Politics Report: Unintended Consequences

It has been 10 years since California became the first state to ban single-use plastic bags. The law prohibited grocery stores and, later liquor and convenience stores, from distributing single-use plastic bags.

California leaders were pleased with their accomplishment.

“This bill is a step in the right direction – it reduces the torrent of plastic polluting our beaches, parks and even the vast ocean itself,” said then Governor Jerry Brown, in a press release, Sept. 30, 2014.

San Diego’s own Toni Atkins, then the Speaker of the California Assembly, was also boastful of what it would achieve.

“Removing the harmful blight of single-use plastic bags, especially along our coastline and waterways, helps ensure the kind of clean and healthy environment we need to have a stronger economy and a brighter future,” Atkins said.

Unfortunately, they appear to only have made the situation worse.   

Ten-year reality check: This week, San Diego Sen. Catherine Blakespear rallied in Sacramento in favor of her bill and a companion bill in the Senate that would … ban plastic bags.

And she came with an alarming statistic. Since the plastic bag ban, our use of plastic bags has only gone up – a lot.

We all know how that happened because we all see it every day. We didn’t get rid of plastic bags, we just made them thicker. Brown, Atkins and the other state leaders in 2014 carved out what turned out to be an enormous loophole. They allowed stores to sell thicker, re-usable and supposedly recyclable plastic bags.

A lot of families were like mine. We got cloth bags but we sometimes forgot them. During the pandemic, we tried, for the first time, ordering groceries for deliveries. Next thing we knew, we had the same number of plastic bags piled up but they were oddly less useful around the house and felt even more wasteful.

CalRecycle studies trash and can estimate how much of each type of waste we discard going to the landfills. In 2014, Californians threw out an estimated 157,395 tons of plastic bags from grocery stores and other retail outlets, or 4.08 tons of plastic bags per 1,000 people. In 2021, that number was 231,072 tons or 5.89 tons per 1,000 people.

That means, six years after the implementation of the ban, we discarded 44 percent more tons of plastic bags per 1,000 people than we were throwing away when the Legislature passed the ban.

That would seem embarrassing to the state leaders but aside from Atkins, most of them have moved on and new ones are happy to right the wrong.

“Plastic consumption is going up. We are fighting against that trend right now,” Blakespear said at the rally in front of the Capitol (and in front of a giant turtle that looked like it was plastic. Presumably, it can be re-used for the next plastic bag ban rally.)

The Blakespear plan is to eliminate all plastic bags from the point of sale at grocery stores. You can bring your reusable bag or you can buy a paper bag. That’s it. Both the bills have passed the Senate and Assembly and they’ll need one more vote in each now before going to the governor.

The lesson: I have made it something of a side passion to check in on politicians’ proclamations of what their laws will do after several years. I have never seen such a stark example of unintended consequences. Not only was Atkins wrong that the bill she celebrated in 2014 would remove plastic bags from the environment, it actually increased the amount of plastic we used and discarded.  

Time for a Reckoning at San Diego Unified

Just three weeks after the United States Department of Education slammed San Diego Unified School District for its handling of sexual harassment complaints, its superintendent has been dismissed after a report substantiated allegations of sexual harassment against him.

We still don’t know exactly what employees alleged Superintendent Lamont Jackson did to them or what the report about the investigation they provoked found, but he’s now no longer superintendent because of it.

That means he no longer must deal with any remaining fallout of the Office for Civil Rights’ review of 253 complaints of sexual harassment and assault over just three years at the school district. In that review, the feds found that the district’s response to sexual harassment and assault claims was characterized by repeated failures.

“These failures led to serial perpetration of harassment with insufficient district response, leaving district students vulnerable to the sex discrimination in school,” officials wrote.

Jackson was a district leader during the years the feds reviewed but he was not superintendent. That was Cindy Marten, his predecessor, who is now, coincidentally, the deputy secretary of the Department of Education.

We’ve spent years investigating and chronicling complaints about educators and school leaders across the region. Yet no agency has gotten more scrutiny than San Diego Unified. Just this week, we settled yet another lawsuit with the district after district officials, once again, failed to turn over all relevant documents about harassment allegations against an educator the district quietly allowed to retire despite years of complaints.

The district’s police chief retired amid complaints from a dozen officers.

In response to the federal agency’s investigation, district spokesperson Maureen Magee said the district has improved since 2020, the last year the feds reviewed.

“The findings released by OCR are related to a review period that spanned the school years from 2017-18 to 2019-20, which do not reflect the District’s current policies and practices,” Magee wrote. 

But Jackson became interim superintendent in 2021 and the investigation into him concluded just this week. What policies and practices was he following?

In March, police arrested a Hoover High associate principal, Charles De Freitas on allegations that he possessed child pornography, sent pornography to a minor and contacted a minor with “intent to commit a sexual offense.”

It took our Jakob McWhinney to reveal in June that nearly two years before his arrest, Jackson had received a complaint from a parent that De Freitas had sexually harassed their child.

Jackson took action: He promoted De Freitas.

Something is dreadfully, horrifically wrong at the District and its Board of Education faces a moment of reckoning. The trustees have let a cancer metastasize throughout the district – a culture that tolerated abusive and violent people.

I’m not sure how they restore trust, but saying this is all old news is not going to do it.

If you have any ideas or feedback for the Politics Report, send them to scott.lewis@voiceofsandiego.org.

The post Politics Report: Unintended Consequences appeared first on Voice of San Diego.