Saturday November 1
9:00 a.m.
Friendship Gate (10th and Arch)
10:00 a.m.
City Hall

Following last week's heated Chinatown town meeting, Councilman Frank DiCicco's office immediately fired off a mass email complaining that information he wanted to share "got lost" at the meeting.

At this week’s Washington Square West meeting, there was plenty of space for the Councilman to share his deeply divided view of neighborhood priorities.

The last question of the day came from a Chinatown resident, a college student, who after restating the opposition in Chinatown asked DiCicco this:

"And my question is . . . if Washington Square West and Chinatown and other neighborhood organizations are opposing the casino, if you would join us in fighting against the casino placement?"

And this is what he had to say:

"I have been fighting the placement of casinos almost four years? three and a half, four years now. But I have learned, and I think most of us have learned, as I was trying to, I tried a couple of times tonight to articulate . . . I look at this from the opinion that we’re gonna have two casinos in the city of Philadelphia. I said that in my opening statement. And at some point a decision will be made whether it’s by me or this administration or someone else. The Supreme Court of PA will ultimately make that decision. So if Foxwoods tonight decided that there’s a third location that they would like to do some due diligence on – I doubt that very much – but if they were, all those sites are in play.

So when you ask me will I fight? If you want me not to introduce CED legislation on Thursday and you want me to stand outside with picket lines and do all the things . . . I did for the last three and a half years, honestly, it’s not going to make a difference in the end.

This is not going to save the world, but it is a small step that we should all applaud:

On Thursday, DiCicco and Kenney will introduce a bill that would ban regular plastic bags at supermarkets and pharmacies in favor of recyclable paper bags or new compostable plastic bags. And Kenney plans to introduce a companion bill that would ban polystyrene foam, commonly known as Styrofoam.

DiCicco said his legislation is modeled on a similar effort earlier this year in San Francisco.

"You walk into the store and buy a tube of toothpaste. It's in a box and they grab plastic bags and put it in them," DiCicco said. "There's no control on the number of bags they give you. The clerks don't pay attention to it. We're in a throwaway society for the last 40 years, and that's one of our problems. Packaging has gotten out of hand."

When I was in Germany last month, basically sequestered away, one of the only things to do was to walk over to the WalMart like supermarket (high entertainment!). I would peruse all the beer I couldn't drink, the chocolate I couldn't eat, and then settle on some delicious diet coke, go to pay, and despite my hands being full, I would rarely get a shopping bag from the checkout person. I could never figure out, nor ask, why the ladies couldn't just give me an effin bag. Then, finally, I realized that they were keeping them behind the counter because they charged you for each bag that you used.

It made sense- even if they were not costing out every externality- the store(s) were helping people remember that there are a lot of costs to using disposable bags. As Diccicco said, we are a throwaway society, and in a time of the coming global warming crisis, this is a small and smart step we can take to do out part in Philly.

Now, if we could only recycle....