Life On “Planet Albany”
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- February
- 26
Lt. Gov. David Paterson got some laughs from college students today when he talked about why the state Legislature, of which he was a veteran before joining the Spitzer administration, hasn’t passed a bottle bill that includes deposits on water bottles and other non-carbonated drinks.
“This is very simple but that would be if you were on a normal planet,” he told NYPIRG volunteers, getting smiles and chuckles from the crowd. “But you’re in Planet Albany, where sometimes there’s no gravity, sometimes there’s no atmosphere and most times there’s little thought.
“So before we discover whether there’s life on Mars or life on the moon, we have to find out if there’s life in Albany.”
NYPIRG was working the offices of state legislators in hopes of reviving failed legislation last year that would add water and juice bottles to the list of bottles that have 5-cent deposits so the bottles are more often recycled.
Senate Republicans and grocery stores have opposed the measure, in part because the state would get the revenue from the unreturned bottles, not the grocers who have to collect the bottles from consumers.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 2:14 pm by Joseph Spector.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
I would like to point out an error in this article-
Currently the revenue from unreturned bottles goes back to the bottling companies, not the grocery store. Also the Bigger Better Bottle Bill would increase the handling fee for groceries.