Building Local Power

By Institute for Local Self-RelianceSociety & Culture News News Commentary

Building Local Power episodes

April 27, 2021Stop Privileging Large Industrial Sites Over Local Composters
On this episode of Building Local Power, ILSR’s Jess Del Fiacco and Brenda Platt are joined by Tom Gilbert of Black Dirt Farm and Lor Holmes of the CERO Cooperative. Their discussion focuses on the need to support local and distributed infrastructure for food scrap recycling and composting.
Highlights include:
The many ways in which on-farm and local composting enterprises nourish healthy soils and community.
How state-level legislation and implementation policies around food scrap recycling have affected their businesses.
How large-scale businesses are being privileged at the expense of local operations — and how this can harm the environment and the economy.

“I think if we’re really hoping to manage resources effectively to capture their full value for the community, but also to address issues of white supremacy and gender violence and all of these other aspects of society that we don’t think of as necessarily purely economic issues… all of that work boils down to relationships. We need to build currencies of trust that allow us to act in solidarity and allow us to build out economies and communities that have really clearly articulated values.”

Related Resources
Black Dirt Farm
CERO Cooperative
Vermont stakeholder letter to legislature: Legislative Hearing on ANR’s Implementation of the Organics Management provisions of the Universal Recycling Law (February 16, 2021)
Lor Holmes, CERO Cooperative, Inc., presentation to MA-Zero Waste Caucus (April 12, 2021)
ILSR Written Comments on NY DEC Proposed Rules for Food Waste Recycling (April 27, 2021)
Waste Dive, Maryland becomes latest state to pass organics diversion mandate (April 14, 2021)
Small Business Rising
ILSR’s Hierarchy to Reduce Food Waste & Grow Community
Readings Recommended by Guests:
Leverage Points by Donnella Meadows
Emergent Strategies by Adrienne Marie-Brown
Viking Economics by George Lakey
Revolutionary Ecology by Judi Bari
Transcript
Jess Del Fiacco:
Hello, and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast dedicated to thought-provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and communications manager here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For more than 25 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities where power, wealth, and accountability remain in local hands. Today, we’ll be discussing the need to support local and distributed infrastructure for food scrap recycling and composting. I’m excited to be joined by my colleague, Brenda Platt, as well as two folks who are helping to keep compost local. Tom Gilbert is a Vermont farmer who runs Black Dirt Farm and Lor Holmes is a worker-owner of the CERO Cooperative, a food waste pickup service provider for a wide range of commercial clients in the Boston area. So, welcome to the show, both of you.
Tom Gilbert:
Thanks for having me.
Lor Holmes:
Thank you.
Jess Del Fiacco:
So, you’re both a part of the Sustainable Food Movement. Could you tell us just super briefly what it is you do, what your businesses are, and how you’re supporting your local agricultural economy? Tom, maybe we can start with you.
Tom Gilbert:
Sure. I own and operate Black Dirt Farm, we’re in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and our business model is designed to mimic the carbon cycle in a mature ecosystem. And so we start by going off the farm and collecting discarded food. We serve about 90 businesses and institutions and collect about 30 tons a week. And then we forage laying hens on that compost mix and ship eggs throughout Vermont and down into Boston. And then we make compost and worm castings with the resulting material. And then we also grow a small number of crops here. And in terms of the local economy, we really prioritize getting food into the mouths of our neighbors and do a lot of solidarity work locally to just build our community more than anything because I think that’s fundamentally sort of the stepping off point for everything else in the economic and system side of it is just the mechanism.
Lor Holmes:
Yeah. Hi, CERO Cooperative does also have an acronym to it. The CERO in both Spanish and English stands for Cooperative Energy Recycling and Organics. So, we started our organics hauling business, which helps businesses, commercial entities, larger and smaller learn how to source, separate, clean compostable material. And then we provide this… So, we train folks and educate as to the importance of that and then we help them set up for service. We provide anywhere from daily to weekly, to on-call pickups of compostable material with our fleet of four trucks. And we transport that material both to local farm-based windrow composting facilities, and two dedicated farm-based anaerobic digesters. Dedicated, meaning that they only process yard, food, and animal waste as opposed to the big digesters you see that also process wastewater. So, we’re highest and best use business. And that’s a lot of reason why customers who work with us choose us as well as for being big service.
Lor Holmes:
As far as the economy, our business was built by folks, grassroots leaders in our black and brown communities have been most impacted by environmental injustice, as well as economic injustice and other forms of oppression. And they decided they wanted to build a business. They wanted it to be worker-owned, to establish good, dignified green-collar jobs, we were calling them back at the beginning, ways that people in the community could make a decent living, even have the opportunity to own businesses or be part of owning cooperative businesses while improving the sustainability and environmental practices in the community and have very quickly seen how that’s part of our local circular food economy. In the most literal sense, I described how we deliver the compost out to the farms. Well, in the growing season like now, once we dump the food scraps into the compost piles and wash out the truck, we often reloading that truck with composted soil products that we bring back to the city to support urban agriculture. So, that’s a very literal manifestation where we’re using this year’s food scraps to produce next year’s food.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Very cool.
Brenda Platt:
Lor and Tom, I’m so blessed to know you both. I think I’ve been following your efforts since we wrote Growing Local Fertility: A Guide to Community Composting back in 2014. Lor, as I recall, CERO formed after Massachusetts passed that state law in 2013, which banned large food waste generators, large food waste generators, I think of one who were producing one ton or more a week of food scraps, banning them from landfilling or burning, right? And the law created these new opportunities for food recycling businesses and interests. And I remember you talking about this passionate group of black and brown folks from Boston’s neighborhoods you just mentioned, how they were like, “Hey man, we deserve a slice of this economic pie.” Can you just talk about just for a few seconds like how that law actually spurred the creation of CERO?
Lor Holmes:
Well, it’s interesting. I think that my first day on the job I got hired by this group of folks and they knew was they wanted to do something in recycling. They wanted to do something green and they wanted to do a co-op. And I was the first hire. I was hired to be the startup manager. And on my first day on the job, I went to a zero-waste workshop with Ruth Abbe and Gary Liss and folks that we all know well as being the international experts on all this stuff. And at the same time, they were announcing Massachusetts DEP food waste ban, which was to take effect in 2014. This was the fall of 2012. And we were just looking for what would be this recycling thing? And it was at the same time that the market was starting to fall out of the other commodities because our single-stream recycling was giving us such crap.
Lor Holmes:
So, I was having a hard time landing on something and as soon as we learned about the food waste ban, we put all our effort and before long decided, “You know what? This is just all we’re going to do, and we’re going to get really good at it.” And I think we’ve gotten pretty good at it. We’re now harvesting about 100 tons a week of clean compostable material.
Brenda Platt:
Wow.
Lor Holmes:
Not going into the landfill and it’s not going into the incinerators and it’s not going into dirty digesters. So we’re pretty proud of that.
Brenda Platt:
You should be. Tom, your farm is kind of a different kind of worker-owner business, right? It’s a family farm. So, why are family farms important for healthy food and the ag system?
Tom Gilbert:
I think Lor really captured all of those things really well. I think really fundamentally local control is highly critical to being able to control where resources go, but also how do they go there. And I think having a collective ownership model like CERO is super inspiring and wonderful because there’s a high level of transparency and accountability built into that. And that’s really inspiring and I think wonderfully effective. I think a family farm model is a alternative structure to that that can capture many of those things, especially if you put your focus on them, but it would be easy also to miss some of those outcomes as well. But for us, we put a lot into our local economy in general, as a family both through the farm, but also as participants.
Tom Gilbert:
And I think if we’re really hoping to manage resources effectively to capture their full value for the community, but also to address issues of white supremacy and gender violence and all of these other aspects of society that we don’t think of as necessarily purely economic issues, really at the end of the day, all of that work boils down to relationships. We need to build currencies of trust that allow us to act in solidarity and allow us to build out economies and communities that have really clearly articulated values. And I think that’s the most powerful thing is we do so much work with all sorts of partners, other small farms, non-profits, schools.
Tom Gilbert:
And the more we interact on a personal basis, and the more we really establish shared values, the more we can define those goals and that the challenge with the way that some of these systems and markets are starting to industrialize is those entities that are coming in say from out of state to take resources, again, back out of state, for instance, that they’re never going to be at the table in the local conversation. And they’re never going to be part of figuring out what is best for the community. And I think that all of these things come down to building intrinsic economies where the people who live with these systems ultimately are the decision-makers about how best to utilize them and making sure that the benefits of those things are spread widely. I think local control is an important thing and having lots of small operations involved means we get to decentralize that and distribute the benefits.
Brenda Platt:
Well, here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance we couldn’t agree with you more on that point about local control. And you’re not the only farmer doing this in Vermont. Talk about some of the other farmers you’re working with, what’s the landscape in Vermont for creating kind of this local economy and healthy sustainable food system? Because what’s happening, we’re going to get into the developments as you mentioned with resources leaving the state. But right now, leading up last few years, you’ve been building to something else in Vermont, right?
Tom Gilbert:
Right. Yeah. I think one of the things that I am most inspired about is we really have a culture of mutualism and there is incredible information sharing and a lot of lateral trust and solidarity. And so, I think ultimately what we benefit from is having more than just sort of a constellation of… Or random businesses here and there doing great things, but we really have more of a constellation where the dots are getting connected and then you get to fill in a bigger picture than any one individual operation would otherwise get to do. So, around here, for instance, we’ve formed the Center for an Agricultural Economy in 2009 and are really just actively building out all the infrastructure in all the gaps in our highly local food system of seven towns. So that’s everything from food processing space to distribution, to trainings for farms and food processors and food justice work.
Tom Gilbert:
And then, between the farms here, we have just such a wonderful community of growers and composters and processors that there’s just a incredibly open environment that is not based on competition and is based on that premise that all ships rise and sink together. And so, we do a lot of information sharing. Somebody figures something out, whether it’s on something ultimately sort of banal like worker’s comp and instead of sort of hoarding that information and building intellectual property really, there’s a sort of a notion that knowledge is part of the comments and that we all will benefit from it. So I think we have all sorts of wonderful aspects of that.
Brenda Platt:
Lor, in Massachusetts you’re not the only community-based composter operating there. Are you finding similar sharing in your network?
Lor Holmes:
Yeah, I think we do. I have tried to formalize this in fits and starts of bringing together community composters in our area to try primarily in the interest of kind of building power, us against all the big industry people. And we’re tiny even together. We’re a tiny bit of the market, but we do share, we do consult one another, but we also compete and we’re often pitted against one another in the contracting process. So, I’m not going to say we have it figured out. I think it’s challenging. There’s certainly, I think the bottom line for all of us is that there’s plenty of work to go around and that there’s much more for us to be gained by working together for the best kinds of policies, but not all community composters are the same either. Some of them are starting to get kind of maybe not necessarily bought, but partnered up with some of the others in the industry. And so, we can’t really just assume that because we’re small composters, we all feel the same way about stuff. I’m just being real.
Brenda Platt:
Yeah. And we facilitate a national cultivating Community Composter Coalition and there’s such a wide range of members in our coalition. CERO is one of them. We have for-profit, non-profit, worker-owned. There are different sizes. And Tom, when you described about sharing information, Lor, you’re in one particular market area and there’s a lot of you and I can see where you compete. But nationally, we’re really seeing a lot of sharing of information among our members to lift everybody up, but-
Lor Holmes:
If I can just add to that, Brenda. In fact, through your network, your national network, we’ve started a smaller group conversation among the ones that are worker-owned co-ops and more interested in solidarity economies and that kind of stuff. And we share information freely with one another that we might not with others in the group. So the network actually not only helped us find each other, but helped us kind of understand those forces better.
Brenda Platt:
All right. So, let me ask you something just about, what do you see as the… Before these more recent, we’ll talk about this with the industry, larger-scale facilities kind of siphoning off, talk about competition, right? Siphoning off some of your clients and the materials that you were handling. Before these new trends started happening, were you experiencing growth? Were you like getting more clients, getting more material, producing high-quality stuff? What was that looking like? And Tom, let’s start with you.
Tom Gilbert:
Yeah. You asked Lor about the Massachusetts ban on organics going to landfill, Vermont has a similar ban and so we… Well, I was in the market, not under the Black Dirt handle, but otherwise. We were having a fight for elbow room at the time and we were mostly competing with trash haulers at the time, not necessarily other food scrap haulers. But then with the passage of the law, it really did open up the market and we saw tremendous growth very quickly. We’re not a growth oriented business. So our whole premise is to sort of grow as necessary, but not beyond necessary, but that’s a hard place to hold in a larger competitive market, especially when you’re talking about not the local farms that I was describing before, but multi-state and multinational companies. But the market for us in the last several years, since the state opened things up for depackaging has shifted quite a bit.
Tom Gilbert:
And while we have lost tonnage, in a very quick period of time, we lost 30% of our tonnage in several months, which was very challenging for us as somebody who operates with sort of just enough, but no more type mentality, we’ve since been able to make up the tonnage, but the challenge for us is that with depackaging, which I guess we’ll talk about a little bit more in a little bit, we lost all of our major scale generators. And so as Lor knows, and anybody in this business, economically it’s way more profitable to service a larger business like a grocery store than a school that’s just going to generate a single 48 gallon tote. And so, we’ve maintained our customer base and made up the tonnage, but we’re servicing way more small stops. So for us, the biggest issue has been a dramatic decrease in our efficiency.
Tom Gilbert:
So unlike CERO, we’re in a rural market and everything is very spread out. And so if you’re having to drive miles just to go get one tote, it takes us at a grocery store a minute and a half per container, whereas a single tote school, it takes us three and a half to five minutes per container. And you can’t make that up in a day by swapping a 30-tote stop out for a one-tote stop. So, our numbers are pretty steady, but our efficiency and our margin have all gone down and our costs have gone up dramatically.
Brenda Platt:
Well, actually, let’s talk about what is a depackager and how is that hurting your business? What is happening there with these depackaging facilities?
Tom Gilbert:
Well, okay, so I’ll talk about depackaging. Depackaging is really more of an indicator of the larger problem and it has an acute impact, but the bigger problem is really a laissez-faire attitude towards markets and regulation and this sort of tolerance for contamination that we seem to have a cultural bias towards. So, depackagers are machines that separate food material from their packaging, and they are used as an alternative to what’s called source separation, meaning the separation of compostable materials from non-compostable materials at the point where it’s generated. And these machines are totally impressive in what they can do. It really is an impressive thing to be able to take pallets of tomato sauce and dump it in a hopper and have it crush everything and separate it. But it also results in, especially with films packaged materials versus say, cans, they do result in those organic materials getting contaminated.
Tom Gilbert:
And so, it’s an inherent downgrade of the material. So what’s happening right now in Vermont is that stores that were sort of separating for over a decade are now just throwing all of their materials in a bin with the packaging on it. And so materials that previously didn’t have plastic in them, now are guaranteed to have say 1% plastic in them. And as a side note, the other irony is that in this sort of effort to make recycling and composting easier, we’re taking a stream of material, some of that packaging that was being recycled, and we’ve now downgraded it to the point where it’s either being incinerated or it’s going to much lower value recycling markets.
Tom Gilbert:
The biggest challenge is that not only does that offer a level of convenience that we can’t and don’t really want to compete with, but it also puts us in a position where we start operating out of fear that our standards for source separation are too high and that when an alternative contract offer shows up that says, “Oh, you don’t have to meet any standard. You can just unthinkingly throw everything in one bin.” Most grocery stores, even a smaller local grocery store is going to find that attractive. It’s just a little less work. And so what it does is it starts downgrading the overall market and changing what the baseline for that market is. And it starts saying that the norm is contamination and source separation is an added hassle. And if the thing that we do to protect soil becomes an added hassle, then it gets externalized in the market and suddenly the issue isn’t a market for services, the issue is market for tolerance of contamination.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Before we get to our next question, we’re just going to take a short break. Thanks for listening to Building Local Power. If you’re enjoying this conversation, I hope you’ll consider heading over to archive.ilsr.org/donate to help support our work. Your donation directly supports this podcast and helps us get great guests like Tom and Lor, and it supports all the work we do here at ILSR. Visit archive.ilsr.org/donate to make a contribution today. Any amount is sincerely appreciated. Now I’ll turn it back over to Brenda.
Brenda Platt:
Top of the contamination issues, which I think are serious microplastics in soil is growing and plastics in general, we know are such a huge problem for the environment, but it’s also this notion that the companies that can handle this mixed waste, they’re large, they’re industrial, they’ve big capital investment. They’re not local, they’re often out-of-state. So, you’re privileging by not enforcing in Vermont, by not enforcing the source separation requirements and the universal recycling law. The state is inadvertently privileging large-scale industrial sites that are outside of the state. And then you’re losing this whole thing we’ve been talking about, about the benefits to local farmers and the local economy. And Lor, you’re facing the exact same thing in Massachusetts, right? So how are you losing your clients because of the same thing happening? What’s happening in Massachusetts for you?
Lor Holmes:
Yeah. Tom gave a really great explanation for sort of what it is, and that’s essentially a universal explanation. I can add a little context for how it plays out for us. So, for example, we have a couple of our larger contracts with big grocery stores. I won’t name them, but this grocery store got approached by our competition and I’ll circle back to why this is so important in terms of policy and definitions efforts is that someone went to our grocery store and said, “You could capture 20% more of your organics if you just change out what you’re doing now. Stop source separating, just put it all in a dumpster,” just like Tom said. “Put everything in. We’ll take care of it. We’ll separate it.” And greenwashing that. In other words, I can’t even blame the customer because the customer is saying, “Isn’t this great. I’m going to boost my compost diversion by 20%.”
