Article seeks to ban plastic bottle use, sales on town land in Falmouth
By Christine Legere
Posted Sep 24, 2019
FALMOUTH — Town meeting members will decide whether Falmouth will become the sixth Cape community to prohibit municipal departments from buying drinks in single-use plastic bottles of any size and to ban their sale on town property.
The proposal is one of a handful of petition articles on the Nov. 12 annual fall town meeting warrant.
The Municipal Plastic Bottle Ban is being promoted by a Cape-based organization called Sustainable Practices. Several towns adopted the ban during their town meetings last spring, including Provincetown, Wellfleet, Harwich, Chatham and Orleans, according to Madhavi Venkatesan, the nonprofit’s executive director.
This fall, the proposed ban is on town meeting warrants in Brewster, Falmouth, Sandwich, Yarmouth and Dennis, Venkatesan said. Her group also plans to present it as a proposed ordinance in Barnstable.
“Our goal is to eliminate plastic use,” Venkatesan said. “Plastic has a huge greenhouse gas footprint.”
Eastham selectmen adopted the ban as part of the town’s policies, and Truro’s recycling committee will be looking for similar action from their town leaders in October.
Falmouth’s petition article calls for the ban to go into effect “as soon as practicable but no later than September 2020.”
The impact of plastic bottles on health and the environment far outweighs their convenience, article proponent Christine Kircun, a local member of Sustainable Practices, told selectmen during their meeting Monday.
The ban has nothing to do with plastic bottle sales by businesses in town, unless they are selling the plastic containers on town-owned property.
Elsewhere in the warrant, petitioner Nathan Holcomb will ask town meeting to loosen wetlands restrictions on water that may accumulate in a property owner’s yard.
“Under the current law, if you have a puddle in your yard or your neighbor does, you could be subject to stringent regulations,” Holcomb told selectmen.
Most of Holcomb’s property and some of his neighbor’s has been impacted by a “puddle” in his yard caused by heavy rains, he said. Under Holcomb’s proposed amendment, an isolated freshwater wetland would only fall under the restrictions if it was at least 10,000 square feet in size.
“We should be putting our resources toward protecting real wetlands, not puddles,” Holcomb said.
Once again, town meeting will be asked to consider adoption of the state’s stretch building code, this time via a petition article submitted by Grant Walker. The stretch code, which has been defeated in the past, requires new construction to meet higher standards for energy efficiency.
Provisions would only apply to new construction, Walker told selectmen.
“There’s not a great deal of difference between the stretch energy code and the base code,” Walker said.
Since 10 towns on the Cape have already adopted the stretch code, its adoption would help bring uniformity from town to town, he said.
Gerald Lynch, owner of the 69-acre gravel pit off Locustfield Road, has submitted a petition article to be allowed access over a town-owned property to the pit area, where Borrego Solar is installing a large solar array.
Other petitions include a request from local veterans to lease the senior center on Gifford Street, once the new senior center opens, in order to open a veterans service center; and an article for a resolution to formally affirm and endorse Police Chief Edward Dunne’s policy to maintain all residents’ civil rights. That latter petition bore over 100 signatures, according to petitioner Sandra Faiman-Silva.
