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Civic Circus with Ankur Patel breaks down local politics, with a weekly report on city, county, and state bureaucracies.

Most issues aren’t confined to a specific location or level of government, but legislation is often done piecemeal; individual cities, counties, and states develop different policies to tackle the same problem. The environment is such an issue; it bleeds through jurisdictions.

Last week at the state level, the California Air Resources Board voted to reaffirm its cap-and-trade plan. The program lays the framework for the buying and selling of carbon and greenhouse gases. Initially, industrial plants would participate in a marketplace where they would have to buy the right to pollute. The 6 hour meeting held in Sacramento included alternatives, criticisms, hesitations, and administrative challenges to cap-and-trade, but in the end the plan was approved unanimously. One of the more poignant criticisms was brought by activists claiming that cap-and-trade would allow refineries, power plants, and other facilities to continue to emit pollutants in poor neighborhoods, as long as they paid a fee… That said, the cap and trade program at the very least, attempts to develop a comprehensive plan to combat greenhouse gases, with California being a pioneer at the state level.

But, even though California might be leading the way on cap-and-trade, a statewide ban on plastic bags was thwarted last year in the state legislature, partly due to heavy lobbying by the American Chemistry Council. To make up for the state’s disregard of the impact of plastic bags, leadership on the issue has been taken up by local governments like San Francisco, who’s City Council passed a plastic-bag-ban nearly 3 years ago. Los Angeles city has looked into such a ban in the past, but has yet to take action. However, the Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors recently passed a plastic bag ban that went into effect in unincorporated areas on July 1st of this year. Unincorporated areas of LA County are those places that aren’t governed by a city structure – like Rowland Heights, Altadena, La Crescenta, Marina del Rey, Baldwin Hills, and Valencia. By the way, there are approximately 1,100,000 people living in unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, and now all of them get to show off their colorful canvas bags when they do their weekly shopping.

The city of Los Angeles also regularly addresses environmental issues, even if they don’t line up neatly with state and county issues – it does that through its Energy and Environment Committee. At that committee’s last meeting, they focused on the contract with the Navajo Coal Burning plant and the increased fees that the City is going to have to leverage in order to maintain adequate water infrastructure. That’s right, your water bills are going up, because the consensus is that our water infrastructure has been neglected for far too long and the money just isn’t there to do what needs to be done.

With varying business interests, local activists, and regional politics in play — state, county and city agendas often don’t line up, even on the same broad issue such as the environment. With everyone thinking they are the ring master, the agenda gets muddled.