Lor Holmes:
And we’re going to say, “No, actually you’re going to increase your trash diversion by 80%.” And we’ve been really trying to do some education and say to them, “Look, we understand you want to capture more organics. If you insist on doing some depacking, will you also consider sustaining the clean material that you’ve got? Let us keep on doing that for you and handle the other in another way.” The other thing that we have to properly characterize, and maybe I’m going to sound like it’s more sinister than the way Tom described it, and I don’t think he intended to portray this as any kind of a passive… This is system design under capitalism. Bottom line is that you design to extract the most resources you can for the largest profit that you can, and the policymakers, whether they’re at EPA or Environmental Protection or Department of Environmental Protection in our state, they’re more influenced by the industry guys than by anybody else.
Lor Holmes:
It’s only for the last five to seven years that they’ve been getting used to us showing up at all of their meetings, and questioning the way these things are being written. But they’ve been writing them. They’ve been writing about the haulers, but the haulers don’t care, right? If you put it in the trash, or if you put it in the compost, or if you put it in the single-stream recycling bin, they’re going to get paid to take it away. And at most of those depackers, some of them separate it, and then the waste managements and the Casella still get paid to dispose of the stuff that they separate out as contamination. They get paid to put that in their landfill or their incinerator. And they get paid for the waste to energy in organics.
Lor Holmes:
What’s the main problem with this? Now, it’s not only are they building depackers with state grants, right? So, these huge profit-making capitalists international corporations that are exporting our resources are also reaping enormous profits, and they are, like Tom said, they’re influencing the definition of what’s what, to the point that they’ve convinced the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection that, “We have now excess capacity for processing the estimated 600,000 tons a year of organics to be recovered from the waste stream.” So, what they’ve done is they’re calling it composting, whether you put it in a windrow compost farm, like what Tom runs, that turns stuff into beautiful dirt and reuse it where it can sequester carbon in the soil. The depack stuff is either making that kind of material and a liquid effluent that’s got tons of microplastics in it and spewing that through the soils.
Lor Holmes:
And who knows what we’re going to be finding out about that, years from now when people start growing extra limbs and stuff like that? Animals start showing up not being able to have offspring, and who knows what? I think about Love Canal and all those unintended consequences are not being considered even at the places in the environmental protection space where they should be doing that. And so we have to fight really hard to say, “This is not… It’s not composting if it’s got such and such contamination. You’re not diverting to composting if you’re mixing the food waste with wastewater. What you’re doing is you’re turning compost into sewerage. You’re not turning sewage into compost.” And those toxic pellets that are in that digestate after they co-digest it with wastewater treatment is full of pharmaceuticals and all the toxic materials. We have scientists testify with us on this stuff all the time. Brenda, you’ve probably heard Laura Orlando speak about this stuff and there’s papers you might want to link to her work [crosstalk 00:27:16].
Brenda Platt:
Okay. Lor, I’ll just say, this is where local control and keeping it local and rooted in community and mission-driven operations and farmers who know how to protect the soil and grow healthy food is so important. When you give up corporate control to the system, whether it’s the ag system or the recycling system, they’re all about the bottom line and making money. It’s not about what kind of community, what kind of neighborhoods, what kind of soils, how we want to live, what kind of food we want to eat. So, this notion of keeping it small, ownership matters, scale matters. It’s just so critical.
Brenda Platt:
And it’s really fast-cutting from whether it’s ag or waste or other sectors. As Jess can tell you from the last episode that we released, you may know for those who listened to it, that ILSR was part of a new coalition called Small Business Rising. And it’s made up of independent businesses asking policymakers to reign in monopoly power like Amazons. And something that we’ve noted in that campaign is that we don’t necessarily need new legislation, we need to enforce existing, in that case, antitrust laws. So, in our arena, and so Tom, in Vermont, are you saying that the state needs to enforce the existing laws? Or do you think there are new rules that are needed? Or is it a mix of both?
Tom Gilbert:
Well, I’m going to answer your question, but I’d like to pick up on the thread that you were just on for one more second, but specifically, I think in Vermont, we actually wrote a very good law the first time around, and now it’s an issue of enforcement and holding true to the values that were laid out in that law. So, I think that we’re actually in one of those rare situations as we’ve been talking to legislators about the problems where those that are sympathetic to our cause will say, “Oh, well, write the bill and we’ll get it in there.” And it’s like, “No, we don’t need actually more legislation,” which is a very tiring process, I must say.
Tom Gilbert:
We really just need oversight, and that fundamentally, over the years, I’ve spent 20 plus years in the Vermont State House, spending quite a bit of time on different issues, and the most fundamental threat to the democratic process, even in a very small reasonably transparent state like Vermont is the lack of feedback loops between the legislature and the agencies. And the biggest challenge that we face for all the things that you were just talking about, both Lor and Brenda, the single greatest element to all of that is the unspoken aspects of culture and bias that find their way into these things.
Tom Gilbert:
And so, the biggest problem is that at the agency level, for instance, I don’t think that there is necessarily malice at work. I think fundamentally, it’s just people bringing these cultural biases towards industrialization and a very sort of European idea of hierarchy that influences how we go about these things. And it’s really a question of those sort of core unspoken ideas. And so I think that the biggest fix that we could be doing is fundamentally in the legislative process, I would love to see each state have a value statements, and have its seven to 10 core values, principles like most religions have, and that every piece of legislation we have is tethered to one of those at least. And that we have a core clear idea of how each piece of legislation is intended to reflect our shared values.
Tom Gilbert:
And I think with those types of things in place, it would enable a review process that would allow us to better align with those things. I think between here and there, the structural thing any of us working on these things can do is just make sure that we are not failing to really name and articulate the details of those things within the legislation. So, in the Vermont law, we have a hierarchy that very clearly states that here are the priority uses of these discarded food materials, and feeding people who are food insecure is the greatest priority above composting, above anything else. And the state has reinterpreted that as a menu of options. And to me and the legal counsel involved in this, it’s quite obvious what the legislature intended, but relying on legal counsel at the agency to interpret it, these guys must be stretching before they show up to the meetings to figure out how to contort themselves through these loopholes that they’re creating.
Tom Gilbert:
And so, really what we should probably do at this point going forward is just to add a sentence to our existing legislation that simply says, “This is intended to direct markets and tell markets what to do.” And put a very clear point on it. And related to that, that I just want to come back to, beginning with what Lor said was prior to CERO showing up at these conversations, only certain interests were in the room and at the table. And I think it ties into what you were saying, Brenda, which is I believe in a certain idea of kind of liberation economics. I think that if we really want to chart the destiny of our communities, we need to own the economy. And we need-
Brenda Platt:
Amen. Amen.
Tom Gilbert:
… and then that means… And all aspects of our communities. And so, we really need to kind of radically reinhabit our communities at all levels, and that means being on school boards, and that means being on neighborhood associations, and that means showing up at policy conversations. And we can’t just be critics on the sidelines wishing it were different. This is the battle that we face right now. And it sometimes takes place in very unglamorous, unromantic situations, it’s not all happening on the street. And when we fight out our values at some of these places where ultimate decision-making happens, it is the place that we begin to pose the stake in the ground and say, “Here’s the line, and crossing this line where you’re having a negative impact on our community or on our soil going forward, that’s the boundary. We’re not crossing that.” And we can’t fight that fight if we’re not in those conversations.
Brenda Platt:
That’s right. And I’ll just say that I think a value that gets overlooked or lost that somehow we need to integrate both into the laws and the rules, but into the education and the activism we’re doing, is this notion of not privileging large scale? We need to convince legislators that farmers and other small businesses that are rooted in community need to be protected. It’s not just like clean materials is important, source separation, all those things we’re talking about, but we also need to integrate this idea of scale and ownership and small-scale, independent businesses. Small Businesses Rising need to fight for our place at the table and our slice of the pie, and the rules and the regulations need to reflect that. So, I don’t know, we could… Lor, do you have advice?
Brenda Platt:
That was great advice, Tom, about where we need to be. I think I’ve heard the saying, I didn’t come up with this, “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” So, we definitely need to be there and in all these places, but do you have specific advice for other folks in other states? I’ll just say this is not particular to Vermont or Massachusetts, bill was passed in Maryland, on the way to the governor’s desk, New Jersey and New York State have similar bills that is bills requiring large food waste generators to not put their food scraps in landfills or incinerators, but the way the rules are being written, it really is privileging dirty facilities in mixed waste and at the expense of supporting operations like yours, farmers and worker-owned cooperative and independent businesses. So, do you have advice for folks in other states? Lor, why don’t we start with you?
Lor Holmes:
Sure. A lot of times people get in touch with me because of this food waste ban that Massachusetts was kind of early on in having this requirement for generators to source separate and compost material, right? So, I say that now source separate and compost material, and I’m just going to underline what Tom said, what you’ve got to do in your legislation and your regulation is define those terms very, very clearly and very, very carefully. Now, whether that’s by doing the hierarchy, which in Massachusetts, it’s worked well on one end. In other words, it has worked very, very well to do source reduction for food waste, and to do food rescue, have done really, really well. That’s great, but it hasn’t done so great on the processing end of things. And so, you’ve got to really, really define what’s acceptable processing of this material.
Lor Holmes:
I don’t care if you separate it if you’re just going to do the same or worse or other just as bad polluting things with the material. And the other thing that I have a little bit of resistance in me, even though I’m all about small is beautiful and small-scale and local businesses and all that other kind of stuff, that does not mean we can’t think about scaling this as a solution. In other words, you can have local control, but you can have scaled and scalable solutions. So, for example, what we’ve been trying to get going and proposing in Massachusetts is much more a decentralized network of smaller processing facilities that require much, much less investment, and much, much less scrounging and scouring and hoarding feedstock material. I’m talking about community-scale anaerobic digesters. So, even in urban environments like ours, what you’ll do is start to reduce the carbon of all this transportation and the cost of all this transportation.
Lor Holmes:
And so, what’s being sold… Again, because of the way the economic system is structured, what’s being sold by the big waste industry as being cheaper solutions, cheaper by what standard, right? Because they’re not accounting for any cost to the environment or to degradation of the roads and highways infrastructure or the air. And they’re centralizing both the profit, but they’re also centralizing whatever benefit there is so that they can take things from hundreds and hundreds of miles in a waste shed, and then they can do this waste to energy stuff and say they’re producing massive kilowatts of energy, where instead if you distributed that collection system among solar and anaerobic digestion, and did small-scale energy production across that same region in a decentralized networked grid say, alternative microgrids, you would produce much, much more power at a much, much lower price. And the benefits would be distributed among a much greater people and cities and towns and supporting positive supports for infrastructure. So, that’s my little wrap on that.
Brenda Platt:
Yeah, we agree. And I think you’re absolutely right that small-scale can be scaled up in a kind of spoken hub. You can have lots of operations handling a lot more material. So, we have a few minutes left. Tom, any advice for folks in other states?
Tom Gilbert:
I think that we just fundamentally need to clarify what our vision for our society is. I think we’re in this place where we have this sort of oddly agnostic approach to society where we’re bickering about even being a society, I suppose, on some basic level. And so long as we continue to sustain the idea that something like white supremacy is just sort of like a matter of personal opinion, and that it’s somehow acceptable within a society to oppress all portion of the rest of society, like these fundamental ideas of what does it mean to be a group? We didn’t get together when we were hunters and gatherers and say, “Hey, why don’t we all get together and we’ll all work for that person over there? And then the rest of us will suffer, but at least that person will be really happy.”
Tom Gilbert:
I think we banded together at a mutual self-interest and out of the idea that we were stronger together. And so I think fundamental to any of the work that we’re doing because none of us can do… We can’t cover all the basis, we can’t do all of the work, but so long as we keep our work connected to these shared values, I think we can continue to build in the capacity to recalibrate and refocus along the way to respond to the changing landscape around us and keep evolving. So, I know that sounds [inaudible 00:40:55] kind of broad, but I really think the more we think of this as organizing and not just simply doing these one-off things, the more equipped we are to have the impacts of our work grow beyond our own capacity. And I think that’s the greatest thing is just collaboration, clarification, and solidarity.
Tom Gilbert:
And I think with those things, if we don’t just throw our hands up and kind of give up on it, even though we got strong headwinds, we’ll be prepared. And I think there’s many wonderful stories, how community groups, whether they’re fighting environmental racism or other forms of social or economic injustice, or resource exploitation, they come together to… I think of the town of Randle, Washington that came together to oppose the I-90 land corridor or land exchange with Plum Creek Timber out in Washington State. And from that, a very disenfranchised, burnt-out logging town, the opposition of a land trade that threatened to level their school from mudslides and destroy all the forest around them emerged a community coalition of unlikely partners that’s working to advocate for their own community. And you see this all around in rural and urban areas. And the minute a community starts organizing, it becomes so much more powerful and capable of things beyond single-issue campaigns. And I think that’s where we start bringing in coalitions and we start building exponential capacity.
Brenda Platt:
100%.
Tom Gilbert:
Yeah. Don’t [crosstalk 00:42:25].
Brenda Platt:
Yeah. But we need to continue to fight for the world we want to live in, and that includes independent businesses, farmers, diverse and equitable community. So, keep fighting for the world we want to live in. And thank you both for the work you do to move us closer on that path. Very impressive. You guys, rockstars and roadstars. So thank you.
Tom Gilbert:
I should just say, Brenda and Jess, I think ILSR is a totally pivotal organization to all of this work. And before you and I ever connected, Brenda, I found ILSR in my early kind of coming up time. I was lucky for the people that I stumbled into, but I stumbled into Will Brinton and ILSR. And I think those are the… So it comes full circle because I think we all need to stand on each other’s shoulders and move information laterally and that’s movement-building right there. And so you guys play a totally wonderful and pivotal part of that whole equation.
Brenda Platt:
Thank you so much. So, we feel the same way about you guys. So I think that’s all the time we have today, right? Jess.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yep. Unfortunately it feels like this conversation could keep on going, but thank you guys so much for joining us and we are… Just so listeners know, you can find a lot of the things we talked about as well as more information about Lor and Tom’s work linked on the website for this episode. So thanks so much again, this was great.
Brenda Platt:
Bye guys.
Lor Holmes:
Thank you.
Tom Gilbert:
Bye.
Lor Holmes:
Bye-bye.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Building Local Power podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find links to everything we discussed today by going to archive.ilsr.org and clicking on the show page for this episode, that’s archive.ilsr.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. We hope you’ll take the opportunity to help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast and supports the research and resources we make available for free on our website. Finally, we’d ask that you let us know how we’re doing with a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts. This show is produced by me, Jess Del Fiacco, and edited by Drew Birschbach. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Jess Del Fiacco and I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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Photo Credit: Maya Gaul
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45 min
April 20, 2021 Small Businesses Rise Up
On this episode of Building Local Power, three members of ILSR’s Independent Business team, Lauren Gellatly, Katy Milani, and Kennedy Smith, answer: What challenges are small, independent businesses facing? And what legislative solutions are on the way? … Read More
43 min
April 15, 2021Small Business Rising is Fighting Monopoly Power
On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Mary Timmel, ILSR’s Small Business Organizer, along with Danny Caine, owner of The Raven Book Store, and Natasha Amott, owner of Whisk, a homewares store. Caine and Amott are among many other business owners and independent business groups that have joined Small Business Rising, a coalition that is calling on federal policymakers to reign in monopoly power.
Their conversation touches on:
Trends they’ve seen in their industries, and at what point they realized monopoly power was behind many of the challenges they are facing.
Why independent businesses are so important to communities.
Why it’s important for small businesses to come together across sectors to challenge monopoly power, and why small businesses and labor shouldn’t be pitted against each other.
The interconnected harms Amazon causes communities, including negative impacts on health, jobs, the environment, and more.

“To make this whole thing seem like this is just a single bookstore that’s mad about its prices makes it too easy to write it off. It’s much too narrow of a view of the argument. And as soon as you do any reading on the Amazon issue or about big tech monopolies, you realize just how many industries are affected by this, and how big Amazon is. So coalition building and teaming up both at the local and the national level, is vital to actually get something done, and also to convince people of the importance of this.”

“I hear David versus Goliath tossed around a lot, because we’re a little bookstore that has a really vocal anti-Amazon stance. But that’s not how I see it because it affects so many people. And if we all get together, we’re not actually that small. And I think Small Business Rising is a really important way to do that.”

Related Resources
Whisk
The Raven
Small Business Rising
Athena Coalition
Transcript
Jess Del Fiacco:
Hello and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast dedicated to thought provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and communications manager here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For more than 45 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities where power, wealth, and accountability remain in local hands.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Today, really excited to talk about a new coalition of which ILSR is a part. It’s called Small Business Rising. And it’s a growing group of independent businesses who are asking policymakers to reign in monopoly power. I’m joined by my colleague Mary Timmel as well as Danny Caine who’s the owner of The Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, as well as Natasha Amott who’s the owner of Whisk, which is a kitchen store in Brooklyn. Welcome to the show all of you.
Danny Caine:
Thank you [crosstalk 00:01:02].
Jess Del Fiacco:
And I think we can get started if Danny and Natasha, if you just want to give very brief descriptions of your businesses and your background?
Natasha Amott:
Sure. I’ll go first. So my name as you said is Natasha Amott. I’m the owner of Whisk, which is a kitchen where retail store. We’re located in Brooklyn, New York. I opened whisk in 2008. In 2018, I had three locations. Two in Brooklyn, one in Manhattan. Now I have just the one location located in downtown Brooklyn. And we sell everything needed for kitchenware, and we are brick and mortar, and also online.
