Trouble in the Iowa House
Well folks, its that time of the year again. Last year was a wonderfully quiet year for our interests in the Iowa house. Not so this year. Already a Keg Registration bill has surfaced in the house. Also there is plenty of movement to change the Iowa Bottle Deposit law.
The Keg Registration Bill has bipartisan support and looks like to succeed. That said, you should contact your local reps and tell them you are not interested in any more government observation of your personal life. The effect of this bill will only be to discourage people from buying kegs. Underage drinkers will switch to cheap canned beer and hard alcohol.. if they haven’t already. I guess once legislatures figure that out they will have to address that too… maybe they will raise the taxes on beer and alcohol (not wine though!) in order to discourage underage drinking next year? It is a slippery slope indeed. 
The details of this bill are to make it a simple misdemeanor for anyone who:
“fails to affix upon sale, defaces, or fails to record a keg identification sticker or produce a record of keg identification stickers”
Also if you are caught with a defaced keg, you will forfeit your deposit on the keg. Note that bud and miller charge a measly ten to twelve dollars as deposits on kegs. The state gets to keep the deposit if forfeited.
We get to keep a record of everyone who buys a keg for 90 days, with all their personal information, including your drivers license number … and it has to be accessible during business hours to any request of a police officer.
Its time to contact your representative and send them off a quick email letting them know that you do not agree with the idea of keg registration. You can find out who to write at http://www.vote-smart.org.
We’ll see what the changes to the bottle bill will be. It is hard for people to understand how the bill actually works in the first place. Let me try to explain. When a distributor sells a bottle to a store they charge the store an extra 5 cents. When you buy a 6 pack or individual soda you pay an extra nickel to the store where you bought it, then you either return it to the store or a redemption center for a refund. The distributors (like us) then pay the store or redemption center back the 5 cents plus 1 cent handling fee, for a total of 6 cents.
It this extra one cent that is at the center of the debate. It has not changed since the bill was created in the 70’s. We are all in favor of this, since it obviously has to change to cover the costs of the redemption centers recycling the glass.. although it will cost us some money.
Really it would be better to have general tax or something that directly promotes curbside recycling. In small towns in Iowa there is very little recycling done. We can’t even get anyone to come out to Amana to get our returned bottles, we have to load them into a van ourselves and drive it to the nearest recycling center.
There are all sorts of problems with the bottle bill as it is. One is called escheats. The entire state of Iowa makes money on the deposit law, since many people buy bottles and never return them for their deposit (they live out of state, or they are lazy and just put them in the recycle bin or trash). Their have been threats to make us all keep track of exactly how many bottles we take in and how many we sell.. and then send any surplus money back to the state. That’s great, but recycling and handling all this glass is a burden on us, and we would like to get something to offset our costs. Keeping track of all the bottles we sell and get returned every year … that is yet another state-mandated record keeping requirement. I think we have enough of those! If an establishment loses money by receiving more bottles than it sells, will the state pay them the difference? Not likely.