Bottling Up the Governor

As we commented yesterday, the "Bigger, Better, Bottle Bill," was excised from the governor's executive budget. What needs to be recognizes here is that, yes a nice labor/industry lobbying effort was waged against the proposal, but all of the effort would have been for nought if not for the stalwart support of Senator Joe Bruno.

What the state senate did, as the NY Times' Michael Cooper points out in his analysis this morning, is to reject "some of Governor Spitzer's pet projects...They rejected his call to require a deposit on cans and bottles of non carbonated drinks." Without Bruno's firmness the bottle bill mess would have been worsened in local markets, and the bottlers nickels would have gone to the state for environmental spending. The industry owes the senator a huge debt.