Danny Caine:
Yeah. And I’m Danny. I’m the owner of The Raven. The Raven has been a small new bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas since September, 1987. I’m the third owner. 1,200 square feet, about 13,000 books. We’re working on a move to a new location just around the corner. But just long time leaders and advocates for literacy and small business in a small college town in the Midwest.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Could you both talk about how your businesses or how your industries have changed over the last year with the pandemic or any other kind of ongoing trends that you want to point to?
Danny Caine:
I can jump in on this one first. The most important trend to look at with independent bookselling is of course the shift to online. We haven’t had customers browsing in our store for a full year. So we shut down browsing as soon as lockdown started when the county health department told us to, which we were in agreement with. But then in order to protect our workers and because of our small space and online business, we’ve remained closed.
Danny Caine:
But the trend overall, I mean it was a good year. 2020 was a good year for print books. Sales were up, and a lot of publishers had pretty healthy years. But independent bookstore sales were down, which is a really sobering statistic. And it tells me that people are going to Amazon for their books as opposed to independent bookstores, even though many, many independent bookstores have made the pivot to online sales like us. Still, people continue to go to Amazon instead of bookstores. So it’s a trend that’s alarming to me. And it’s a trend that I’m kind of keeping a close eye on.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Did you already have an online presence beforehand? I mean, I assume it had to expand and adapt accordingly. Or was it all brand new?
Danny Caine:
No, we did. We have been selling books online since 2011. In every year since then except for last year, 99% of our sales were in store and 1% was online. And that flipped last year. So last year, 1% of sales were over the phone, and 99% of sales were through the website.
Danny Caine:
Fortunately, we had a couple kind of big moments where we got a ton of online orders, and that kind of prepped us to have a workflow ready to go. And we just kind of made that emergency website overload workflow has been every day for the past 365 days. But yeah, the American Booksellers Association offers a great kind of online platform called IndieCommerce that comes preloaded with basically every book that’s in print, and you just plug it in. So we don’t have to upload all of our inventory to our website. And it’s pretty easy to start a bookstore’s website online through that system. And we did that. And since have gotten much better and much more adept at using it, but it was ready to go. So we did a quick pivot last March.
Natasha Amott:
Yeah. And I’ll say Whisk, very much kind of similar trends that Danny has noticed with bookstore. So I’m selling housewares, right? Under the pandemic, we had a tough spring. We had to make a number of changes with our online selling. We really had to dig in deep with our customer service once we were allowed to be back open. And that did work for us. So the pandemic year given that everybody was at home cooking a lot more actually meant that Whisk was able to be okay.
Natasha Amott:
But I think the more important trend here is something that started in the housewares industry, probably I would say 2014, 2015. That’s when I first began to notice that things were changing for my business, for other kitchen stores in New York City, and for the huge category of housewares overall. I noticed a decrease in fourth quarter sales probably in 2015. And it completely threw off the growth trend that we’d been experiencing for seven years prior.
Natasha Amott:
So I started to kind of take a look and started to think about what was going on here. And I started to talk with other kitchen stores in the city, and I could see that we were not just the only one going through something like that. And now in 2021, I can tell you that New York City has lost five independent kitchenware stores in the last few years. There’s only four of us that are left. There are some stores that specialize in knives or restaurant supply oriented. But if you look at just those that are selling all things kitchenware we’ve lost some real treasures in the city in the last five years, and we’re not seeing replacements coming on board. Even some of the other larger housewares stores like Sur La Table, they’ve also cut back their footprint. And they actually filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy last year.
Natasha Amott:
And I’ll just note that pre-pandemic, we would always have an annual trade show in Chicago. And all the retailers would come together with the suppliers. And for probably since about 2015, the number one conversation when you stepped into a booth was, “Well how are you doing?” Which was always code for, “Well, how are you doing with Amazon?” And I think that’s just exactly what has been going on for the last few years.
Jess Del Fiacco:
And that was going to lead to a question that I wanted to address with both of you. When did you make a connection that the issues you were seeing in the changes in your industry, was there a moment when it sort of crystallized that it was Amazon, it was monopoly power that was really the challenge that you were facing. As small business owners, you face challenges all the time. Right? Very different things happen in your communities. But when did it start to crystallize? And I think Natasha, you touched on it a little. How did that look to you in your sales and on the ground?
Natasha Amott:
Yeah. Well just to kind of play off what I was saying a moment ago, I remember being in my store, and a couple was looking at a KitchenAid stand mixer, which it’s a high ticket item. Right? And they came up to me and they said, “Wow, would you consider dropping the price?” And I was kind of like well, why would I want to do that? Because it’s an item that I run a very low margin on, below 30%. And it turns out they showed me their phone, and of course this is way back, 2015 or so.
Natasha Amott:
But they showed me their phone and they said, “Well, look at the price that it’s selling for on Amazon.” And what I realized is that not only was Amazon selling that stand mixer for below MAP, minimum advertised pricing, it was actually selling it below cost. So that was my trigger when I was like oh my goodness. And that’s when I discovered predatory pricing. And for me, predatory pricing in the housewares industry has just been a critical issue because it’s all about what benefits the consumer. And at the end of the day, antitrust law is all based on well, is the consumer benefiting? If the consumer’s benefiting, then there’s no problem. But the problem with this of course is that we’re just thinking of citizens as consumers. We’re not thinking of the fact that we’re also creators, we’re builders, we’re traders, we’re all of that and more.
Natasha Amott:
And I would just add in as well that free freight. I think Amazon has really gone to town in order to build its consumers, its shoppers, its loyal customers. They’ve really gone to great extent to provide free shipping, as we all know. And that’s part of the predatory pricing model. And I think it completely causes individuals to misunderstand the true cost of shipping and the true cost of value of producing goods and selling those goods.
Danny Caine:
The free freight thing is such a good point, and it’s really altering people’s expectations of what’s possible, how long shipping should take. And only one company can ship goods that fast and at that low a cost, and they’re doing it on purpose to hook people and drive their competitors out of business. Everything you just said resonates with me so much Natasha.
Danny Caine:
In the book industry, it’s funny because Amazon picked books first. So we’ve been kind of watching them since the ’90s. But I started as a bookseller in 2015. So I’m like an Amazon native bookseller. I’ve never seen a book industry that wasn’t totally hijacked by Amazon on their policies and their pricing.
Danny Caine:
But I will say generally my bookstore, we had a Borders books and music across the street from 1997 to 2011. And I think that we spent a lot of time worrying about that and figuring out how to deal with that. And I think that’s emblematic of the industry as a whole. In the ’90s, we were really focused on the big bookstore chains, and their pricing, and what they would do to the independent bookstore market. But then once that problem was kind of solved or at least we moved on, Amazon was there waiting. It had been getting more powerful all along.
Danny Caine:
They even litigated some of these pricing issues with the big chains. But as soon as we moved on from that, there was Amazon, much bigger and much more frightening. So I think it was in the early odds that it really became a big issue. But we’ve been watching it since the ’90s, since Amazon started selling books online. Because we’re the first industry that they set their sights on. And all of this stuff that they’re doing everywhere else is what’s happening to books first.
Natasha Amott:
Yeah. And I’ll just throw out another example that I see in housewares. And it’s not specific to Amazon, but it’s quite interesting. I’ve been looking into it more recently. And that is the role of the suppliers that we work with. And I think there’s been two trends. One is that, this one has been going on for quite some time. A lot of the houseware suppliers really favor the power buyers like the Bed Bath & Beyonds, like the Amazons I’m sure as well, with favorable pricing. If they don’t do it through direct lower pricing raw cost, then they do it through things like better terms. They give them defects allowances, which basically means they can deduct as if there were defects in product shipments to them. They get to charge outrageous amounts of money for advertising a product for a supplier.
Natasha Amott:
They also get to even do things like if they get a shipment in from a big supplier that doesn’t have the labels on the way that a Bed Bath & Beyond would like them to be, Bed Bath & Beyond actually gets to charge them for that mistake. So all these little ways in which suppliers basically feed into making it more difficult for the small independent retailers like a Whisk to do really well.
Natasha Amott:
And then to link that back to Amazon, what I’ve been noticing in the last couple of years is that I have had to sign so many third-party sales agreements, meaning that I am promising not to sell on an Amazon or any other third party platform. Now I’m not the type of business owner who wants to sell on Amazon. But it’s fascinating because what I’m seeing is that a lot of my big suppliers are saying okay, no other sellers on here except for me and Amazon. So I think a lot of the suppliers for a long time were struggling with how to control pricing on Amazon. But then they’re realizing, “Oh my goodness, what an incredible catchment. Right? And I want in on that.” So now a lot of my suppliers are selling direct to the consumer. And yet here I am as a retailer with brick-and-mortar rents to pay.
Mary Timmel:
And I think I’ll chime in a little bit. In looking at Small Business Rising and the multiple, we’ve got over 20 partner organizations signed on. These issues go across industry. And we’ve heard a lot about, and we have a lot of detailed information online, and it’s one of the things that we’re building toward is that there’s supplier issues and grocery, there’s supplier issues in outdoor gear, and in books. So it’s not just the industries that we’re talking about here on this phone call or this podcast.
Mary Timmel:
And I think one of the things I wanted to ask you all is when you’re thinking about addressing this problem, when was it that you realized you had kind of hit your maximum capacity to fight back by yourself? And when did you start looking to other businesses to have this conversation, or your trade associations, or your neighborhoods? Was there a sort of a moment when you realized as a business owner with your store that you’d maxed out? Right?
Danny Caine:
It’s a good question. I think I’ve always, since making anti-Amazon pro-small business advocacy part of the story we tell with our business, I’ve made a point to make sure that people know it’s about more than books, it’s about more than The Raven. It’s about more than book prices. All of these are important. The Raven has a beloved community that cares about us very much and wants us to stick around. And the issue of books pricing is very important.
Danny Caine:
But to make this whole thing seem like this is just a single bookstore that’s mad about its prices makes it too easy to write it off. It’s much too narrow of a view of the argument. And as soon as you do any reading in the Amazon issue or about big tech monopolies, you realize just how many industries are affected by this, and how big Amazon is. So coalition building and teaming up both at the local and the national level, is vital to actually get something done, and also to convince people of the importance of this. Because I don’t want to be one business complaining about one competitor. And to kind of prevent myself from being written off like that, from the get-go, we’ve teamed up with businesses here in Lawrence and businesses and people across the country to make sure to convey the scale of what’s going on.
Natasha Amott:
I could not agree more, Danny. I think you hit it right on the nail of the head when you talked about it as neighborhood. I think that is what we are trying to preserve. We’re trying to preserve not just our independent one-off location stores. We’re trying to keep neighborhoods dynamic and places that we want to be in. Places that we want to invest in, whether as renters or as home buyers.
Natasha Amott:
And I saw that so clearly when I had to close my Williamsburg Brooklyn location that was my original store. I’d been there for 10 years. And I couldn’t renew the lease because the landlord wanted a remarkable hike in rent. When I say remarkable, it was truly remarkable. And I was already paying a high level. And I was able to do that. I was actually paying a high rent for a long time, and I was comfortable with that because we had such a great following.
Natasha Amott:
But when we announced to the public that we were closing, the anger, the sadness, the frustration was so palpable in the community. And it was for Whisk, but it was for what all that Whisk closing, represented. Just what Danny was saying. It’s about the fact that if it’s not Whisk, it’s the other coffee shop. It’s that little boutique clothing store. And just this sense of sadness that people were losing something that they really loved. And the number of people who remarked to me, “That’s it. I’m done with this neighborhood. I’m leaving.” Was really astonishing. And I think that’s so much about what we’re talking about.
Jess Del Fiacco:
I think it’s time to take a short break. We’ll be right back. Thanks for listening to Building Local Power. If you’re enjoying our conversation, I hope you’ll consider heading over to archive.ilsr.org/donate to help support our work. I also want to take this moment to encourage you to check out smallbusinessrising.net. And that’s where you can learn even more about independent businesses’ efforts to fight back against monopoly power and everything we’re discussing today. With that, let’s head back to my conversation with Danny, Natasha, and Mary.
Jess Del Fiacco:
I was just going to ask if we could dig into that a little bit more. I’m really curious about how you guys see examples of the importance of independent businesses to communities. I mean not just importance, but how integral you are to the web of a happy, healthy community. If you have any specific examples to share.
Danny Caine:
I totally do. I talk about this all the time, because I love this story so much. I think it’s a perfect example of how to respond to difficult times with grace and how the small business can build community. And it involves at least three small businesses in Lawrence, Kansas.
Danny Caine:
So Ladybird Diner is kind of a small neo diner right across the street from us. They never did carry out. They were not ready to go remote. So when the pandemic hit and the restaurant shut down, they had a pantry full of food and, they just made everything into bag lunches that they gave away. And they were so stunned by the response and the need in the community that they pivoted to a food pantry model and started to raise money. And every weekday for the past year, they’ve given away 200 free sack lunches to people in the community who need it. And completely rewriting their business model. It’s not even a business anymore. They’re just raising funds to distribute food. And one of the ways they raised money is the owner who’s a great writer, self-published an essay collection about the pandemic, about restaurant life. She got it printed with the help of University Press of Kansas, a small business in Lawrence. And she sold it through the Ladybird Diner site and here at the Raven. And we’ve sold more than 1,000 copies of this book.
Danny Caine:
So it’s three businesses kind of teaming up not even with the idea of making money. Because beyond what we take to pay for the person putting the book into the envelope and delivering it, we don’t take any money on the book.
Danny Caine:
Each book sale provides for sack lunches for customers. So I just think that’s a great way. That’s a perfect example of how a small business can pivot, can take care of its community, and can adapt and team up to create positive change.
Mary Timmel:
Natasha, I didn’t mean to cut you off, but I know when we’d spoken before when you talked about your community and your neighborhood, you talked a little bit about the impact of the delivery van pollution and in that area as well. So if you had a different story to share here, but I also know that it was something you really cared about, about how that fulfillment center and how those warehouse deliveries, all of that extra traffic are really impacting your community too. And I didn’t know if you wanted an opportunity to talk about that on this platform too. Because I think it’s really important when I think about how you all exist in your community, it is those overlapping issues. It’s very much not just how Amazon’s impacting you, but how their impact is affecting your neighbors and the quality of the air that the people that you live … all of those issues as well.
Danny Caine:
Well yeah. So the downtown Lawrence, there’s a trade organization for the downtown businesses. And they’ve done a really good job pushing the city to let us adapt. So each business can claim up to two parking spots for curbside pickup to encourage safe operation. We’ve done that. Many, many other places have done that as well. And the Amazon drivers with just their insane quotas and their need to deliver so many packages per day often are in a hurry to find a parking spot. So they’ll kind of park in idle in our curbside parking spots. And we make a point not to confront them about it because their job is hard enough as it is. But just the needs and the conditions that they’re put under to take these curbside pickup spots from small businesses.
Danny Caine:
And then you have all of these people, 200 people coming downtown for lunch and eating in the open air. And the air is smogged up by the fleet of Amazon vans that descend onto downtown Lawrence every day. Whereas one business is trying to create a place where people can be nourished for free if they need it, another business is literally pumping smug and emissions into the air through their vans. So it’s just two wildly contrasting takes on the downtown spaces comments.
Natasha Amott:
I’ll just piggyback on that and say Amazon’s gone on a total warehouse leasing spree in New York City over the pandemic. So they just leased a very large space in Queens. And then two fulfillment centers or future fulfillment centers, pretty close to where Whisk is in Brooklyn right down by the waterfront in Red Hook. And I think overall, it’s about 1.6 million square feet of space now just added to their collection. And that’s all about trying to get product to customer in hours. So that congestion that Danny just spoke of, it is enormously a problem here in New York City. It is unbelievable. And the city is now actually taking away parking spots, which on the face of it, I don’t have a problem with taking away parking spots. But they’re specifically doing it to make them into loading zones for the Amazon and the UPS trucks.
Mary Timmel:
And can I ask if you, when you have deliveries come in, how hard would it be for your business to get a designated loading zone in front of?
Natasha Amott:
There’s no way I could. I don’t have those powers.
Danny Caine:
I’m sorry to laugh, but yeah, same boat here.
Jess Del Fiacco:
That’s when we miss the visual medium with podcasts. Because everyone’s face at that question answered the question.
Natasha Amott:
And I wanted to say back to your question about why are independent businesses so important, we also have so many examples. We could point to New York City of businesses helping out. But it’s also, I always think about it as imagine your community if you didn’t have that bookstore, that local pharmacy, that kitchen housewares kind of store. What would your community look like? You wouldn’t have as many options, right, for things you want to buy? You may not have the affordability you need. I think small businesses are really good at identifying local need and pricing availability, because they know they’re not going to last. And it’s really important. They can’t afford to say, “Well, we’ll try it out for two years and see how it goes.” No, we go into it to say we really need this to work out for ourselves. So we’re going to do it well from the beginning. And I think that there’s a lot of spillover effects. I think commercial displacement is very tied into residential displacement. And I think we really need to understand that connection.
Danny Caine:
If retail goes, then so do restaurants and bars. And then you’ve got empty streets. That affects culture, that affects morale. You need density and you need a variety of commerce to maintain communities. And if Amazon puts all the small retail out of business, every other type of small business is going to suffer. And then you lose what makes your community’s unique and appealing for people to live there.
Jess Del Fiacco:
I think that’s really well put. Thank you. I had a question for Mary. Mary, could you just give us an overview of what Small Business Rising is and what the goals of this campaign are?
