Opinion: More Hot Air From Lobbyists

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Will the Balloon Council – there’s a lobbying group for everything -- please just suck it up?

And I don’t mean helium.

Every year, hundreds of those metallic helium balloons that some little kid lets go of by accident, or some misguided romantic releases into the sky like a shiny-bright dove, float up into electric lines and knock out the power hundreds of times over. They create millions of bucks in losses for utility companies and businesses – costs that you know for a fact get passed along to you and me.

In California, the metallic helium balloons already have to be sold with weights, to keep this from happening. But when the ‘’weight’’ is some toy or candy, it disappears fast, and then so does the balloon.

So the California legislature may ban the metallic balloons altogether, if they’re filled with floaty gas. The Balloon Council, evidently full of its own product, is yammering about how this criminalizes a toy.

Oh, put a sock puppet in it. Party peddlers did a fine trade long before those balloons came along. The plastic kind of helium balloons would still be perfectly legal. Anyone who thinks a ban on metallic balloons will be the ruin of California party life obviously doesn’t have any kind of a life in the first place.

Or there’s my alternative offer: if the Balloon Council wants to keep sending aloft balloons that knock out power to thousands of people, be my guest: just make sure every balloon is marked with the manufacturer and seller’s name and address, so that the Public Utilities Commission will know who to bill for tens of thousands of dollars, to recoup the cost of damage from all those balloon blackouts.

Besides, what’s the point of a balloon you can’t make into anatomically correct balloon animals?