The town is attempting to limit the buildup of plastic bags full of advertising that end up sitting at the end of people’s driveways.
“We’re getting quite a few people quite irate with these plastic bags,” First Selectman Rudy Marconi told the Board of Selectmen at the end of the May 15 meeting.
The green bags are familiar sights along town roads, often many days after they were delivered.
The pale green bags are delivered to many homes in town.
“It’s a plastic bag full of inserts,” Mr. Marconi said.
They contain “The Savings Source,” a collection of ads from an area daily, The News-Times of Danbury.
As Mr. Marconi explained it, the daily paper offers a program in which advertisers are promised a certain amount of coverage, and seeks to achieve it in part by delivering the bagged inserts to homes that don’t subscribe to the paper.
If people are away a few days, or don’t pick them up, the bags sit at the end of the driveway.
“It really is an eyesore,” he said.
Mr. Marconi said he’d had a meeting with the publisher of The News-Times to ask that the indiscriminate distribution be limited.
“I’d met with the publisher two other times,” he told the board. “If it doesn’t stop, we’re going to start issuing littering violations.”
Planning and Zoning Commission member John Katz, a regular in the audience at selectmen’s meetings, had his own suggestion.
“If those of you as irate as I am were to collect them and deposit them in the lobby of The News-Times,” he said, “this would stop.”
(Note: After the appearance of this story in the print edition of The Press, reader Dorothy Wright wrote: “When this practice first started, I called the non-circulation number of the News-Times, 203-744-5100, asked to speak with the manager of ‘The Savings Source’ program, and asked that manager to have my address taken off their distribution list. Deliveries stopped the following week, and have not resumed.”)