Dont worry, the city will pay to recycle these bad boys.
  • R.B.
  • Don’t worry, the city will pay to recycle these bad boys.

The Seattle City Council today eliminated a fee from the yellow pages ordinance that would have required phone book companies to pay a $148 recycling charge for every ton of yellow pages they distributed in the city. The council did this as an amendment to the city’s original yellow pages opt-out legislation, which bans phone book publishers from sending yellow pages to anyone on a city-regulated opt-out list.

Council Member Mike O’Brien, who sponsored the legislation, said that the recycling fee was dropped because of ongoing litigation. Yellow pages publishers sued the city in November, charging that the ordinance violated their free speech rights. In a response (.pdf) filed late today to the yellow pages lawsuit, the city said that it had struck down the recycling fee. I asked O’Brien if the lawsuit had scared the council shitless into dropping the fee and shifting the onus of paying for recycling on the city once again. “We have the legal right to impose a recycling fee, but it wasn’t the most important part of the opt-out ordinance,” he said. “It was just making things complicated.” He added that the council had acted on the advice of the city’s legal counsel. They had not reached any kind of agreement with the yellow pages publishers.

So does the ordinance still carry as much weight as before sans fee? Of course, O’Brien said. The most important thing was to prevent yellow pages publishers from dumping junk outside people’s homes, and the opt-out legislation was already doing that, he said. But, wouldn’t a fee have made those yellow-bellied bullies respect that law even more? O’Brien had been pretty adamant about the recycling fee while crafting the legislation, so I am surprised (and even a little disappointed) that he agreed to drop it just to appease the likes of the yellow pages folks.

O’Brien said (and the Yellow Pages Association confirmed) that it was unlikely that the yellow pages publishers would drop the lawsuit because there was no fee involved. “They are still concerned about other parts of the legislation,” O’Brien said, mainly the city-run opt-out website and a 14 cent fee for every phone book delivered that would go toward its maintenance.

14 replies on “Council Drops Phone Book Recycling Fee in Response to Lawsuit”

  2. I swear to Jeebus… what is with you guys and the Great Phone Book War?

    I don’t like them either, but they just seem like such small potatoes compared to other problems.

  3. Nobody, not even Yellow Pages publishers, has the right to litter my front porch under the banner of “free speech” if I object.

    Last time I looked, there were no expressions of “speech” in those books, only commercial advertising accompanied by lists of names, addresses, and phone numbers.

  4. What’s the big deal? Ancient forests are being hacked down so that these people can use huge amounts of water and energy to make stupid phone books that nobody even wants. After they are abandoned on our doorsteps, they are thrown away, or at best, recycled. The tragedy of this pitiful cycle is that it epitomizes the global pattern of useless, unthinking consumption. Also, it’s really fucking annoying. There are few things more ugly and sad than rain-soaked, unwanted phone books in a dirty yellow plastic bag discarded on the sidewalk.

  5. Ok, so unwanted phone books is like, the Big Fucking Deal of today’s troubled democracy?

    Whatever… Vietnam vets rolling over in their graves and so forth…

  6. UF — there is always something else worse going on. I see at least three worthless variations on that theme every day, but I’m sure someone finds it convincing, otherwise why would people keep repeating it? I think a comprehensive disposal fee would make more sense, applied to packaging, electronics, and pretty much all non-food items, but hey, here we are. Progress is incremental, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do it.

  8. How much does the city get sued for each year? I’m curious as to what percentage of our taxes are just a big raffle to see who gets a few million by the end of the year.

  9. So I guess corporations really do have free speech rights now, and it allows them to trespass and dump junk on my property. Interesting how the constitution works.

  11. Should have stuck to the lawsuit. Post Office charges (last time I checked) .79 cents for every returned business class mail. If the phone books are delivered via postal carrier, then we should have the right to scribble “Return to Sender” and have the post office take it back at an additional fee.

  13. @9: Not only do they have free speech, they have first class free speech as opposed to the coach version we have (see campaign contribution limits for example).

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