Mary Timmel:
Yeah, absolutely. And then I’m going to pivot to Natasha and Danny to talk about why this is something that’s important to them. Because they have been engaged on this since I met them.
Mary Timmel:
So what we’re doing with Small Business Rising is it’s a coalition of trade associations and business organizations, and also independent and small business owners from across the country. And what we’re coming together to do is to address these issues to stop tech monopolies, to block dominant corporations from engaging in these abusive and anti-competitive tactics that we’ve seen. And we can do that by making existing antitrust laws stronger and easier to enforce.
Mary Timmel:
So when we talk about legislation, it’s not necessarily in all cases new legislation. There’s rules that exist around this. And we want to talk about mega mergers and how we all hear all these different companies that merge together and create a super company that has the kind of power that Natasha and Danny were addressing and talking about with getting special loading areas, and being able to set pricing below cost in order to make profits to drive out their competition.
Mary Timmel:
And it’s also come up here too that small business owners and independent business owners are innovators. They’re makers, they’re creators. They’re folks that want a level playing field to do the work that they want to do. And it’s not about getting special treatment as small and independent business owners, it’s about getting fair treatment. And what we’ve seen over the course of time in what’s being expressed here very clearly is that it’s an unfair situation. And this pandemic has only made Amazon stronger. And we want to talk about what’s the vision of your community that you want to see when this pandemic ends, and we’ll all be able to kind of go back into our communities in the way that we were before. What community do you want there waiting for you, and how do we make that happen?
Mary Timmel:
Because we’re facing a problem that has been there for a long time. And when we come back and we’re visiting our small businesses again, Amazon is still going to be there. And these large monopolies are still going to be there. And they’re still going to be this competition. So we want to have small business owners an opportunity through Small Business Rising to talk to their legislators, to share these stories of what they’ve experienced, and to talk about why they need these issues addressed. And it’s for all of the reasons we’ve stated here. And it’s also because these corporations are becoming, when they’re able to manipulate systems to get loading docks or to get treatment that other businesses aren’t getting, that’s becoming decision-makers in communities. They’re deciding things on how beyond wages and environmental impact, they’re deciding pushing for tax breaks for themselves or all the other ways that they dominate these conversations.
Mary Timmel:
And there’s enough small businesses, and there’s enough small and independent businesses that care about this. That Small Business Rising has come together with a really impactful launch last week. And we’re going to continue growing and pushing to say that this is enough, right? We’ve had enough, and we’d like to talk about how to make changes so that we can compete, and exist, and have these thriving local communities. And I’d love for Natasha and Danny to talk a little bit about what it is that has you here on a Tuesday afternoon, taking time to talk about this, and talk about what you want to see, and how you want to see Small Business Rising working to make these changes.
Natasha Amott:
Sure. So I have learned in the advocacy work I’ve been doing, which has really been probably since about 2016 or so, we need a new way of organizing. That seems very clear to me from my experience in New York City. It’s hard. So why is it hard? We have, again, this is New York City experience. Multiple languages. We have neighborhoods where you see clusters of immigrant owned businesses that may not want to work necessarily with businesses in another borough.
Natasha Amott:
You see a lot of sectoral alliances. You might see restaurants working together, perhaps bookstores working together. Certainly in housewares, we don’t have enough of us to kind of form any alliances. And I think we need something that kind of cuts across sectors. We need something that invites everybody into it. And we need the help because small business owners, we’re busy. We are super running our businesses, and we do need a group like a Small Business Rising who’s going to help organize us, help hear our voices, and help corral those voices in the most effective ways.
Natasha Amott:
I think the other thing that has struck me very, very much is how popular Amazon has been, right? I think there was some survey in 2018 where Amazon ranked as the most popular company or something. And here in New York, we were of course considered to be the location for HQ two, which of course did not happen. But I think in that debate, what we saw a lot of is this conversation around well, do we want to give subsidies to such a large corporation? Which is a very worthwhile conversation to have.
Natasha Amott:
I was struck however by how few people really said, “Well no we don’t want Amazon, because look what it’s doing to small businesses.” That connection actually was not part of the common day conversation amongst elected officials in this city. So I think there’s a lot still to do, to really explain why it’s so important to talk about monopoly and what it’s doing to small businesses. So we need a wider platform like Small Business Rising to help do that.
Danny Caine:
Yeah. I agree with all of that. I think it’s a really smart idea. And Natasha covered a lot of my feelings about it. I think when I entered the book industry, we were very good at having this discussion among ourselves. And I had a lot of really great conference discussions or at the bar after the conference discussions among booksellers about antitrust policy, and Amazon, and competitiveness, and predatory pricing. But it struck me a couple of years ago, we weren’t having this conversation with our customers at all. And for it to get anywhere, it couldn’t be a closed loop among booksellers.
Danny Caine:
So we’ve been working really hard on doing that to some success I think. But now I think the next step is to make it beyond our industry. And to team up with a really broad coalition. I hear David versus Goliath tossed around a lot, because we’re a little bookstore that has a really vocal anti-Amazon stance. But that’s not how I see it because it affects so many people. And if we all get together, we’re not actually that small. And I think Small Business Rising is a really important way to do that. And I also, I appreciate the lobbying and legislative help that a group like ILSR and Small Business Rising, the expertise they bring to this. Because it’s not something I have a ton of experience with. And like Natasha said, I still think there’s more to be done to explain these issues from a small business perspective to the government. And that’s ultimately where a lot of the solutions lie, like Mary talked about with stronger enforcement of existing antitrust laws and in convincing legislators that small businesses are a part of this story, and that Amazon can’t be allowed to grow unchecked to their heart’s content. I appreciate both the size of coalition building and building bridges across the industries. Because we’re all affected the same way. And kind of making a strong legislative focus a part of this is why I’m really excited about Small Business Rising.
Natasha Amott:
And if I could just add on a couple more points to that, Danny’s point about lobbying, heft and weight is so critical. I mean, I think we can all agree that Jeff Bezos bought his mansion in DC for that very purpose. And I sure can’t do that. So I definitely think that lobbying power is so critical.
Natasha Amott:
But I think it’s also two other things. One I think that, and we’ll see how Small Business Rising kind of develops and grows. But one of the issues that I felt here in New York City is that labor and small business are sometimes pitted against each other. There is a debate around paid leave, which I think is one of the most important conversations that New York City at least and I think all of America has to come back to the table around, especially under this pandemic and all we’ve seen.
Natasha Amott:
But in that conversation pre-pandemic about how to make effective paid leave happen, we saw city council effectively pitting the small business owner against their staff. And it was a very awkward conversation. I think Small Business Rising will hopefully be effective in bringing labor and small business together on the same side.
Natasha Amott:
And then just a final point, we have the chambers, right? We have a lot of chambers here in New York, one in each borough. They are tremendous resources at times. They can provide a lot of technical assistance. But they’re not thinking about policy. So a lot of the existing resources are really just about minor technical assistance. They’re not going to the level of the policy change that we need to see.
Mary Timmel:
I think I’ll just add real quick that we’ve already begun taking action. At the end of February, early March, we convened a town hall with Representative Cicilline and a panel of experts, a number of our partners and small business owners like Natasha and Danny, that got a chance to ask their questions directly to decision makers about how they’re going to address antitrust reform. We had a very robust chat full of attendees, over 400 attendees, attending a webinar entitled Reining in Monopoly Power. So the interest is there. There is a lot of will. And I think it’s absolutely about how we come together and we wield that power that we have. Because we’re not alone. We just need to find each other to make this happen.
Jess Del Fiacco:
I think on that note and also seeing that we are just about out of time here, I’d like to end for listeners or even for your customers who are listening to this and say, “I care. I want to take action.” Can they get involved with Small Business Rising? Are there local actions you would encourage them to take? I guess any recommendations on that from any of you.
Danny Caine:
Well, I think one of the most important things you can do is just to make sure to support the small businesses you want to see there after this is all over, and to kind of build your community in that way. Because those small businesses want to care for you, and they really do appreciate your support.
Danny Caine:
But also just read up, and there’s nothing stopping people, our customers from getting in touch with their legislators and sharing their concerns. I don’t want to pin all of this on consumer choice. I think that’s kind of a false thing, and perhaps even what Amazon would want us to do. So to make sure if people have concerns about Amazon or the difficulty of running a small business in their communities, to let the people making policy and in power know that they have those concerns is really important.
Natasha Amott:
Yep. 100%. Everything that Danny said is so critical. We just have to encourage our community to support that community if we want it to be there. And I think also sometimes what I increasingly find myself doing when I get into these conversations is I make the connection to the jobs that we provide. And I think that for the most part when you have a brick-and-mortar business with a sales job, a customer service associate job, these are jobs that do offer some opportunities for upward mobility. They are jobs where you can discover the skills and strengths that your staff have. Whether that be art skills, which has happened in my business. Tremendous art ability, which has then allowed them to do our windows, do our sandwich boards, do our signage, and get recognized by other people for other opportunities.
Natasha Amott:
So it’s that kind of conversation. If we want those jobs to be there for your friends, your neighbors, the next generation, then supporting local and supporting local brick-and-mortar is really important.
Mary Timmel:
Yeah. And I think I’ll just add to build on that it’s. And I could talk for a long time about the way that folks who work at a small business are really impacted for the rest of their life, and the skills that they learn and the way that they see, a number of small business owners I’ve spoken with started out working at a small business, and then opened up their own store and were able to learn and grow, and become fuller, talented, dynamic engagement. As opposed to working in a warehouse where maybe there isn’t a lot of upward mobility because you’re seen as just kind of a cog in a machine. So I think that growth is really important.
Mary Timmel:
But as far as getting involved in what folks can do and listeners can do, absolutely supporting your local small business. And Danny touched on it though, is that it’s more than consumer choice. Amazon has a dominant place in this country and worldwide. And because of their monopoly power, they’re able to muscle out choice. So consumers in a lot of areas don’t have a lot of other options than dealing with Amazon. And that’s why getting legislative and policy change is so important, because they have been allowed to grow unchecked for so long, that they are now dominating a lot of industry. So being able to say that it’s about how you choose to spend your time and your money, but it’s about more than that. It’s about the way that policy is made. So at Small Business Rising, we welcome individuals to sign up to stay informed and look for ways to engage. There’s a lot of folks doing this work. The Athena coalition has come together with organizations that are addressing a number of different ways that Amazon is harmful to our communities.
Mary Timmel:
So I’d encourage folks to take a look there. We’ve highlighted a few, which is environmental impact, the impact for workers. And it’s a way to stay engaged in that. But it’s about choice and it’s about taking action. So we have a petition you can sign to encourage Congress to break up Amazon, right? And to set forward. And when you see news stories that are talking about these issues and saying things, news stories about a new warehouse opening or a fulfillment center, really thinking about what is that impact in your community going to look like. But I think it’s just making sure that being thoughtful about the ways that you spend your money, but also being conscious of your power as an individual and as a community member to lift up what you want to see changed.
Jess Del Fiacco:
With that, thank you guys so much for joining us today. And just so listeners know, we will have links to all the things that we talked about. The petition to the different resources to your business websites on the post for this episode, which you can find at our website archive.ilsr.org. All right. Thank you so much.
Danny Caine:
Thank you for having me. This is wonderful.
Natasha Amott:
Yeah absolutely, pleasure to be here.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Building Local Power podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to archive.ilsr.org and click on the show page for this episode. That’s archive.ilsr.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. We hope you’ll also take the opportunity to help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast and supports the research and resources we make available for free on our website.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Finally, we ask that you let us know how we’re doing with a rating or review on Apple podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts. This show is produced and edited by me, Jess Del Fiacco. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Jess Del Fiacco. I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Photo Credit: Danny Caine
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42 min
April 01, 2021Can We Be Local in a Digital World?
On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Christopher Mitchell, Director of ILSR’s Community Broadband initiative, and Christopher Ali, Associate Professor in the department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Their conversation focuses around the idea of what it means to be local during a time when more and more pieces of our lives are shifting online. Other highlights of the discussion include:
Ali’s recent Congressional testimony around rural broadband issues.
Where federal broadband data is falling short.
A rundown of recent and upcoming federal funding programs earmarked for broadband projects.
How physical and virtual spaces can overlap, and the heightened importance of virtual community in rural areas.
The case for connecting everyone to Internet access that goes beyond “good enough.”

“I also think when we talk about local broadband networks there’s also this idea of return on investment that can’t be measured by the quarter, as in quarterly shareholder returns. It’s measured in communities and people connected, it’s measured in the longterm — decades, sometimes. It’s a very different way of thinking about broadband deployment — much less as a commodity, much more as a service and a utility. And that’s why you’ll see me and read me say over and over again, the best broadband is local broadband.”

Related Resources
Media Localism: The Policies of Place by Christopher Ali
Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity by Christopher Ali (Coming Soon)
Transcript
Jessica Del Fia…:
Hello, and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast dedicated to stop provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and Communications Manager here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For more than 45 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities where power, wealth, and accountability remain in local hands. And today we’re going to have a discussion about what it means to be local in a time when so much of our lives is virtual, including this podcast recording itself. So welcome to the show, Christopher Ali, who is an Associate Professor at department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, as well as Christopher Mitchell, who’s the Director of the Community Broadband Initiative here at ILSR here at ILSR. Welcome to the show.
Christopher Ali:
Thank you very much.
Christopher Mit…:
You, you missed the other important part, which is Chris, has the best pipeline of people who come out of college ready to do important work on broadband. I’ve worked with many of his former students and I mean, Kat Blake, Katie Jordan, and then also, I didn’t want to forget Anna Higgins because she works with Katie Jordan and the work that they’re doing at Internet Society is so important. I shouldn’t have started naming names because I won’t get through them all. But now Jericho is on our staff currently just a lot of really great people who I think were inspired to do this work, Chris, so thank you for that.
Christopher Ali:
Well, thank you. And, yeah, those are some amazing young people doing amazing work and I love being able to follow their careers and the impact they are making specifically in this place or space of broadband deployment and the importance of kind of evangelizing the importance of community networks, local networks, broadband networks, more generally, I could not be more proud of them.
Christopher Mit…:
This is important. We desperately need more of these people.
Jessica Del Fia…:
That’s actually a call for recruits, sort of broadcasters.
Christopher Mit…:
Right. If you’re listening to these words and you have any interest in this, please come work.
Jessica Del Fia…:
All right, Chris, our guest, you recently testified before the Senate on Rural Broadband Policy generally, is there anything you want to share, like a few highlights from what you shared there, anything that like surprised you or that you want to share with us about that?
Christopher Ali:
Yeah. I mean, it was kind of a surreal experience. I did it in person because I wanted the whole pomp and ceremony of it and had some great one-on-ones particularly with Senator Klobuchar about some awesome developments in Minnesota. I think one of the, I guess, two things that I took away is that we are still having a debate over minimum broadband speeds. The speeds that Americans need in order to go through their daily lives, and we are still waffling on whether or not we should be using the speed and said back in 2015, which is 25 megabits per second, download three megabits per second upload and there was different perspectives on whether or not that an adequate speed. I, for one, do not believe that’s anywhere close to an adequate speed specifically when we’re talking about households of more than one person where the bandwidth, it’s not like this Zoom call is five megabits and another Zoom call is five megabits and therefore you can have five Zoom calls using 25 megabits, that’s not how broadband works.
Christopher Ali:
And it just kind of baffled me that we’re still having this conversation. I know there’s a number of folks who would join me in saying that we’d prefer what’s called a symmetric definition. So maybe like 100/100, which would mean that everybody in a household, let’s say, four people, six people, could be on a Zoom call, could be watching high definition Netflix, but could also be uploading data quickly, which is so very important for businesses, especially farmers. So I was surprised that that was, maybe assumed a bit, but that garnered so much attention in the testimony and the back and forth yesterday.
Christopher Mit…:
It is frustrating to say the least. And one of the things I’ve found is that the people who are defending the lower standards almost always live in areas where they’re never going to encounter them because the vast majority of Americans live in areas where there are cable networks and if you can afford their prices, which are going up next year, because they go up every year, basically. If you can afford those prices, then you are getting speeds that are radically in excess of that standard. And I do find it frustrating to have people defending that when they themselves would not raise their family on that standard.
Christopher Ali:
Yeah, absolutely. And it is also, this is something I said yesterday to the Senate, that oftentimes we think about 25/3 as a ceiling, right? As if that’s something providers need to meet, especially the larger providers like to think about that. But oftentimes 25/3 becomes like theoretical speed where maybe when no one else is on the network and it’s brand new copper wires for DSL networks, and you’re really close to the network node then yeah, you can get 25/3, but the 25/3 is an advertised speed as well. I mean, so you qualify for some big money from the FCC, but really that 25/3 becomes 5/1 or 10/1 very quickly. And that’s something that I think the proponents of keeping the speed low don’t really think about it. And I’ve called it the politics of good enough, right? It’s good enough for rural people, it’s good enough because you have no choices and it’s fine, don’t worry about it, but good is the enemy of great here and that’s what I tried to tell the Senate yesterday.
Christopher Mit…:
I’ve gone on a rant before on this show so I won’t do the long version of it about how the Federal Communications Commission is really good at making sure that electronic devices do not emit harmful radiation either for health or for interfering with other devices. A lot of things, almost any device you buy has like a little thing that is inspected and improved by the FCC. Meanwhile, it almost could not be worse at mapping. And I think that came up yesterday. I mean, that the speed definition is bad, but the mapping, the Federal Communications Commission has no idea where there is broadband in the United States with the exception of where cable networks are and even then you might have massive reliability issues.
