By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The Princeton Council still is waiting for legal advice on whether officials have the authority to impose a charge on plastic and paper shopping bags.
Municipal attorney Trishka W. Cecil originally was to have issued an opinion on the topic by the end of May. But that’s been put off, until possibly next week, Mayor Liz Lempert said Wednesday.
Mayor Lempert said that as recently as last week that when the lawyer issues that opinion, the document would be shared with the public.
She said officials do not want to rush into something, although there has been pressure from environmental activists in town to make Princeton the first in New Jersey to create a mandatory charge.
They want to require merchants to charge 10 cents for every plastic or paper shopping bag their customers use — a way to reduce the number of plastic bags. Their aim is to follow the lead of other municipalities that have done so, but it has been unclear to Princeton officials if they have the constitutional authority to do so.
“We have to be careful that if we were to move forward with an ordinance, that we would be on solid legal ground and would be able to withstand a court challenge if there were one,” the mayor said.
Bainy Suri, the local woman leading the effort to get the bag charge in place, had no comment Thursday.
Council President Bernard P. Miller on Wednesday again raised concerns that such a fee would be “unworkable” on the local level if only one town did it. He suggested that Mercer County needs to take the lead on the issue.
He predicated that some Princeton residents would shop elsewhere to avoid paying the charge.
Along those lines, the president of McCaffrey’s Food Markets inveighed against the bag fee because it would put the store located in the Princeton Shopping Center “at a significant competitive disadvantage.”
“None of our competitors operate within Princeton, which means that none of them would be subject to the mandatory bag fee,” wrote James J. McCaffrey in a letter to the editor in the May 22 Packet.
