The Urbana City Council held its regular meeting on Monday at 400 S. Vine St. to discuss a number of topics, with a particular focus on the city’s sustainability and proposals to improve the efficiency of local law enforcement. The meeting was also livestreamed for those who were unable to attend in person.
A mayoral proclamation regarding AmeriCorps week was made early into the meeting. Tristan Thomas was sworn in as lieutenant for the city of Urbana and the county of Champaign.
The University’s Environmental Leadership Program led a proposal presenting the possibilities for a single-bag tax in Urbana. University students Linnea Turner, Jack Casey and Toby George were present to speak about this proposal to council members.
“Single-use plastic bags are one of the leading sources of litter, which contributes to the growing microplastics crisis,” Turner said. “A bag tax is the first step to getting away from plastics. The tax revenue could provide a green fund for Urbana.”
Casey spoke on the high effectiveness of bag taxes in areas of Illinois that have already implemented a bag tax, like Edwardsville and Chicago, both of which saw a decrease in plastic bag usage after the implementation of a bag tax.
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A case study conducted on the local Walmart in Champaign revealed that the store uses approximately 4,320,000 plastic bags per year.
“The manager we spoke to said he was open to the tax and that many of his customers come to and from Chicago where there is already a tax,” Casey said.
The students’ proposal was a 10-cent bag tax on all single-use plastic bags sold in Urbana, which would be assessed to the customer at checkout. To incentivize businesses to carry reusable bags within their stores, they added that stores that carry reusable bags would get five cents back per bag; stores that did not carry reusable bags would only get three cents back per bag.
The students hoped that this would not only reduce single-use plastic bag waste in Urbana but also provide the city with a new, meaningful source of revenue.
The implementation of a bag fee was also a previous recommendation of Urbana’s Sustainability Advisory Commission. This motion was passed in a unanimous vote by the Urbana City Council.
BerryDunn, a national firm, conducted a thorough study on Urbana’s police and fire staffing in hopes of improving the city’s public safety response model. The report left several key recommendations, mainly focusing on developing policies to better assess resource deployments by the Urbana Fire Department.
The meeting ended with a brief discussion on allowing skateboarding on city parking lots, which the council agreed to talk more extensively about in a future meeting.