Christopher Ali:
Absolutely. And this is something that at those of us in the public interest community, we’ve been talking about this for years, right? And the FCC was even ordered by Congress last year to improve its maps because for those listening to this who don’t know what we’re talking about, the FCC asks the providers to tell them about their broadband deployment twice a year and they really let the providers call the shots. So it’s measured by the census block level, which means that so long as one building in a census block is served or can be served in tenders and stays, that whole census block is considered served with broadband, which means we have grossly overestimated the number of Americans who are un and under connected, which is just absolutely agregious. So, yeah, that was a major talking point yesterday.
Christopher Ali:
I’ve been really excited by what I’ve been reading about the Georgia map though, and kind of these innovative partnerships at the more local or state level to map out communities, map out broadband deployment in communities. Georgia has partnered with a real estate data provider to go address by address, to figure out who has broadband in the state and they noticed some major discrepancies. I’m doing some work right now in the State of Virginia where I’ve asked counties to self-report their broadband speeds. And in one County, there is a 90% difference between what the FCC says and what the county says. The FCC says they’re 100% served, the County says they are 10% served. And quite frankly, I’m going to trust the County more than I’m going to trust the FCC on that point.
Christopher Mit…:
Yes. But I think it is important to note something that is just really frustrating. The FCC, as you noted, the Congress ordered the FCC to improve their broadband maps and the administration, the Trump administration, Ajit Pai, refused until the last day. And then they pass the rules so that they could structure it to make sure that even though they refuse to collect the appropriate data, that they would make sure it was harder for Democrats to collect data in the way that the Democrats would like to under the Biden administration. This is why things don’t work in this country. Just nuts.
Christopher Ali:
Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, we could certainly talk about the need to do some major FCC reform so it doesn’t flip flop back and forth all the time. I’m a big fan of acting chair Rosenworcel, I’m excited to see what’s coming up this task force. And I appreciate that this is a difficult job because you’re pushing against the ocean and that ocean is big teleco and big cable who do not want to share maps, who say it’s proprietary or that they just don’t have the data. They absolutely have the data. So it’s an uphill battle, but Congress has at least started to pay attention to the battle
Jessica Del Fia…:
Can either or both of you give just like a very brief snapshot of what’s happening at the federal level in regards to broadband policy right now, I feel like we haven’t really given that overview.
Christopher Mit…:
I haven’t written books about it so I’m going to defer to Chris.
Christopher Ali:
Yeah. So, I mean, you could almost divide it between everything that’s happened before six months ago and everything that’s happening in this six months because it’s been bananas and I’m actually giving a presentation to Odessa Texas tomorrow on this. So just off the top of my head, Congress has finally woken up to the idea that broadband is a necessity, which means you have to start putting some public money behind it because we have massive broadbanders in this country. In the CARES Act, CARES Act didn’t do great, less than 1% of the CARES Act went to broadband, although there was some wiggle room in how the States could use their CARES Act money and a number of States as the Shelby coalition just released a great job, post this week on how States used CARES Act and kind of this innovative way to get broadband out.
Christopher Ali:
We have the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which gave $7.1 billion to broadband, including a $3.2 billion broadband benefit package, is going to make broadband more affordable for low-income families, it also gave a billion dollars to Tribal Broadband if I’m not mistaken to connectivity there and to broadband provision amongst HBC use and also 300 million to broadband in rural areas. Now we’ve got the American Rescue Plan Act, which gave 7 billion this time for schools, hospitals and libraries, and another 10 billion for State infrastructure projects that’s supposed to be used towards broadband. Last but not least, The Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act was reintroduced in the house and in the Senate by James Cliburn and Amy Klobuchar respectively, that’s promising 94 billion for broadband, including $80 billion for broadband deployment. And the reason that number is so important is that that is the number of the FCC itself gave in 2017 to get 100% of Americans or close to it as possible connected with fiber to the premises.
Christopher Ali:
So that number is as the young people might say clutch. And the rest of it would be moved towards the important aspects of digital inclusion work, digital literacy work, and continuing the need to subsidize broadband for low income families. So I’m really excited about Congress finally putting big money where the talk is, where its mouth is, because if we do it piecemeal, which is what we’ve done in the past 15 years, we will never close the digital divide. So we’ll see about what happens with The Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, but I’m pretty excited about things to come.
Christopher Mit…:
So I want to highlight, you had a really great rundown, particularly off the top of your head.
Christopher Ali:
Thank you.
Christopher Mit…:
That was impressive. The amount of money flowing to local governments right now because of the American Rescue Plan is particularly unprecedented in terms of the lack of strings attached to it. Regarding the Accessible, Affordable Internet Act with the 80 billion that you’re talking about, let me just offer a counterpoint. Congress is taking it serious. I want to give them credit to that. And it’s the Democrats, Republicans are not supportive of it. I’m worried that the Democrats won’t even be supportive of it in coming months. The first thing to note is that the $80 billion is like you said, to get fiber to everyone, but the program is structured in a way that right now would put a lot of that money into networks that will be built in areas where there’s already a cable provider.
Christopher Mit…:
And I’m very curious to see if the Democrats stick to that or if the Democrats themselves water that down. And if they do that, then I don’t know that there’ll be able to spend the $80 billion. And we might see a lot of press releases, but we might see a whole bunch of money that just can’t be spent because there’s no eligible areas left as hard as that might be to think. And the real danger is not so much the rural areas, it’s the population centers in rural regions that have crappy cable that might not work very well. That might look pretty good on paper in D.C, but really isn’t that effective. And even in more urban areas where you might have effective cable, but it’s still very expensive. And so I’m kind of worried that even though Congress is treating this more seriously that we might be getting our hopes up a little bit too high right now.
Christopher Ali:
That’s a great point, Chris, and thank you. I think I’m excited by big numbers, but I think this is also a tethering back to our earlier conversation why we need to raise the speed definition of broadband because suddenly a lot of these underserved, but pushing the limit of the definition, like for instance, a lot of those County seats that you mentioned that have crappy cable service who are currently considered served, but if we raised that definition, they would now be unserved or underserved which would hopefully, I agree, make them eligible for upgrades because I think, one of the problems about keeping the definition of broadband so low is that we’ve created a lot of underserved communities that are served on the map, right?
Christopher Ali:
So you go down to, and this happens a lot with rural County seats, where there’s a cable provider that has an upgraded their network in decades, the speeds aren’t much better than 25/3 if that, but they are considered served and therefore ineligible for any type of federal or state support. And we need to help these communities as well, because they’re kind of stuck in like a broadband purgatory where you don’t have good broadband, but you don’t have no broadband and so you’re just ignored and people are frustrated, absolutely.
Christopher Mit…:
Yeah. Fully agree with that.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Thank you for that rundown of the federal level stuff. That’s, I think, really helpful context to have. Just to switch tracks a little bit. I’m really curious to get to the local half of this conversation, and I’d love to hear Chris, what does it mean to you for something to be local or for someone to be local in this day and age when people might have a more homes, in quotes, in virtual communities rather than their physical community where they live or other aspects of that.
Christopher Ali:
That is a great question. And I actually wrote a whole book on this idea of what does it mean to be a local in the digital age. I think it depends so much on what we’re talking about. I mean, obviously when we’re talking about voting, we still vote locally. And I would actually argue when we talk about broadband, broadband is local, broadband is fundamentally local and the best broadband service is local service. When we start talking about things like communities of interest or I’ve been particularly interested in like linguistic communities, it becomes a lot more subjective, right? I am local in the space, I am most comfortable. I teach a course at the University of Virginia called what does it mean to be local in the digital age. And I start the chorus asking my students just to write down a reflection. What does it mean to be local? And most of them will point to a particular geographic neighborhood or community. I am local there. And then by the end of the semester, we talked about, well, where do you feel local?
Christopher Ali:
So you might feel local at a Starbucks, but doesn’t have to be any Starbucks, or it can be any Starbuck, you just feel local in that environment or at a library for instance or playing World of Warcraft, right? So I think we’re starting to maybe untether that definition in theory between local and places, but on the flip side, I think when we talk about policy, particularly when we’re talking about broadband policy, that geographic component becomes absolutely crucial. Because it becomes about local accountability.
Christopher Ali:
If you’ve got one of the big providers, I don’t know if I should name big providers, but if you’ve, let’s say, you’ve got Comcast or you’ve got CenturyLink there, I just did it. You don’t know the owner of that network, you don’t know who to complain to if it goes down, you’re calling a customer service line, if you have a local cooperative or a municipal broadband provider, you’re more than likely to see the person at the grocery store, they might be your neighbor, you probably got their phone number. And when I talk to local broadband providers, that’s what they tell me. Like when someone’s network goes down, they get phone calls to their house.
Christopher Ali:
So there’s this element of local accountability. But I also think when we talk about local broadband networks there’s also this idea of return on investment can’t be measured by the quarter, as in quarterly shareholder returns, it’s measured in communities and people connected, it’s measured in the longterm decades sometimes, it’s a very different way of thinking about broadband deployment, much less as a commodity, much more as a service and a utility. And that’s why you’ll see me and read me say over and over again, the best broadband is local broadband.
Christopher Mit…:
Is nice, but I mean, in talking to someone, a U.S rep staff, he told me we’re never going to actually get broadband, like high quality fiber optics across the entire prairie though. And I don’t know, there’s a corner of Southwestern, Minnesota that is pretty remote and we can’t really expect that everyone there is going to have fiber optics, can we?
Christopher Ali:
Well, you’re talking about my favorite piece of Minnesota, Rock County, Minnesota. Rock County, Minnesota population, roughly 10,000 has 99.93% pass through broadband to the home. [crosstalk 00:18:16].
Christopher Mit…:
Did you mean the 17 families? It’s like what? 17 families that probably don’t have access. [crosstalk 00:18:22].
Christopher Ali:
It’s an amazing success story of a public private partnership between the state of Minnesota, which is in my mind, the leader, the statewide leader in kind of broadband thinking, you had an amazingly proactive County administrator and you had a board of supervisors that supported that County administrator. And then you have a cooperative, a Telephone Cooperative Alliance Communication. You bring all these things together you’ve got a great recipe for 99.93% broadband to the home.
Christopher Mit…:
Five, you said.
Christopher Ali:
Five, oh, sorry, five or 10 of them, yeah. It is incredible. And I absolutely agree that we can’t… You’ve seen one broadband network, you’ve seen one broadband network, but there are lessons to be learned. There’s lessons to be learned at the state level, which means empowering local communities, there’s lessons to be learned at the local level, meaning you need a local digital champion and you need to understand what you want out of your network, in this case in Rock County, they were offered fixed wireless networks, but they wanted fiber and they were going to hold out for a fiber dance partner. And then you’ve got this local cooperative. Now, it’s local in South Dakota, but they drove there, the County administrator drove there, had a meeting and basically on our handshake, maybe not that easy to contract, but said they would invest $6 million in Rock County. I mean, local, local, local, local, all the way down the pipeline. And in one year they did this, including at Minnesota winter.
Christopher Mit…:
Yes. And I’ve met some of the folks from Alliance, they’re great. And there’s a lot of… The upper Midwest, we have a lot of really great local cooperatives, we’ve got some great independent family companies that do similar things and there’s a lot of those partnerships. It seems like, again, to reinforce that local, what needs to happen is you need to have local folks that are organizing around it. It might be members of the County staff, might be independent business owners, it might just be residents who are themselves making sure this is a priority and having those conversations to make sure that if grant money becomes available, they can quickly put a project together.
Christopher Ali:
Absolutely. And that’s what we saw the avenue. I mean, I think, everyone would agree that in a community broadband toolkit you have to have digital champions who are going to keep pushing for this and be ready to act when there is an opportunity to act and in Minnesota, they have quite a great that border to border broadband program really does open up a lot of opportunities for communities like Rock County, which might be passed by communities in terms of broadband deployment because it’s difficult to find what they told me with a dance partner. But if you’ve got a state like Minnesota that’s willing to put some money behind it, suddenly you’d be able to attract a provider. And that’s something that we’re struggling with here in Virginia actually. The state has finally realized that they need to put some a little bit more serious money behind County projects so that these counties can attract a provider. In Virginia it is difficult for municipal broadband projects, not impossible, it’s not prohibited, but certainly inhibited. And the State definitely prefers public private partnerships.
Christopher Mit…:
Yes. And I think it’s just worth knowing there’s been a conversation and people have run for office in terms of getting the State out of the way and the legislature has decided after conferring with lobbyists, that it should not get further out of the way the current enrollment.
Christopher Ali:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s definitely frustrated here in Virginia. I work with a number of counties, I speak with a number of counties doing this County project right now, and what I’m hearing from a lot of counties is we’re excited, we have a plan, we can’t find a partner and we don’t have enough money and enough political sway to do it on our own. And so they’re stuck and it’s not fair because they’ve done everything right. And they still can’t find a provider. We need to figure out ways, policy mechanisms at the state level, at the federal level to make it easier for these counties to get connected.
Jessica Del Fia…:
This conversation also makes me think about how these physical and virtual spaces really overlap. I mean, in terms of like community organizing, where you might have local businesses or residents in a community neighborhood Facebook group that are talking about what their problems in regard to broadband are and how to organize around it, so they can influence each other, right? Same with like local media.
Christopher Ali:
Right. Right. But, of course it does depend on having broadband in the first place-
Jessica Del Fia…:
Exactly.
Christopher Ali:
… to organize online, this summer I did a study with my colleague Nicholas Matthews at the University of Minnesota and we studied Surry County, Virginia, which is one of the least connected counties in the state. It is also what’s called a news desert. It does not have a local news outlet. So it was a broadband desert on top of a news desert. And we were trying to figure out like, how do you get information? And particularly, how do you get local information? And we talked to a lot of people who were spending hundreds of dollars a month because they needed a cell phone, a mobile hotspot, they were trying to do whatever they could with satellite internet which we all know is garbage. But a lot of times they were still depending on word of mouth conversations and the dollar general store became this amazing news ecosystem in and of itself. But hearing firsthand the frustrations of people who don’t have access to what so many of us take for granted, it definitely makes you think that something better needs to happen.
Jessica Del Fia…:
We’ll continue with our conversation in just a minute, but first we’re going to take a short break. Thanks for listening to Building Local Power. If you’re enjoying our conversation, I hope you’ll consider heading over to archive.ilsr.org/donate to help support our work. With your help, we can continue advocating for the kinds of local solutions that Christopher has been discussing with us today. We sincerely appreciate anything you can contribute. Thanks so much. Now let’s go back to my conversation with Christopher Ali and Christopher Mitchell. Could you talk about the importance for people in those communities who might feel disconnected with the neighbors that they have, or like outcasts in this community and how broadband access can help them?
Christopher Ali:
Yeah. I mean, that’s a great point. And I think particularly when we think about the way that LGBTQ youth use the internet as a space, actually to be local, to feel comfortable, to be themselves. We often think about broadband access in terms of like the big things, like economic development, education and healthcare, right? Civic life, these kind of big democratic and capitalist ideals, but it’s also an opportunity to live your life or to make inquiries about yourself. And we can’t discount that when we have conversations about the importance of broadband, because you’re absolutely right. You may not feel at home, just because you live somewhere it doesn’t make it home, right? And I think particularly of, again, LGBTQ youth, who have used the internet such innovative ways to find a community where they feel supported and loved.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Yeah. So Chris, you have a book coming out in a few months at the end of the summer called Farm Fresh Broadband. Could you tell us a little bit about that and the process of researching and writing it?
Christopher Ali:
Yeah. The book will be out early September, that’s first week of September, from MIT Press, the full title is Farm Fresh Broadband The Politics of Rural Connectivity, it’s based on five years of research including reading a lot of policy documents, doing a lot of interviews. Chris, I know I interviewed you for the book. I also went on what I called the rural broadband road trip. I drove throughout the Midwest with my hound dog, Tuna, trying to humanize broadband policy, trying to really make the connection between what’s going on at the federal level at the FCC and USDA and what’s actually being lived on the ground. So it an analysis trying to answer, an easy question to ask, a very hard question to answer, which is we spend, we being, let’s say the United States federal governments spends in various capacities between six and $10 billion a year on broadband deployment, not affordability issues, just deployment, getting wires in the ground or strung up in the air, to solve the rural urban digital divide. That rural, urban digital divide, as we just talked about is not solved.
Christopher Ali:
In fact, by a lot of measurements, it’s getting bigger because going back to an earlier conversation, you’ve got these communities stuck with like crappy DSL, and you’ve got a lot more urban wealthy areas moving to five, or just not even worrying about this because they have a good updated cable system. So how is it that we spend all this money and where’s it going? And what solutions, what are communities doing to connect themselves in the wake of what I call policy failure? So I like to say, it’s a story about success and failure, failure of policy, success of communities, spoiler alert for way too long all of this money just went to the 10 largest providers and for very little, in terms of built out, that’s me being a little cynical.
Christopher Mit…:
I would say that, that’s absolutely correct, although some money has gone to local, the monopolies, the local independence. They’re not technically monopolies, but I just say, they often feel left out of these conversations. And so there has been money that’s been wisely spent-
Christopher Ali:
Yes.
Christopher Mit…:
… on the internet, but the vast majority of the money that you’re talking about does go to those Big Ten biggest customers.
