Haddam's Sen. Edward Meyer Supports New Mattress Fee

A proposal to add a fee of as much as $12 to the cost of buying a new mattress in Connecticut has passed the state's House and Senate and has the support of some local lawmakers, including Haddam's Sen. Edward Meyer. 

Saying that towns and cities right now bear the burden of disposing of abandoned mattresses and other bulky wastes discarded on roadsides, Meyer said he hopes the fee eventually will get lower.

“As this program catches on, there will be higher volume, and the fee will come down,” Meyer, who co-chairs the legislature's Environment Committee, told the blog Capitol Watch. 

Groups that lobby on behalf of towns, including the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, support the measure to ease the costs on towns of disposing of illegally discarded mattresses.

Some 350,000 new mattresses are sold annually in Connecticut and CCM estimates that towns collectively spend $1.3 million each year cleaning up old mattresses from roadsides, Capitol Watch reports.