Municipal Resistance Quoted from 2 Articles

Municipal Resistance

          In the spate of companies looking for greater jurisdiction in various communities, locals have proven an effective force in blocking undesirable corporations from moving in”.  From The Electrical Worker and The Nation.

          Never has the role of government been a more scorching topic in the national discourse of the U.S. and Canada.  Should some services now provided by local, state, provincial and national government be turned over to private interests?  If so, which ones?

          That was the question faced by 13 members of Grand Island, Neb., Local 1597 who maintain the city’s wastewater treatment plant-treating 8 million gallons of raw sewage each day-after they heard that their mayor and city council had lined up behind a plan to turn management of the facility over to a private company.

          An operations agreement with a subsidiary of Veolia Environment, a huge private enterprise with operations in 77 countries and nearly $40 billion of revenues in 2011, looked like a done deal.  City leaders saw in selling management rights an easy solution to completing a $50 million upgrade of the aging plant’s infrastructure outlined in a 2009 comprehensive plan. 

          But members of Local 1597 and activists from an international advocacy organization, Food & Water Watch, were not content to be observers.  Waging a multi-pronged campaign against privatization in Grand Island, the Great Plains industrial city with the incongruous name, they set a potent example of how to build political consensus at the grassroots and win.

          The local started by sending a letter to 13,00 Grand Island households, saying, “Residents of cities with privately operated wastewater treatment plants experience consistently higher rates, declines in customer service and quality, and little-to-no democratic input.  Other consequences of privatization regularly include lost jobs due to cutbacks by the private operator, and profits leaving the community, as well as lack of transparency, increased corruption and diminished accountability for the operation of the wastewater treatment plant.”

          Next, the local mobilized for a turnout at a city council meeting where Veolia was scheduled to make a presentation.  The surprise witness at the council meeting was the water treatment plant’s superintendent, who refuted Veolia’s numbers.  The council postponed a vote until his analysis could be verified.

          Following the meeting, Local 1597 Business Manager Dan Quick and Iowa-based organizer with Food & Water Watch, Matt Ohloff sponsored a town hall meeting.  The next day, The Grand Island Independent carried an article favorable to the anti-privatization campaign.

          On Feb 2, an overflow crowd attended the council’s vote on privatization.  Quick requested the mayor to ask everyone opposed to privatization to stand up.  Only the two representatives from Veolia remained seated.  The council voted 10-0 against privatization.

***

          Similar battles are being fought and won by towns all over the nation opposing outside influences.  In Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, the natural landscape and time-tested buildings remain intact largely from expressing disapproval of corporate interests.  In 2010, an international electric consortium proposed a high-voltage transmission line that would slice through the village like a giant zipper.  Opposed to the line disfiguring their visual landscape, residents Dolly McPhaul and Nancy Martland campaigned for a local ordinance that would ban corporations from acquiring land or building structures to support any “unsustainable energy system.”  The ordinance stripped those corporations of their free-speech and due-process rights under the Constitution, as well as protections afforded by the Constitution’s commerce and contract clauses.  Judicial rulings that recognized corporations as legal “persons” would not be recognized in Sugar Hill.  Any state or federal law that tried to interfere with the town’s authority would be invalidated.  “Natural communities and ecosystems”-wetlands, streams, rivers, aquifers-would acquire “inalienable and fundamental rights to exist and flourish,” and any resident could enforce the law on their behalf.  “All power is inherent in the people,” the measure stated.

          Sugar Hill’s attorney suggested this was folly; local governments can’t override state or federal law, much less the Constitution.  Such an ordinance could attract a lawsuit, which the village could ill afford.  McPhaul, a Republican and a charity volunteer and a self-described “goody two-shoes,” also worried about litigation.  “But what is your option?” she asks.  “To lie down, play dead and let them destroy your town?”  After a two-month public awareness campaign, Sugar Hill’s residents took up the ordinance at their 2012 town meeting.  It passed by a unanimous voice vote.

          Attorney, Thomas Linzey runs the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a Pennsylvania nonprofit that advocates for local self-government and the rights of nature.  CELDF comes to threatened communities, educates residents about US legal history, and trains them to advocate for “rights-based ordinances” like Sugar Hill’s.  About thirty municipalities in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio and New Mexico have enacted such measures, according to Linzey, following an earlier round of over 100 more modest laws.  CELDEF’s organizers have helped citizens fight frackers, coal companies, factory farms, big-box stores, water bottlers and sewage-sludge dumpers.  They’ve campaigned to overhaul the City Charter in Spokane, Washington.  And they aided the successful effort to confer rights on nature in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution.

          Measures like these are effective alternatives to violent protests.  While this isn’t an all-inclusive measure, it can and should be used wisely by towns threatened from outside interests.  When residents voice their opinion, policies usually are created or altered to tailor these requests.  The key here is to allow this to happen.  Hold public meetings, where residents can discuss and vote on the measures, and there will be undoubtedly less resistance and chaos when such measures are introduced.