Christopher Ali:
Yeah. Right. I look at the difference between, to get really wonky here, the called The Connect America Fund Phase II which was 1.5 billion a year that was just given away to the 10 largest companies. And then you had a smaller fund called the Alternative Connect America Model, which I’m kind of a big fan of. And that was also a billion dollars a year, but it had to be split between 173 small providers. And Chris, I think these are the providers that you’re thinking about. They had much higher standards to meet and you know what? A lot of them met it. So a lot of them were using that billion dollars a year or do use it to put fiber in the ground or have fiber field fixed wireless network whereas the 10 big companies were using it just to upgrade their DSL networks. Again, I’m generalizing here, but local providers-
Christopher Mit…:
Yes, I’m sorry. You’re generalizing because those big companies didn’t actually upgrade their DSL networks for the [crosstalk 00:28:45].
Christopher Ali:
Yeah. Yeah. They connected a lot of suburbs and excerpts though and still continue to abandon or leave abandoned rural communities. The local providers, including just small regional mum-pop providers, electric cooperatives, telephone cooperatives, they ended up being the big heroes of the book. Again, this idea that local broadband is the best broadband and yeah, the book has introduced me to an amazing number of people and passionate, deeply passionate digital champions and just everyday folks wanting broadband or how they’re using broadband. So again, it’s a story of success and failure when I hope that will resonate with a lot of people and it will be out in September.
Jessica Del Fia…:
I would love a picture of Tuna on that road trip to add to our posts [crosstalk 00:29:32].
Christopher Ali:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Christopher Mit…:
Did you prearrange or did you just like stop and get gas and talk to folks about broadband serendipitously?
Christopher Ali:
Little bit of column, A, a little bit of column B. I had a few stops mapped out along the way, but other than that, I just chatted with people. And this is where having a dog as your research assistant becomes amazing because people want to pet your dog when you go for walks. And then you say, “Yeah, totally you can pet my dog,” And while Tuna is working his magic, I say, “Hey, can you tell me about your internet connection? Like I’m doing this research, I’m just trying to figure things out.”
Christopher Ali:
One of my favorite stories was that I was at a grocery store in Missouri, and it turns out that a grocery store is in Missouri you can drink beer while grocery shopping. So I was waiting in line at the grocery store bar and I started chatting to this young couple, certainly younger than me and they were asking what I was doing, it’s like, I’m writing this book and doing this research. And they’re like, “Oh, you have to talk to our friend who just bought a farm and didn’t realize that it didn’t have broadband and then paid for a fiber connection.”
Christopher Ali:
So these kind of like serendipitous conversations so it’s really ended up, again, putting such a human face on a very wonky and some of very technological issue and I really want to humanize broadband policy because I think that’s where you can really start to make some changes.
Christopher Mit…:
Well, I’m glad that Tuna didn’t eat your book.
Christopher Ali:
You know.
Christopher Mit…:
Speaking of your book, I feel like you have not used the requisite number of answering questions saying, as I write in my book, to just remind people constantly that you have a book that they should pre-order at a local independent bookstore. I want to come back to where we started a little bit with your testimony and we didn’t touch on overbuilding yet. This idea that we should be very wary that in general, the biggest problem we face in broadband is that we won’t have too much competition and it might be unfair for the government to give one entity a subsidy to build in an area where it has previously given other people some subsidies. And so I’m curious if you want to address that and preface it by saying, as you discuss in your book.
Christopher Ali:
As I discussed in my book, I am not a fan of the idea and, again, I started writing my book this idea of like, again, the politics of good enough, that one provider is good enough. Even if that provider received government money. Because as we just talked about, sometimes that provider did a really bad job using government money. So it might’ve connected community, let’s say, to 10/1, which was the standard that these large providers needed to meet. So why shouldn’t we fund another provider who’s going to actually deliver meaningful connections to those communities? Why shouldn’t we? And because we also know that competition drives down prices and drives up innovation, right? And we’ve seen this in a number of instances when a municipality decides to fund its own network, we see a lot of shady politicking as well in terms of lobbying, but we have seen meaningful competition even in small communities.
Christopher Ali:
So this idea that one provider is good enough when we exist in this capitalist system that shouldn’t endorse competition, I don’t know. I think competition can’t be a bad thing. And so this idea that overbuilding becomes as boogeyman, that we should just always avoid, really just privileges incumbents. You can continue to do a bad job. Now, some of the companies are doing a great job, but for those who aren’t doing a good job, why not have a competitor? And I also think about things like there’s this program, The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which says, if you got money from the State or you got money from USDA, you can’t dip into this money because we don’t want, again, using that over overbuilding we want to do the most unserved areas. I don’t know, I just feel that a lot of this is done at the behest of big incumbents who have the ear of lawmakers and regulators.
Christopher Mit…:
Yes. I think it’s classic penny wise pound foolish where they are… We should probably update the penny-wise dollar foolish, I guess, I don’t know.
Jessica Del Fia…:
I honestly, don’t know what those words mean. So as an idiom I should know.
Christopher Mit…:
Well it’s the idea you go around saving pennies while you’re throwing dollars away. Like you’re so focused, you don’t really understand where the value is, where the bottlenecks are. And in this case, it’s to say that, that we end up with a system in which we overpay for poor outcomes and those are outcomes in which then residents and businesses have to overpay for rather than just getting it right. And this is an odd situation in which I feel like there’s a lot of people, Chris, who their work is to try and convince the American public to change their mind on things. Like what you and I are doing, it’s like 85% popular.
Jessica Del Fia…:
That’s exactly it, how can you be against this?
Christopher Mit…:
It’s weird because we still have to figure out how to be strategic because most of the elected officials don’t want to do what 85% of their constituents want them to do.
Christopher Ali:
Yeah. It’s amazing. It is. Yeah, it is amazing. And it is frustrating and it is vexing, but we’ll just keep fighting the good fight.
Jessica Del Fia…:
I just wanted to end this conversation with Chris. Do you have any reading recommendations? I also accept watching recommendations and it doesn’t have to be related to this topic and it could be your book if you [crosstalk 00:34:52].
Christopher Ali:
I mean, I’m not going to be vexating, Although people can buy either my first book or my new book, it’s available for pre-order. But one of the books I found, I came back to a lot for researching my book is a book by my friend, Roberto Gallardo called Responsive Countryside. A very similar book to mine, but maybe a much more community toolkit driven, a lot more solutions at the community level whereas mine looks at federal policy. He’s also a great writer.
Christopher Mit…:
Sorry, let me interrupt for a second. He’s also in the Big Ten, which is a big deal. Like we don’t want any of that focus from the ACC schools, he’s at Purdue, which is inherently superior to other schools.
Christopher Ali:
Are we talking about sports now?
Christopher Mit…:
Yes we are. I am. No one else is.
Christopher Ali:
The sports, I got nothing. Unless we talk about figure skating, Winnipeg hockey or curling, I’m really at a loss for sure.
Christopher Mit…:
So let me say, you have a deep history of figure skating. I got into skating a little bit last winter and really this winter, I mean, skating is the coolest thing ever. So that can be-
Christopher Ali:
I agree.
Christopher Mit…:
… the sports segment. Yeah. Skating is great.
Christopher Ali:
Yeah. There you go. Skating is great. What else can I recommend? I’m going to look around my room just very quickly to see what I’m reading and what I’m really into. Jason Farman’s book, Delayed Response, which is about the history of being bored and the history of waiting for things is outstanding. Jason’s at the University of Maryland, I don’t know where they rank on the sporting.
Christopher Mit…:
Big Ten.
Christopher Ali:
There you go. I read a lot of Big Ten don’t I? I like reading, I mean, don’t reading informative books I read for my job, but like when someone is in good writer as an academic, it is a magical, magical thing. And Jason Farman is a fantastic writer. So his book is called Delayed Response.
Christopher Mit…:
Those are great recommendations.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Well, thanks for joining us today, Christopher, this has been a great conversation, Christopher and Christopher. Great to have you.
Christopher Ali:
Thanks so much for having me.
Christopher Mit…:
Thank you.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Building Local Power podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to archive.ilsr.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s archive.ilsr.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. We hope you’ll also take the opportunity to help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast and supports the research and resources we make available for free on our website. Finally, we ask that you let us know how we’re doing with a rating or review on Apple podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts. This show is produced by me, Jessica Del Fiacco and edited by Drew Birschbach. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction Al. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Jessica Del Fiacco and I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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38 min
March 21, 2021Keeping NYC Land Out of Corporate Hands
In this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco and ILSR Co-Director Stacy Mitchell are joined by Brad Lander, who represents Brooklyn’s 39th District on the New York City Council. Brad shares his perspective on how the pandemic has affected NYC neighborhoods, the parallels he sees between now and past crises — including the 2008 financial crash and the city’s near-bankruptcy in the mid-1970s — and how the city can avoid repeating past mistakes.
They also discuss:
How the city can protect small businesses and families from being priced out of neighborhoods by spiking rents and the financial impacts of the pandemic.
How a city-run “land bank” would strengthen communities, boost economic development, and expand affordable housing by keeping property in the hands of non-profits and co-ops instead of for-profit developers.
The successful community land trusts in Burlington and Albany that helped inspired this work and how other communities can pursue social ownership models.
“Our model for community economic development for affordable housing construction and for economic development investment has really been very substantially for-profitized, so that 80% of the subsidies the city gives out for affordable housing go to for-profit private developers. And then lo and behold, 30 years later, when the mortgage is up, they’ve got the right to take it to market, and we wonder where the affordable housing went. But we don’t have to make those choices. We could pull our affordable housing back.”

Related Resources
How to Avoid a Post-Recession Feeding Frenzy by Private Developers
Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Community Ownership of Commercial Spaces
Transcript
Jess Del Fiacco:
Hello and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast dedicated to thought-provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and communications manager here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For 45 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities where power, wealth, and accountability remain in local hands. Today I’m here with Stacy Mitchell, who’s the co-director of ILSR, and we’re joined by Brad Lander, who represents Brooklyn’s 39th district on the New York City Council. Welcome to the show, guys.
Brad Lander:
Thank you so much. I’m a big fan, so I’m really honored to be here.
Jess Del Fiacco:
We only let big fans come on the show so they can praise us the whole time. That’s the secret. Before we get started, I also want to note that you’re involved with Local Progress, which is a network of progressive local officials around the country, so we might touch on that a little bit too. But Stacy, anything you want to say before we hit the ground?
Stacy Mitchell:
No. I’m so glad you’re here. I think we should dive right in. I think what’s on my mind is thinking about the huge impact that COVID has had on New York City, both people and the business community. I am imagining that there are a lot more vacancies than there used to be when you walk around city streets. I’ve read that hundreds or maybe even thousands of businesses have shuttered. Can you talk about what you’re seeing, particularly at the street level and with local businesses, and how the fabric of neighborhoods has changed?
Brad Lander:
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. I think what ILSR is doing all across the country is really inspiring. And that model of supporting communities to take more control democratically is really powerful, and an urgent time for it. So yeah, I mean, New York City has been so hard hit, and I still think even though you see it in vacant storefronts that in most of our minds, we’re back in March and April hearing those sirens.
Brad Lander:
So the death toll and how unequal that death toll was, we’re all holding it. And we have to figure out ways to deal with the economic devastation, but I think both the human devastation and just how unequal it was, along the lines of race and class we’re still sitting with also. So yes, I mean, commercial property broadly, our retail storefronts, our office buildings, our hotels are really dramatically devastated. We got information yesterday that the projections for next year are that our property taxes are expected to be down $2.5 billion, a 20% decline-
Stacy Mitchell:
Wow.
Brad Lander:
… almost all driven… Very little of that is residential to clients, even though obviously lots and lots of people are facing eviction or struggling with their mortgages, but it’s overwhelmingly commercial properties. Now, I think at the neighborhood level, I’m here in Brooklyn in my neighborhood. And if you walk around, you can see it in the storefronts. Our bodegas are open, but so much else is closed. And we’ve obviously seen this.
Brad Lander:
We opened up our streets, so a lot of restaurants have outdoor dining. And they’ve even built shelters and huts for winter outdoor dining. We’re going to have an ability to reinvent our streets to actually work more for neighborhood businesses. But I think probably somewhere between a quarter and 40% of small businesses are at risk of closing because got so much back rent that can’t pay. We still have very, very serious restrictions, as we need to amidst the second wave, on indoor dining and other businesses.
Brad Lander:
Meantime, obviously lots of people who did commute into Manhattan to work in their offices are continuing to work from home. Most of our hotels are closed. But I’ll end with this. And I think of all your work here. Our residential streets are so full of commercial delivery vehicles. The ways that it’s been transformed, you’re not only seeing closed storefronts, but just an incessant flow of Amazon and FreshDirect trucks. And you can see the changes of our economy devastating on both sides, both the loss of small business and the loss of jobs, but also the increase in kind of monopoly control right here on our streets.
Stacy Mitchell:
What do you think the role of a city government is with an issue like monopoly? I mean, seeing all of those Amazon delivery vans, I saw some reporting out of a local newspaper. I think it was from the city, a neighborhood newspaper that was showing pictures of Amazon delivery vans essentially commandeering whole blocks, and setting up and sorting boxes, basically taking a city block and turning it into a warehouse distribution hub, which I don’t see UPS or other delivery operations doing. Certainly local businesses aren’t allowed to just go occupy the sidewalk. Should the city be doing more to address these issues of monopoly power? And if so, what?
Brad Lander:
Yeah, absolutely. We’ll come back to talking about what we can be doing to better support our small businesses and keep building a diverse and strong economy. But the last mile distribution in particular is just the Wild Wild West right now, and localities may not be able to get at the heart of the monopoly issues, but they can sure get at a whole range of public interest, worker protection, consumer protection, and neighborhood health and safety issues that we haven’t done anything near enough about.
Brad Lander:
So I’ll start by the fact that there’s a giant Amazon distribution center on Staten Island where workers report just horrific conditions during COVID, but working conditions in general. And it’s absolutely the responsibility of states and cities to demand decent working conditions for their workers. There’s a lot more that we could be doing there. A lot of those Amazon Flex delivery trucks are taking advantage of the gig economy loopholes. It’d be best if that was fixed at the national level, but states can fix it too, and we don’t have to be cowed by Prop 22.
Brad Lander:
So we’re looking to New York City and there’s pressure on New York State as well to do something about that. But I’m looking at some regulations around last mile distribution because we don’t have anywhere near enough regulations on those last mile distribution centers. They come from a giant set of warehouses and more and more all over our cities. Even within a couple of miles from where I’m sitting, I think five of them are now permitted, but we don’t have good permitting rules. So they didn’t have to do a special permit application. There’s no license required. They don’t have any information on how many trucks are going in and out, where they’re going. Are they going to be electric?
Brad Lander:
What are going to be their impacts on the environment in the neighborhood? [inaudible 00:06:45] clarity about the job quality or about traffic. And all of those matter enormously in local communities. It’s a pretty straightforward use of the police power of cities to stand up a new set of regulations to get at all of those, both the workers’ side and the environmental side of these last mile hubs. That’ll be true whether they’re Amazon hubs or whether they’re independently contracted, so whether or not they’re in the monopoly or not, but it’s so critical. If we want neighborhoods that feel like neighborhoods and not like truck distribution centers, then we’re going to have to find a new set of regulations to do it.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yeah. Going off of that and kind of looking towards the future of things, kind of what comes after this, you recently wrote this piece in the New York Times called How to Avoid a Post-Recession Feeding Frenzy by Private Developers, which seems like an important thing to do. And in that you compared what the city is going through now, OUR current recession with what New York went through, reaching near bankruptcy in the mid-70S, and then the financial crisis in 2008, and you kind of drew parallels between those moments and now. Could you talk about some of those parallels that you saw and why they have you concerned?
Brad Lander:
Absolutely. So New York has been through those two relatively recent crises. In the 1970s, we faced a massive fiscal crisis as people were moving out of the city to the suburbs, and the city’s tax base was cratering. And then again, after 2008, the foreclosure crisis led to just massive amounts of properties, in that case mostly homes, being foreclosed upon. And each time it was a really cataclysmic threat to the city with threats to the economic and fiscal health.
Brad Lander:
Unfortunately, both of those times, the response of our city leaders was to look to the private [inaudible 00:08:33] and say, “We’ve got to batten down the hatches, cut the social safety net, lay off city workers. That means not adequately maintain our parks or our subways, and instead hope that if we give tax breaks to businesses and developers, they will create jobs and somehow restore the economy.” And a lot of those leaders were praised as the champions who saved New York city, but the consequences were really devastating, both the austerity that that imposed.
Brad Lander:
The City University of New York stopped being free, stopped being a vehicle for working class and low-income kids to get a chance to thrive and create the next great business. And then it also had a bunch of impacts on property ownership. So especially after the Great Recession, all of those homes that had had largely Black and Latino homeowners who had been sold predatory products and then had their homes foreclosed on.
Brad Lander:
The folks who scooped them up, by and large, were private equity firms and real estate investment trusts, some of whom had actually participated in the run up to the Great Recession and in subprime lending, and then on the back end were able to buy up properties at discounts and then look to flip them back out in a way that has continued to make our housing market less affordable and not benefit neighborhoods.
Brad Lander:
So that’s how we don’t want to do it, is sort of that way that it was done out of the 70s and out of the Great Recession. Luckily, we do have some other lessons in our history in New York City, because after the Great Depression and after World War II, our leaders really chose a different path, one of investing in public goods, investing in the subways, in the City University of New York, in public housing, in what we here call Mitchell-Lama housing, which are multifamily cooperatives, what are called limited or shared equity cooperatives, where folks could buy in for a modest amount, act as cooperative homeowners, and when they leave, still sell at a modest amount.
Brad Lander:
So it doesn’t go on the market at the market price, you don’t have speculation, but you make homeowners in a durable way. And more than 50,000 New Yorkers in that time were able to become cooperative homeowners. So that model of investment in public goods as a platform for shared economic growth is also in our history. And I really think that this moment, given the challenges of inequality, given the challenges of the climate crisis, given the challenges to our democracy, we have a stark choice. And that article was designed to say, “Here’s a way forward to take that better, more public-minded path.”
