Little agreement on how to save Iowa’s sinking ‘Titanic’ bottle bill

DES MOINES — Iowa’s 44-year-old bottle bill is sinking and legislative attempts to fix it are nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs, a grocery company lobbyist told lawmakers Tuesday.

“It’s the Titanic. It's sinking and we all know it,” former legislator Chip Baltimore told a House Commerce subcommittee considering House Study Bill 709. The bill, the Fareway lobbyist said, “is kind of like the orchestra playing on the deck. It makes everybody feel better as the ship is sinking.”

Speakers at the hearing expressed a lot of love for the bottle bill that requires customers pay a nickel deposit on carbonated beverage cans and bottles, which they get back when they return empties to stores or redemptions centers. Retailers return containers to distributors, who reimburse them for the nickel deposit plus 1 cent to cover handling costs.

However, there wasn’t much love for the bill as it is written. There also were questions about legislators’ commitment and ability to pass a fix.

The key, Rep. Shannon Lundgren, R-Peosta, told lobbyists, is to reach an agreement that can be presented to leadership.

“The buck stops in the Speaker’s Office,” she said, so there needs to be agreement “so that you don't have both sides going back to the Speaker’s Office and fighting for the direction that you want to go. If we have a tug-of-war, it’s not going to happen.”

House Speaker Pat Grassley, R-New Hartford, has expressed interest in finding an agreement.

“But every time it seems like we get right to that point, everybody gets cold feet,” he said before the legislative session opened in January. If anything is going to happen, “we have to be willing to accept that everyone will not like what we do.”

“I'm for doing something about it as long as it doesn't eliminate the program,” Grassley added.

There’s a lot of money at stake. Dustin Miller of the Iowa Grocery Industry Association said an estimated 2 billion cans and bottles covered by the bottle bill are sold in Iowa each year. That represents $10 million in deposits or 200 million nickels.

An unanswered question is how much the distributors retain when containers aren’t redeemed. Some estimates put that number at $20 million to $50 million. Until that number is available, Miller said, the actual redemption rate is unknown.

HSB 709 and Senate Study Bill 3033 would increase the handling fee to 2 cents split between distributors and retailers and allow retailers to opt out of redeeming cans and bottles if there is a redemption center within 15 miles.

Following Gov. Kim Reynolds’ suspension of redemptions in grocery stores and other retailers during the coronavirus pandemic, some retailers are moving on from in-store redemption.

“To set aside actual building space, to warehouse garbage is really a non-productive use of anybody's investment,” Baltimore said.

Kwik Trip has built about 15 stores in the recent past, “and we did not add any storage area for cans and bottles,” lobbyist Larry Blixit told the panel.

“We're not a gas-and-go, pop and candy store,” Blixit said. “We're preparing food. I don't think we want to be in the can and bottle business anymore. We give you a lot of horror stories about that.”

The subcommittee agreed to move the bill to the full committee. Either the House or Senate version must win committee approval before the end of the week to remain alive for further consideration.

Comments: (319) 398-8375; james.lynch@thegazette.com