Gov. Beverly Perdue signed legislation Wednesday that bans plastic shopping bags for large retailers on the Outer Banks and sent the new law back to its chief patron, Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight, in -- wait for it -- a plastic shopping bag.
Basnight, a Democrat from Manteo who owns a restaurant there, relentlessly pushed the bill to help rid the beaches of wafting bags. Many of his fellow Democrats saw it as an unexpected fixation. The law makes the Outer Banks portions of Currituck, Hyde and Dare counties the only jurisdictions in the nation to join San Francisco in banning the plastic totes.
Basnight said one of Perdue's aides delivered the bag containing the signed bill and the pen used to do it. He said he's never received legislation in that fashion in his 26 years in the legislature.
So what happened to the plastic bag?
"I hope we recycled it," Basnight said today.
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Re: Bill in a banned bag
If Dare, Hyde and Currituck counties are now included with the City By the Golden Gate in this prohibition of plastic bags, then I reckon you could say that this is one ban that reaches from Frisco to San Francisco. If this movement keeps growing, then the good folks in Francisco in Stokes County may ask to be included as well.
They'll have to go back to "The Andy Griffith Show" episode which shows a bus arriving in Mayberry all the way from Currituck and make sure that none of the passengers are trying to drop those plastic bags off in Deputy Fife's territory.
They'll have to make sure Tony Bennett has a couple of paper bags to see him through his next concert in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, while it cannot be said that this plastic bag ban extends all the way from Manteo to Murphy, at least it does cover the considerable coastal stretch from Sligo to Swan Quarter. But will it play in Pamlico?
David Proctor McKnight