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Opinion: About time: California Senate debates bill allowing citizens to decline delivery of a telephone book

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With minor issues like a $20 billion budget deficit still looming, a California legislative committee has taken a major progressive step forward on a far more important issue to protect the entire state’s precious environment.

In a stunning 6-4 vote that drew remarkably little attention outside the committee room, the state Senate’s Committee on Energy, Utilities and Communications has passed an almost pioneering measure that would allow California’s many millions of telephone subscribers to opt out of receiving annual telephone books, a right that many citizens may have thought they already possessed without legislative authorization.

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The bill was introduced by Sen. Leland Yee of the Bay area who is, of course, a Democrat.

‘At a time when Californians are looking for ways to reduce our carbon footprint,’ Yee said, ‘we should give them that choice.’

That choice had been taken away from citizens by previous legislators allegedly protecting said citizens by mandating phone book delivery to everyone.

Senate staff said 78 million phone directories are distributed across the vast state each year, roughly two phone books per citizen. These heavy paper products duplicate electronic resources available online, assuming every Californian is online.

Senate Bill 920, which mimics similar measures in Cleveland and Miami, would allow any Californian to use a toll-free phone line or website to choose never to receive a phone book ever again. Not even once.

This would create another vast state data base of names, phone numbers and addresses and, of course, require hiring people to monitor, update, distribute and enforce the lists.

But it would permit millions of citizens to finally leave their homes each year, no longer waiting by the door day-after-day for the familiar if unscheduled thunk of a four-pound phone book tossed by someone mindlessly walking through neighborhood bushes and gardens.

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The bill now goes to another Senate committee for even more consideration, debate, possible amendments and more voting, hopefully none of which requires volumes of documentation and transcribing on paper.

Another option, clearly unacceptable in California, is for any telephone subscriber interested in helping the environment to politely decline delivery of future telephone books. They could accomplish this unusual feat by using their own private voice to tell the delivery person, ‘No, thank you, young man. Save the environment and don’t leave me a phone book this year. I can look up numbers online myself. Good luck now in the unemployment line.’

The obvious problem with that silly approach, however, is that it requires no government authority nor involvement and counts on something called individual initiative, leaving important elected officials in Sacramento with one less thing to debate, parse, vote on and claim to have accomplished during the next election campaign.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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