Bisbee, Arizona, is at the center of a jurisdictional tussle with the state government, a kerfuffle that may prove whether there’s room in a conservative state for local self-determination—even liberal local self-determination.
The Scrapbook has to admit a fondness for Bisbee, a former mining town in the desert mountains of southeastern Arizona. Much of the city’s late-19th- and early-20th- century frontier architecture has survived, giving the place a quirky Old West quality that helped make it an artsy destination. Which, in turn, has made Bisbee something of a liberal outpost in what has otherwise traditionally been a conservative state.
One way you know Bisbee is liberal is that it has banned plastic shopping bags—a city ordinance that Arizona’s attorney general says is illegal.
It was just last year that the state legislature passed a law saying that only the state government could regulate “auxiliary containers.” As the Arizona Daily Star puts it, no local “fees or prohibitions are allowed on containers ranging from bottles and cans to bags.” It doesn’t matter if a locality has “compelling reasons” for a bag ban, says state attorney general Mark Brnovich, state law trumps city law and that’s that. Bisbee is likely to contest that in court.
It’s the sort of tussle that has played out in other conservative states with liberal pockets: Should blue-city governments be allowed to pass laws at odds with the druthers of red-state majorities? This summer, for example, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed a law restricting local tree ordinances in the Lone Star State. The target of the legislation was city environmental rules such as those in Austin, a town that combines a funky-left “keep it weird” ethic with liberal nanny-state intrusiveness. Austin has strict regulations about what trees homeowners can cut down on their own property, rules enforced with hefty fines and fees.
Abbott scuffled with Austin over the felling of trees at his own house—one inconveniently placed old pecan in particular. The governor has made the case that such rules erode the conservative “Texas model” that makes the state so attractive. “Texas is being Californianized,” he complained in 2015. “It’s being done at the city level with bag bans, fracking bans, tree-cutting bans,” and other heavy-handed left-wing regulations.
All of which may be true. But The Scrapbook remembers when it was a cornerstone of conservative thought that the best government was that closest to where people live. Local lawn-cutting ordinances shouldn’t be a federal matter and it’s better for tree-trimming rules to be made by city rather than state lawmakers.
All of which to say, if the people of Bisbee want the obnoxious restriction on choice and convenience represented by a ban on disposable shopping bags, that’s their business.