Stacy Mitchell:
What would it take to take that path? I mean, both as a matter of policy, how would you structure that, but also as a matter of politics?
Brad Lander:
Yeah. So I’ll do politics first, and then I’ll be glad to get into the tools. New York City has got elections coming up, as a lot of other places do, but it happens that our democratic primary is coming up in June. And we’re going to make this choice. There are some candidates in the city-wide and council races and mayor’s race who are articulating really both of those paths. We have the guy who was the vice chairman until recently of Citibank who just got the race, and he announced a $5 million haul in his most recent fundraising. It was this amazing line in The Times. It includes [inaudible 00:12:01]. Contributors include 20 billionaires, including some people whose wealth goes back to the Ottoman Empire.
Stacy Mitchell:
Wow.
Brad Lander:
And so it’s pretty clear that that’s going to be… Is it going to be a group of people saying, “Turn it over to the business community, and let’s try that path of austerity and real estate tax breaks again”? But there are also candidates running with this bolder vision. And I think we can do it right now. I come from the community development and affordable housing world. Before I got in politics, I ran a non-profit community development corporation in Brooklyn called the Fifth Avenue Committee.
Brad Lander:
And when I got into that work in the early 90s, there wasn’t much private sector interest in low-income neighborhoods throughout New York City. And so the work to save our neighborhoods from abandonment was grassroots. It was non-profit, it was cooperative. It had the spirit of Banana Kelly up in the Bronx taking over abandoned buildings and making them community assets. And you could feel a kind of economic democracy that brought back neighborhoods.
Brad Lander:
But what’s happened in the decade since then, is our model for community economic development for affordable housing construction and for economic development investment has really been very substantially for-profitized so that 80% of the subsidies the city gives out for affordable housing go to for-profit private developers. And then lo and behold, 30 years later, when the mortgage is up, they’ve got the right to take it market, and we wonder where the affordable housing went.
Brad Lander:
But we don’t have to make those choices. We could pull our affordable housing back. So I propose creating a New York City land bank that could acquire some of the distressed properties rather than having it bought up by private equity funds and vulture funds and bottom feeders. I propose any city-owned land that we’re disposing for affordable housing or economic development go to non-profits and co-ops rather than for-profit private developers.
Brad Lander:
And I mentioned that 80/20 split where 80% of the subsidies go to for-profit developers. I just want to get back to 50/50, so at least half the money is in the hands of non-profit community development groups and co-ops. And I think if we took those steps and a few others, we could have a focus on a recovery that creates jobs, the hat creates affordable and supportive housing, that makes spaces for artists, that makes more room for small businesses, but by increasing the footprint of various forms of social ownership and community control, that really could point a strong economic way forward, but just so much more democratic, equal, vibrant, inclusive way forward.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Personally, I don’t know a whole lot about land banks, but I’m curious if you’ve kind of seen them succeed in other cities around the country or elsewhere, if there’s other models that you’ve kind of looked at to shape what you’re imagining for the city?
Stacy Mitchell:
For listeners who’ve never heard that term, just a little orientation would be great.
Brad Lander:
Great. And I’ve been using two different terms here, and they’re a little different from each other. One is a land bank and one is a community land trust. So let me quickly describe each of those. A land bank is a pretty simple concept. It’s just, it would be controlled by the city of New York. So you’d have one for the whole city, but basically it could acquire property and then transfer it to publicly beneficial use.
Brad Lander:
So a real simple example right now is all these vacant hotels. We have so many hotels that are right now closed, and we think that more than 20% of them and maybe as many as 40% of them won’t reopen. Right now, obviously they just have this very long period of no income, but we know New York City’s tourism is going to come back, but it’s going to come back slowly. It’s not going to be back to normal even after the pandemic is done. And so for at least the coming years, there’s going to be a reduced need for hotel space.
Brad Lander:
Meanwhile, we have 60,000 homeless people in New York City. So it’s a pretty obvious public policy problem-solving solution to turn some of those hotels into permanent supportive and affordable housing for homeless and low-income New Yorkers. But to do that, we have to acquire them from private actors and get them into the hands of non-profit supportive housing developers. And the land bank is the vehicle that you would use to do that.
Brad Lander:
Rather than bidding against private equity funds that might scoop them in and hope to do something different with them later, the city’s land bank would acquire them, and then we could use them for a little while for a range of different things, but make plans, use public capital to redevelop them as supportive housing for homeless and low-income families. And the land bank is sort of the middleman in that transaction.
Brad Lander:
A community land trust is generally a neighborhood-controlled entity. You can have city-wide ones like the Burlington Community Land Trust, which is maybe the most famous, but in New York City, which is so big, we do it at the community level, and that’s a non-profit entity that owns land, and in some cases own buildings as well, in a way that holds them permanently in trust as a public resource, preserves their affordability and their community value, but leaves room for things to be going on in them that are sort of different from each other.
Brad Lander:
Some might be cooperative home ownership with those limited resale restrictions. Some might be rentals by a non-profit community development corporation. Some might be supportive housing units for formerly homeless families. Some are retail spaces for neighborhood retail businesses. But the ownership is with the community land trust so that when they come up for a new sale or the end of a lease, they don’t go to market and you lose all of the public benefit in them.
Brad Lander:
So it’s a city-wide land bank concept with a network of many, many different kinds of actors in the marketplace, community land trusts, as well as non-profit affordable housing groups and housing co-ops. That’s the sort of flourishing social ownership ecosystem that we’re lucky already to have a lot of that here. We have 65,000 of those Mitchell-Lama co-ops. We have, I gave it as an example in The Times article, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is an amazing story.
Brad Lander:
The Brooklyn Navy Yard is just what it sounds like. It was created to build ships. It was where an enormous number of the Navy’s ships were actually constructed, and it stayed that way into the 1960s, but then it was decommissioned by the Navy. And for a while, it was a little bit like the Wild West, like every city agency that had a fleet of cars tried to grab some piece of it to park their cars, and it became a kind of abandoned parking area. And it’s easy to imagine that what could have happened was that it would have been sold off for condos. That’s what happened to a lot of vacant land. And this is on the water, so it’s got good views.
Brad Lander:
But kind of just by good luck in the mid-1990s, an idea was hatched to create the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, public-private. City continues to own the land, but a mission-driven non-profit operates it under contract with the city, with the goal of making space for businesses that create good jobs for New Yorkers. And it’s amazing the different range of companies that are in there, folks that are doing all kinds of creative technology work.
Brad Lander:
During the pandemic, they actually produced a ton of PPE and test material when we couldn’t get it. But it’s all kinds of light manufacturing, creative arts. There’s actually a movie studio, hundreds of businesses and tens of thousands of jobs, lots of them who would not be able to get stable long-term leases in much of the property in New York City, which is privately owned, and manufacturing has really been pushed out in favor of higher rent paying office and retail uses, and have been able to thrive in the Navy Yard. So that’s what we want more of, and that’s what these ideas of having a land bank and land trust are going to do.
Jess Del Fiacco:
We’ll continue with our conversation in just a minute, but first we’re going to take a short break. Thanks for listening to Building Local Power. If you’re enjoying this conversation and want to hear even more about local solutions to big problems, I hope you’ll consider heading over to ILSR.org/donate to contribute today. We really do rely on your support to keep this podcast going, so any amount is sincerely appreciated. Now let’s go back to my conversation with Stacy Mitchell and Brad Lander of the New York City Council.
Jess Del Fiacco:
We’ve talked a lot about housing, but how are these ideas potentially in play around commercial property? I mean, as you know, local businesses have not only struggled a lot in the pandemic, but even before that with rising rents and just all of the problems of maintaining space that’s suitable for what they need to do and also affordable.
Brad Lander:
Absolutely. So let’s start with the neighborhood retail sort of mom and pop businesses. And we need a lot of strategies here. I actually support some form of commercial rent regulation, so even in privately owned buildings, you know that your rent is going up at a stable amount each year. Sure, the cost of your owner experiences are going up, and you got to pay a little more because insurance costs or energy costs are higher, but you don’t just have to compete with somebody your landlord can bring in who might be able to pay twice your rent and throw you out. So that’s one piece.
Brad Lander:
But boy, when I worked at the Fifth Avenue Committee, we took over some abandoned property in the neighborhood that I live in. And it was affordable housing on the upper floors, but the ground floors had retail stores. And because we were a mission-driven non-profit with the goal of strengthening the neighborhood, we didn’t have to get the top, top dollar for every square foot of commercial space.
Brad Lander:
We had to make the project work to cover our financing, but that meant we could look to make sure the businesses were more likely to be owned by people of color, to be people from the neighborhood, not to be chain stores, somebody who had a neighborhood business idea, and then give them a long-term stable lease with reasonable rent increases over time so they could create businesses and stay there.
Brad Lander:
And really, that’s most of what I find, in our neighborhood, our retail, our small business startups need is just affordable long-term rent that is not going to spike and double, so they know they can make an investment, try something. Many succeed, many don’t, but that’s a fair way to give somebody a chance to start, is not to rip the rug out from under them because so many other spaces here, when a five year lease is up, you could pay double the rent, fine.
Brad Lander:
And if not, somebody else that is a bank that wants to come in or a new chain store that wants to come in, and local owners without a lot of capital, just even if they’ve got a good business, can’t possibly pay twice the rent they were paying. And that’s true for light manufacturing businesses, that’s true for arts-related businesses, folks who are doing work in the creative economy, and it’s certainly true for the mom and pops and retail stores in so many of our neighborhoods.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Just to rewind slightly to talk about something you mentioned earlier related to this. You are also involved with a program that is working with commercial landlords to renegotiate leases, right?
Brad Lander:
We’re trying. That’s a bill that we are pushing, and we are calling it small business recovery leases. Yeah. The evidence here, the data here is just really kind of stunning. The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce did a couple of surveys asking small businesses in Brooklyn whether they were able to cover their rent. And as they did those surveys over time, 75 or 80% of businesses said they were not able to pay their rent in full. And how could they? The rent is the biggest single cost they have. If their workers aren’t working, they’re not paying them. Those folks may be on unemployment, or maybe they got some short period of time with PPP, the Payroll Protection Program that Congress set up and, knock wood, is going to be starting up again.
Brad Lander:
But a lot of them had a big period of time when they had no revenue coming in, or at most could use 25% of their space. But only fewer than a quarter of landlords made any rent concessions to the small businesses that were in their spaces, even though they weren’t possibly able to stay open and cover their costs. So the number of businesses who have back rent is just enormous, and we need some way of working that out. So we came up with a program designed to share that burden between the city, the commercial or the property owners, and the businesses themselves.
Brad Lander:
And the idea would be you would enter into a new lease. We call them small business recovery leases. They’d have to be at least 10 years long. They’d have to have affordable rent increases during that period. The landlord would have to agree to forgive some of the back rent, and then some of it could be rolled into that this new lease in a way that was mutually acceptable to them and their business. And then the city would come in and give a property tax break equivalent basically to about half of what the landlord was forgiving.
Brad Lander:
So piece of it, the small businesses are still going to have to come up with, over time, a piece of it. The landlord forgives and forgoes, and then a piece of it comes in the form of a 10 year property tax break. And we think that would be a way to give these small businesses a chance to get started again as the economy begins to open back up. I should say, we’d love to be able to build on that toward a broader system of commercial rent regulation, that basic idea that we have in New York City for housing.
Brad Lander:
About half of our rental housing stock is covered by rent regulation. And I know this is, around the country, not the typical experience, and it’s taken as sort of a weird New York City thing, but it’s such a simple idea. If you live in an apartment, you ought to be able to know that next year you might have to pay a little more than this year because the cost of the fuel went up or the cost of insurance went up. So your rent might go up two or three or four percent, but you can’t be kicked out, and someone’s not going to come in who can pay twice as much rent as you and boot you out of your building.
Brad Lander:
It’s such a simple, reasonable idea that you ought to know you can stay with a reasonable rent increase. And we have that for half our rental housing market, but we could have it not only for more of our rental housing market, but for commercial properties as well. It’s certainly reasonable to make sure owners can cover the cost of increased costs.
Brad Lander:
But if you allow them to have the speculative value of their property, whatever they could get if they kick you out and bring somebody else in as their benefit, it’s really hard to give stability to anybody, to residential tenants, families trying to raise kids, or to mom and pop businesses who are investing their life savings and getting something started, and just need enough basic stability to try to make it work.
Stacy Mitchell:
Does New York City have the authority to implement commercial rent control and also the authority around… I mean, I thought your solution around this idea to deal with the lost rent from COVID to say, “Okay, the city’s going to step in on about a third of it, the business is going to eat a third, and the landlord’s going to eat a third.” That feels like, okay, that’s a solution that is going to be hard for everybody, but there’s some equity and sharing the burden of it. Can New York just do that? And if so, what’s the holdup, and how does the commercial rent control idea also play into that authority?
Brad Lander:
Yeah, I mean, as your listeners well know, unfortunately cities are often beholden to their states for almost anything they want to do. And that is in part true here. Even for those small business recovery leases, we need state permission to establish new tax incentives. We don’t have the power in New York City to grant this kind of tax incentive for small businesses. So I’m working with some state senators and assembly members to try to get authorizing legislation in Albany so we can then pass it here.
Brad Lander:
It’ll be from the city’s property taxes, but we need authorizing legislation in Albany even to do it, which is kind of one of the frustrating forms of preemption that local communities all over the country have. The commercial rent regulation is really a complex and interesting question. Our lawyers believe that we could pass a pretty strong commercial rent regulation bill at the local level. It wouldn’t reset on new leases. One beautiful thing about our residential program is that actually, it stays affordable even from one tenant to the next tenant.
Brad Lander:
You can’t go to market even when there’s a vacancy. That turns out to be important, because if you can go to market when there’s a vacancy, the incentive to harass and displace tenants is just overwhelming, as we saw in New York City through some loopholes in our laws. On the commercial side, I think there would have to be a ,ark to market at new leases, but we think we can do it for the period of time that a lease would be covered. We’re working on a bunch of the legal questions, but the reason why we don’t have it even though we could do it, you know the answer to. I mean, real estate has a lot of power in New York City.
Brad Lander:
That’s true in all kinds of times, but it’s certainly true at a moment like now. There’s this anxiety that people are leaving the city. Will they come back? Can we make more demands? And to me it’s less about what you can or can’t demand and more, what’s the model of solidarity and shared sacrifice that you’re trying to build a city going forward on? You know better than anyone at just how much money and how much more value Amazon and the delivery companies have had.
Brad Lander:
I just saw something that fast food employers are worth $40 billion collectively more than they were a year ago. So that’s what the pandemic is doing, is transferring wealth from kind of small businesses and communities to these mega corporations. And we’re going to have to be a little more courageous to do some things that set a better platform. I know in New York, we have people that will want to start up small businesses when we can open the economy, to save the ones they have, recapitalize them, lean forward, and also create some new ones.
Brad Lander:
But that’s going to work so much better if we could do it on a platform of stability and affordability and fairness, but we got to have the guts to change the rules, but that means building more political power than we have. I think that’s why our elections coming up are so critical. This is just an important moment for people, really. We all want to pull together, but we have to pull together with some bold new policies, not pull together imagining that the old rules will work differently than they have. And that’s why this moment calls for bold new politics.
Jess Del Fiacco:
You’ve mentioned that there’s some components here that are unique to New York City, but I’m wondering if there’s certain things that you’re working on that you think other cities could learn from if leaders want to push for similar things in their communities?
Brad Lander:
Absolutely. First I’ll say, we’ve learned from a lot of places around the country. So I don’t want to do too much of the New York exceptionalism. I heard a great story recently from my friend, Greg Casar, who’s a city council member in Austin who helped a group of really very low-income Latino mobile home residents whose landlord was trying to boot them out all together to I think sell the property for condo development. And they were able with the support of the city council, not only to prevent that sale, but to buy the property, to buy the mobile home property from the owner and convert it into a cooperative mobile home park.
Brad Lander:
So there are examples all over the country of people using this model of social ownership to do creative things. The community land trusts around the country that are best known are in Burlington and Albany and North Carolina. So there are some great models. I do think more people are going to have to look to or should look to multifamily limited and shared equity cooperative home ownership. That is not unique to New York. Some other places have it, but not a lot of places.
Brad Lander:
But if we want to make some forms of stable, affordable, durable home ownership available to a much wider range of people in the coming years, especially given the climate crisis, we know that building more suburban communities that you have to drive a car to get to way out in the exurbs is not a sustainable model, even if you could offer affordable ownership. But to the extent we’ve been able to make it possible for people to have affordable ownership, that’s what it is, is a small place at an exurb very far from your place of work with a long commute. That’s not a way that I think… It’s definitely not sustainable.
Brad Lander:
I don’t think it’s a way that people want to live, either. So investing more in cities, allowing multifamily housing, and using this model of co-ops with reasonable resale restrictions. So you make a little money, more than you would have if you had put that same amount in a savings account, but it’s still affordable to the next buyer. I think that people are doing that model of what we call limited equity cooperatives, or shared equity home ownership around the country on community land trusts and otherwise. I really hope that that is something that we can jumpstart all around the country with new resources from Washington.
