As the single dissenting vote on Tuesday evening’s City Council approval of a polystyrene ban for restaurants, Thomas Small, congenial environmentalist, wants this much known:

“I don’t really have any objection to the ordinance as it is. The ordinance is just fine.”

Mr. Small explained the evolution of his vote.

As happens commonly at Council meetings when an emotional topic is in the center4 ring, advocacy groups flood into Council Chambers.

On this night, members of the Surfrider Foundation and Ballona Creek Renaissance voiced objections to a Mayor Jim Clarke amendment that passed two months ago. It held that if certain restaurants found it a hardship to replace their stock of Styrofoam containers, substitutions could be made and evaluated by the City Council.

“I don’t think that amendment is such a terrible thing,” Mr. Small said. “I don’t think it is really going to have any effect.

“What it does is develop the potential to create a white list (of replacement products) that would be allowed because it is too much of a (financial) burden to replace them.”

Mr. Small said city staff “has determined there are no such (replacement) products. There are no products that cannot be, that don’t already have substitutions that are just fine.

“So there are no items to go on the (Mayor Clarke-suggested) list. A lot of people at the meeting argue that the clause should be taken out.”
Removal of the amendment, however, would have further delayed implementation of the ban, already pushed off months into a cloudy future.

“The (city) legal department came up with a way to amend it again to have the amendment sunset (expire) after a year if it was not used,” said Mr. Small. He called this “a terrific compromise. That was a way we could approve it that night. It would have given the environmentalists what they wanted, and yet it would have been the law for a year.”

Shaking his head, Mr. Small said “this was an obvious thing to do.”

He made such a motion, and Councilperson Meghan Sahli-Wells seconded it.

“For some reason (the Council) voted it down,” said a puzzled Mr. Small.

The motion failed 3-2.

When it came time to vote on the ordinance, the final score was 4-1. “My vote was symbolic,” said Mr. Small, “because I felt I couldn’t vote against my own motions.”