Plastic grocery bags don’t fall apart when they get wet. They can be reused. They aren’t bulky. They are cheap. And the Bend City Council is moving with impressive speed to ban them to make Bend greener.

To that end, councilors formed a subcommittee. They have a draft ordinance. As early as the middle of next year, many businesses in Bend could be forbidden from providing single-use plastic bags at checkout. There will likely be a number of exceptions.

A plastic bag ban may be as about as close to inevitable as the council action gets. Why would the draft ordinance, though, include a requirement that customers be charged no less than 10 cents per recyclable paper bag provided to a customer? The obvious answer is that it provides an incentive for customers to switch to reusable grocery bags. But if it costs businesses less to provide a paper bag, the city is dictating that stores overcharge their customers.

A draft city ordinance also says businesses shall “not rebate or otherwise reimburse any customer any portion of the pass-through cost.” It’s easy to understand why that provision is in the draft. It reinforces the incentive for consumers to switch to reusable bags. It’s a regulation, though, impossible to enforce if a business is sneaky about it, such as by lowering other prices.

The draft ordinance further requires businesses to print on the sales receipt how much extra the customer is paying for any recyclable paper bags. Perhaps retailers could include the names of the councilors who vote for the ban as well — a proud memorial for some and a reminder of who to blame for others.

A plastic bag ban may bring some of the green goodness that is hoped. The sad thing is in a town with critical problems with affordable housing, traffic congestion and homelessness that councilors don’t show the same intensity of commitment to create special subcommittees of councilors to work on solutions. Of course, they are much more intractable issues. But that’s exactly why they should be attacked with the same sort of aggressive approach. Or is it only when an issue is colored green that councilors can muster up extra motivation?