New York’s do-gooders have been on a tear this year, winning new laws, regulations and zoning fights that promise a brighter future for the state — everything from bail reform to City Council votes that have initiated the closing of Rikers Island.
Now comes the hard part: turning big promises into reality. This will require the decidedly unsexy work of painstakingly coordinating ideas that individually sound wonderful, but can easily clash and cancel each other without careful planning.
It happens all the time in government. In an effort to encourage recycling, we have a bottle law that provides a 5-cent deposit refund on most disposable bottles and cans — but we also require homeowners to separate out containers and place them on the sidewalk recycling, or face a fine.
If one incentive to recycle is good, two must be better, right? Not necessarily.
More from the NY daily News here.