Kerstin Diehn
USAmap
In the age of Donald Trump, some of the most significant political battles are taking place on the local level. Municipalities are struggling to raise wages and protect immigrants. School districts are subject to state takeovers across the nation. And efforts like the Community Rights Movement are seeking to upend the legal structures that allow private corporations to trump local law-making. From coast to coast, locally focused movements are finding innovative ways around restrictive top-down policies, showing that cities, towns, and counties can remain engines of progressive power.
Georgia: Promoting Sanctuary
Georgia is one of ten states to prohibit sanctuary city policies or require cities to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in some way. This has not stopped the Georgia #Not1MoreDeportation Coalition from working with municipalities to do what they can. According to Project South, the cities of Decatur and Clarkston, as well as Fayette, DeKalb, Clayton, Fulton, and Clarke Counties, have all passed policies to require U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide an actual warrant before local law enforcement can detain individuals on their behalf.
Portland, Oregon: Seeking Climate Action
A city of Portland ballot measure would create a 1 percent surcharge on in-city revenue for businesses that make more than $1 billion per year and ring up more than $500,000 annually in Portland sales. If passed, the measure would raise roughly $30 million per year for a “Portland Clean Energy Fund” for energy efficiency upgrades, home weatherization, rooftop solar, local food production, and “future innovation.” Low-income residents and communities of color led the drafting process, and would be given prioritized access to funds. Petitioners gathered twice the needed signatures to place the initiative on the November 6 ballot.
Toledo, Ohio: Protecting the Lake
An imperiled Lake Erie and a looming water crisis in the Midwest has inspired the Ohio group Toledoans for Safe Water to draft a ballot initiative to establish “irrevocable rights for the Lake Erie Ecosystem to exist, flourish and naturally evolve.” Asserting “a right to a healthy environment for the residents of Toledo,” the ordinance decrees that any state license or permit that allows a corporation to violate the lake’s rights will not be valid within the city. It would allow lawsuits to be filed against violators on behalf of Lake Erie, and the proceeds—used to restore the lake—would be paid to the city. Petitioners are on track to gather the required signatures before an August 1 deadline to get the initiative on the November 6 ballot. Similar initiatives are also targeting the November ballot in Columbus and Youngstown.
National City, California: Taking Rent Control
California prohibits localities from controlling rent prices in properties built after 1995—a key obstacle for the state’s housing justice movement. A state referendum to repeal this preemption is up for a vote in November. Some local residents are taking a proactive stance to prepare for the initiative’s potential passage. Residents in National City have handed in signatures for a ballot initiative to cap annual rent increases at 5 percent and ban arbitrary evictions. The initiative has survived a lawsuit from the city government to remove it altogether and will appear on the November ballot. According to the coalition Tenants Together, petitioners have turned in signatures to get similar measures on the ballot in the cities of Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa and in San Diego County and are still collecting signatures in the cities of Inglewood, Glendale, and Santa Ana.
Española, New Mexico: Confronting Colonial History
Española’s mayor appointed a Community Relations Commission tasked with making changes to the town’s controversial annual Fiesta celebration, which critics say glorifies Spanish colonization and the conquistadors who murdered local Pueblo people. The commission is recommending that the city remove all depictions of the brutal conquistador Juan de Oñate at the upcoming Fiesta.
Providence, Rhode Island: Keeping Cops in Line
On January 1, a transformative “Community-Police Relations Act” went into effect in Providence. The law prohibits police from engaging in racial or other forms of discriminatory profiling, political surveillance, and “targeted electronic surveillance” without reasonable suspicion. It prevents police from detaining people based solely on their immigration status and from interfering with civilians who record the police. It revamps the rules for including individuals on a police gang database, institutes new protocols for police searches, and requires detailed reports on every police stop. And it grants residents’ power to sue the city over any violations of the law. The search is now on for the director of a revamped external review authority, which will have subpoena powers.
Austin, Texas: Halting Deportations
Texas’s draconian sanctuary city preemption law, known as SB4, directs police, sheriffs, and campus law enforcement to act on behalf of federal immigration agents and says local officials can be removed from office if they interfere. In response, the city of Austin has passed two “Freedom City” resolutions directing the police to halt discretionary arrests for nonviolent misdemeanors, including marijuana possession and driving with an invalid license. The resolutions also require officers to record all of their requests for immigration status and to inform individuals of their right to deny requests for immigration papers.
Decorah, Iowa: Pushing for Public Utilities
The franchise agreement between the city of Decorah (population 8,000) and the multi-billion-dollar company Alliant Energy expired in June. Decorah residents launched a referendum campaign to explore taking over the utility and making it publicly owned. The referendum lost by three votes in May after Alliant’s “no” campaign spent more than twice the public “yes” campaign. But the momentum behind the citizen push has renewed interest in public ownership as an option—the last time an Iowa municipality took over a private electric utility was in 1974.
Meigs County, Ohio: Fighting for the Environment
Petitioners in Meigs County, Ohio, are proposing a new county charter to outlaw the injection of fracking waste. The sixteen-page document asserts that local residents have legally enforceable rights to “clean air, water, and soil” and limits the government’s power to use eminent domain to benefit private entities. Similar county charters in Ohio have garnered the required number of signatures ten times since 2015, but the Ohio Supreme Court, secretary of state, and others have removed them all from local ballots. Meigs and Portage Counties keep on trying—both are currently collecting signatures to get on the November 2019 ballot.