mayor William Martin said at a meeting earlier this week when the idea was first publicly discussed.

If the council decides it wants to avoid voting on the ordinance and instead give it to the voters in November, it can do so by voting on the language of the referendum. If it then passes a potential veto by the mayor, it will be more or less set to appear on ballots. This all should be done no later than the summer time, Greenfield Clerk Kathy Scott said.

In the 2015 non-binding referendum vote, 47 percent of Greenfield voters who came out to the polls for the mayoral election said they were in favor of the ban. The vote was 2,021-2,242.

The mayor race at the time was decided by similar margins, 52 percent for William Martin and 48 percent for Patty Morey Walker.

Precincts 4, 5, 6 and 8 all voted in favor of the ban. Precinct 6 was the most in favor of it, with 60 percent of voters saying “yes,” while only 39 percent of voters in Precincts 1 and 9 were in favor of it.

The plastic bag ban has seen several iterations through the years.

For a while it was under the title of citizen-proposed ordinance, brought forward in fall 2013 by Garrett Connelly as a member of Greening Greenfield. In April 2014, he withdrew the proposed ordinance after hiccups with the council passing it. “I guess I was naive that this would be their job,” he had said. At the time, Town Council President Hillary Hoffman suggested the ordinance may not be necessary. “I think this is more about educating the public,” she had said. 

A citizen-written ordinance by Sandra Boston, and bolstered by Greenfield Rights of Nature, was brought before the council in the summer of 2015. That ordinance ran out of steam and ran into legal issues over the validity of the petition, pushing it once again out of the council’s hands and into the ballot box for that non-binding referendum vote. 

The 2015 vote brought forward three related issues: plastic bags, water bottles and foam containers. About 59 percent of voters agreed to ban foam containers in the non-binding question, which the council later enacted. 

Now the plastic bag ban might find a resolution, again. In 2015, Greenfield could have become one of the first communities in the state to vote for the ban. In the three-plus years since, many towns and cities have come to support a ban. In recent weeks Boston began its own ban, which Greenfield City Cuncil Vice President Penny Ricketts said she saw in action when she was in Boston  for the holidays. “I’m convinced” the ban is a good idea, she said.

Renaud wants to make sure it is voted on this month, because if not, “that will put all the hard work that’ s been put into this ordinance down the drain and the process will have to start from scratch in over a year.” 

You can reach Joshua Solomon at:

jsolomon@recorder.com

413-772-0261, ext. 264