Toasting the Bottle Bill

ALBANY—It was finally time to pop the cork.

On Friday night, I found a bunch of environmental and good-government advocates standing in a light drizzle on the sidewalk outside DeJohn's restaurant on Lark Street, celebrating the passage of an expanded bottle bill. It passed Friday, along with the rest of the state budget.

Here's a photo I grabbed of Laura Haight, who has been advocating for this for longer than she likes to admit. Judith Enck, David Paterson's deputy secretary for the environment, was also there, but ducked out of the picture. A bunch of folks from NYPIRG were present–I saw Blair Horner and Bill Mahoney–as well as Katherine Nadeau of Environmental Advocates.

The measure that passed in the budget would require a five-cent deposit on bottled water–like what you pay now for soda and beer–and would send 80 percent of the nickels not claimed by drinkers to state coffers.

I asked Haight if she was going to be cracking a $300 bottle of champagne, or something like that. She laughed.

"Whatever we get, we will be ceremoniously paying a nickel more," she said.