Brad Lander:
Hopefully there’ll be more money for investment in affordable housing. And I hope we can use some of these new models to make sure it really has durable value. First, just that it stays a permanent public asset, that it’s not at risk of being lost when the owner sells it, whether that’s a private developer or the first homeowner. But it also builds that form of more democratic, collaborative ownership and decision-making that restores control to communities. And to me, that’s an appropriate response to the inequality and racial justice reckoning that we’re seeing in this moment. But I really do think it’s going to be important as well as we’re trying to prepare our cities for the climate future to make them more sustainable.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yeah. There was a line or a question from your piece in the New York Times that was something like, “Who can imagine a future here, or can the average person imagine a future here, and what is that going to look like?” That, I think, is the big question.
Brad Lander:
I’ll encourage to your listeners to read this wonderful new book, Ministry for the Future, which is Kim Stanley Robinson’s new book. It’s a science fiction, or I guess there are some people that are calling it climate fiction, but it tries to imagine… And this one, actually, after some horrible things happen in the beginning, pivots in a positive direction, almost a utopian direction, but with climate realities in mind. And I think people will see these connections between what we have to do if we’re really going to confront the climate crisis with some of these models of local ownership and more permanently affordable and durable public value.
Brad Lander:
I found it really useful. It’s hard to imagine a future like that. We know the horrors that are coming. We know what an economy looks like that’s got more Amazon and McDonald’s, and it’s unfortunately, through some books, not hard to imagine what a planet ravaged by the climate crisis looks like, imagining something that we could live in, or our kids could live in, that lives by the principles of sustainability and equity. But it’s for real. It has to get loans and keep the roof from leaking, and invest in our communities.
Brad Lander:
It’s hard to do. And I think you and I are lucky to have seen some amazing examples in communities, but our challenge is to scale that up, not to have them be small boutique pilot programs, but to have them be what the federal money is supporting and measuring in the footprint of our cities, how much of that and a property is under various forms of social ownership. So I think it’s an exciting time, and I think it’s a platform for the creativity our people have.
Brad Lander:
But the politics of winning it are not utopia. The politics of winning it are through really hard organizing. And obviously when people are experiencing standing in food lines and experiencing the kind of suffering they are, it’s an extra leap to say, “Not only do we need relief, but we need to change the rules to build that more community-owned and sustainable future.” But it’s an urgent time to do it.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you so much for joining us, Brad.
Stacy Mitchell:
This has been great. Thank you so much.
Brad Lander:
Really an honor to be with you. And please, keep up the good work, and I’ll keep listening.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Building Local Power podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find links to what Stacy, Brad, and I discussed today by going to ILSR.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s ILSR.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. We hope you’ll take the opportunity to help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast and supports the research and resources we make available for free on our website.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Finally, we’d ask that you let us know how we’re doing with a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts. This show is produced by me, Jess Del Fiacco, and edited by Drew Birschbach. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunkshunal. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Jess Del Fiacco, and I hope you join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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39 min
March 18, 2021How Big Utilities’ Climate Pledges Fall Short
On this episode of Building Local Power, ILSR Co-Director John Farrell speaks with John Romankiewicz, Senior Analyst for the Beyond Coal Campaign at Sierra Club. Their discussion focuses on a new report from the Sierra Club called The Dirty Truth About Utility Climate Pledges, which takes an in-depth look at electric utilities’ public commitments to lower carbon emissions.
Highlights include:
Romankiewicz’s background working on clean energy and the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign.
Why it’s important to monitor utilities’ commitments around clean energy, understand the financial incentives driving their decision-making, and track whether they keep their promises.
The equity implications of utilities’ actions.
How city leaders can hold utilities accountable and reach their own climate goals.

“It’s striking that you’re talking about how costs, financially and environmentally, have already fallen hardest on marginalized communities, on communities of color, and that continuing to operate them will continue to have that disproportionate impact… Shutting them down is a win-win. And same thing for energy efficiency. You not only get people who have lower bills and more comfortable homes, but then everybody pays less for energy because you have to use less of it.”

Related Resources
The Dirty Truth About Utility Climate Pledges
Transcript
Jessica Del Fia…:
Hello and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast dedicated to thought provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies, and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power, and Communications Manager here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For more than 45 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities where power, wealth, and accountability remain in local hands.
Jessica Del Fia…:
This week, we have a conversation about climate change and the utility sector. Specifically, we’re going to be taking a look at a new report from the Sierra Club. This report is called the Dirty Truth About Utility Climate Pledges, and it looks at how big utility companies oversell these pledges, and the ways in which they often fall short. This will be conversation between ILSR Co-Director, John Farrell and John Romankiewicz, who’s a Senior Analyst for the Beyond Coal Campaign at the Sierra Club. With that, I’m going to turn you over to their conversation.
John Farrell:
So joining me to talk about his report is Senior Analyst with the Beyond Coal Campaign at the Sierra Club, John Romankiewicz. John, welcome to Building Local Power.
John Romankiewi…:
Thanks for having me.
John Farrell:
Well, I’m really excited to talk to you about this. In part, because I always think it’s important to have a lot of scrutiny on utility companies, which often act as monopolies. Which is to say, in an anti-American fashion we have set aside the service territories that give these utilities customers, and therefore they have this really important public responsibility and sometimes are not living up to it.
John Farrell:
What I want to start with though is just… Before we get into the weeds of this report and the findings that you had, could you explain a little bit about what got you interested in this at Sierra Club, in tracking on this? And how did you come to doing this kind of work in general? Why are you working at Sierra Club on the Beyond Coal Campaign? What got you passionate about doing this work on climate and clean energy?
John Romankiewi…:
Great. Lots to dive into there. I’ve been an energy analyst for 10 to 15 years with different types of organizations, government research labs, federal government, private consulting. Sierra Club was my first nonprofit, which I came to about four and a half years ago. Coming out of public policy school, I did a Master’s at UC Berkeley, I really wanted to dive into the advocacy directly. I read this article about the Beyond Coal Campaign, and was truly lucky and privileged to land a spot in the campaign after being inspired by what I was reading.
John Romankiewi…:
I help a lot of our state and local teams, which are really multifaceted and focused on these utilities. They involve lawyers, volunteers, our local chapter leaders, as well as our campaigners and organizers, and we push so much on each individual utility. But wind back about a year ago when this pandemic was starting, maybe there’s some extra time on my hands and I’m thinking about bigger ideas. And we’ve been collecting this data on coal, gas, and clean energy for a long time. I mean, essentially five to 10 years. And a lot of it informs our internal strategy and how we’re going to approach each utility.
John Romankiewi…:
But some of it, we thought we should get out into the public, and we should really let the public know the truth about what we’re seeing. And so, we’ve been tracking coal retirements since we started our campaign officially in 2010, we’ve been tracking new gas plants since 2017, and we’ve been tracking all of the clean energy announcements. How much are utilities building out gas first clean? In other words, when they’re retiring coal, also for the past five years. So I got this idea to basically make this three legged bar stool, coal gas, and clean energy and come up with a grade. We want to call for the same things that we’ve been calling for all the long, retire, coal, stop new gas and build lots of clean energy. Well, let’s put a score to it because our hypothesis was that utilities don’t like being graded. And I think we found that they, yes, don’t like being graded.
John Farrell:
It’s so interesting because when we think about who is responsible for the climate crisis, when we think about who’s responsible for the pollution burden, when we think about who’s responsible for failing to have the power on in Texas, for example, in the last couple of weeks, electric utility score pretty high in terms of responsibility. And pretty highly as well for their long standing use of fossil fuels to generate electricity.
John Farrell:
I think what’s interesting about this is that here you are gathering this data on what they are doing, and you’ve been doing that for a number of years, but what’s really changed in the last year is that lots of these utilities have been making very public commitments to lower carbon emissions to say, “Oh, we’re going to be net zero by 2050,” or “We’re going to be a hundred percent clean by 2040.” Is this the transformation we’ve been waiting for? Or what have you… What data… How does the data line up with the pledges that these utilities are making?
John Romankiewi…:
Well, we wanted to grade them on what their actions are for the next decade. And we… Because we see this as, the electric sector, as being the key, the pivotal key, to unlocking kind of economy-wide decarbonization. And also, it’s the sector that has the tools at its hands to make a transition faster and more affordably in this decade. So as much as utilities don’t like to move too fast, unfortunately the burden really rests on them, and everyone is looking to them to do something ambitious in this critical moment.
John Romankiewi…:
What we found is that their pledges are often for… Some are for 2040, but most are this 2050 pledge, and that’s 30 years away. That’s a long time away. When you look at most utilities, how they do resource plans, they only go out 15 years. So we have no idea what their… When they’re planning to do these reductions. By looking at the resource plans that go out to 2035, it doesn’t seem like they are planning to push up too many of their coal retirements. And so we’re seeing that disconnect between a 15 year plan and a 30 year target, and we have missing information. So we wanted to maybe catch them off guard a little, but also, in earnest, grade them on the date that we believe is really grounded in science, and that’s 2030.
John Farrell:
So you had a lot of this data about coal retirements, about gas, about utility pledges. You start to piece this together, I imagine, looking at what a utility has promised and these resource plans. I’m just getting out of a docket myself here in Minnesota, where we’ve been looking at that 15 year plan of a utility. When it talks… Those plans, they talk about what they expect energy consumption to look like. They talk about what more power generation the utility thinks they’re going to need. They talk about conservation energy efficiency. So as you dug into what these utilities were planning to do, to compare it to their pledges, but also against this important next decade timeline, what were utilities planning to do? What were they saying that they had in mind for the next 15 years?
John Romankiewi…:
Well, there’s some important aggregate findings. We can dig into individual utilities later, but this group of 50 utilities that account for half of the remaining coal and gas generation in the country, they’re only committed to retiring a quarter of their coal by 2030 or sooner. So, that’s a big red flag for us.
John Romankiewi…:
The companies that we studied, they are really heavy on coal. And we see a lot of merchant coal retiring, because they have the direct economic signal. But coal that’s owned by regulated utilities, that can earn a rate of recovery on these coal assets, they are very leery of bumping up their coal dates for a lot of reasons that they’re obfuscating with. And basically, the data said they’re only committed to retiring 25% of their coal. We also found that, in aggregate, they’re building tens of thousands of megawatts of new gas, and that’s a big stranded asset risk. There’s a lot of talk in the industry of gas becoming the new coal, just becoming a big waste of money on a false bridge.
John Romankiewi…:
And then the third finding is that we found in aggregate the building around a 100,000 megawatts of new clean energy, these 50 companies. But if you look at some of the latest reports coming out, that number needs to be like 400,000, 500,000 megawatt, in the next decade. We built 35 gigawatts of wind and solar last year in 2020, it’s a record year for each industry. And we need to definitely be doing 35 a year, and soon moving to 50 or even 75 gigawatts a year, to really get to the levels of ambition that are going to get us on a climate safe pathway.
John Farrell:
So I want to ask you a little bit more about this interesting dichotomy you highlighted here as you looked into… So you’re looking at coal retirements, you’re looking at what they’ve got planned for gas, or you’re looking at clean energy. I’m really struck by what you said about coal. So you’re saying by 2030, these utilities that are monopolies, so they’ve got captive customers, the folks who own power plants that are bidding into the markets are saying, “We can’t make this coal plant work anymore. It’s not cost-effective. We’re competing against cheap gas. We’re competing against cheap wind and cheap solar. It doesn’t make sense to keep running.” So I… I had sort of written down here I wanted… The fall… This is such important quote I feel like in the way that you think about any kind of policy, just follow the money, right?
John Farrell:
What financial incentives are driving these utilities to keep coal plants open that we know are not really economic to run. And I guess… And who’s going to pay the price of this? So if the merchant plant, this is a plant that’s independently owned, it’s out in the market, it’s competing, these are owned by these monopoly utilities. So first of all, what’s our financial incentives? Let’s talk a little bit more about that. And who ends up paying to keep these coal plants running if they decide to keep doing so, even though there’s cheaper stuff out there?
John Romankiewi…:
Yeah, that’s a really complex question, but a great one. I think my first point in following the money is that utilities asked for this money. Many, many of them, not all of them, through dockets, like you mentioned through rate cases. And so at least I think 30 out of the 50 companies we graded really are going through a public utility commission. And that commission has to approve or deny certain investments to be part of the rate base. Which coal plants are economic? Which ones aren’t. How are they running them?
John Romankiewi…:
And so commissions can be different. They can look quite different. Some are elected, some are appointed, but we do see some commissions that rubber stamp what the utilities want, and that’s problem because often utilities are acting in the interests only of their investors and not their customers. And so it’s important for the commission, first of all, to keep that… To keep the balance a little more oriented to consumers. In our eyes, we see a lot of alignment between basically an environmental advocacy and consumer advocacy at this stage. And so that’s my first point in following the money.
John Romankiewi…:
Second is, these utilities are not… They’re continuing to run their coal assets and often they’re running them basically more than they should be. Way more than the market would allow. It’s called non-economic dispatch. There’s a lot of different terms about it. There’s been a lot of reports and investigations by FTP and MISO into these practices of non economic dispatch, but Sierra Club and other organizations have found billions of dollars are being wasted just in terms of… Let alone retirement, you’re just operating the coal units way too much. And customers are getting pinned with those costs at the end of the day.
John Romankiewi…:
And then following the money, I think it’s the partner of a rate case is in a resource plan, which can help you determine when you have a lower cost alternative to go with. And for that follow the money, I go to, what assumptions are you using in the resource plan? Are you using outdated wind and solar costs, or are you excluding battery storage from your modeling explicitly because you don’t think it can provide the services?
John Romankiewi…:
And so in that case, we look at a utility, Northern Indiana Public Service Company, they get the highest score of any parent company in our report. And they used what’s called the all source request for proposal to get bids on what the latest wind solar and battery POS are, so that they could use that to inform their planning. So rather than going to some technical study off the shelf, they’ll say, “Hey, what are the actual providers in the market able to provide to us in terms of competitive costs?” And then when they plug those numbers into their model, they’ve got this coal to clean energy result with no new gas. And it’s really remarkable. And we think serves as a key best practice for utilities across the country.
John Farrell:
I just find this so fascinating. We actually were just partners with Sierra Club on a filing in a resource plan in Minnesota. So the formal comments were due just in the second week of February. One of the things that we were pushing for, so in addition to really checking their numbers on the resource costs was to also encourage them to think carefully about distributed resources. So in other words, stuff they’re not going to own, but that might happen anyway.
John Farrell:
And in partnership with Vote Solar and with Sierra Club, we were able to show with our alternative model that we could do twice as much distributed solar as the utility had originally forecast in their resource plan. And that it would still cost less than what they were planning to do, which did include building a new gas plant. This was for Xcel Energy’s resource plan in Minnesota. So it’s no surprise to hear you say, there are better ways to do this. And I’m just so grateful for Sierra Club and others that get out there and intervene in these resource plans to make sure that commissioners at least have to see some of these alternatives, which otherwise the utility doesn’t necessarily tell them about.
John Romankiewi…:
Yeah, and I’m really glad you brought up distributed solar and community solar, and are focusing your comments there. Because when I think about it, jumping from 100,000 megawatts of clean energy to 500,000 megawatts of clean energy, I think we need to build all types of solar. And there’s been a lot of studies, like by Vibrant Clean Energy, that are highlighting this is not a just utility solar or community solar, and it’s not a zero sum game. We need to be building both types of resources to build the most resilient system, and least cost. There’s certainly, just with the amount we need to build, we need to be exploring all avenues and also leaving opportunities open for customers to own some of this solar generation.
John Farrell:
I feel like it’s so hard to explain to folks outside the utility sector, just how different this is from so many other ways that the American economy operates. That we have these utilities that manage our grid system with these… In this monopoly structure. And it varies from state to state. Essentially each state has its own utility market that’s a little bit different. But hard to imagine that you have to describe for folks, to explain to folks why, even though you have this electricity system out there, and even though everybody really has the right to put solar energy on their own rooftop, that there are all these rules and policies and procedures that can get in the way of folks doing that. It’s really striking.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Sorry to interrupt John and John’s conversation, they’ll be back in just a minute. I just wanted to thank you for listening to Building Local Power. And if you’re listening to the show, you appreciate our coverage of these issues, I hope you’ll consider heading over to archive.ilsr.org/donate to help support our work. We do rely on your help to keep this podcast going, and to sustain the valuable research produced across all of our initiatives. Any amount is sincerely appreciated. That’s archive.ilsr.org/donate.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Now I’ll turn it back over to John Farrell and John Romankiewicz, who have a discussion about how big utilities’ climate pledges often fall short.
John Farrell:
So I did want to ask you a quick question on… When we were talking about the costs, I had been thinking about, what’s the equity implications here? And you touched on one piece of it already, which was when we’re thinking about the cost of these coal plants, you have utilities that have shareholders, they have investors, and then they have customers. And supposedly our public utilities commissions, these public regulators are looking out for the customer and making sure that the utility has to come up with the best deal for us. But that right there is one of the big tensions, right? So when I talk about equity, we have shareholders and customers. Are there other facets of equity that you came across in this or that we should be thinking about in terms of how these plans can impact electricity customers?
John Romankiewi…:
There’s a couple angles there that I’d like to take. The first that comes to my mind is, the reason we’re doing this report is to avoid catastrophic climate change, which there’s a lot of research that shows if we get to three or four degrees Celsius scenarios, most of those costs are going to fall on low income and marginalized communities, which already takes huge burdens. So we’re… At the end of the day, we’re trying to lower the costs of adaptation by amping up our ambition around what we can do in terms of getting to clean power quicker. And I think there’s a huge equity lens just in terms of we’re trying to move deal to sector as fast as possible, so we have as best of a chance of avoiding high temperature rise.
John Romankiewi…:
The second is that, although our score did not directly take into account efficiency, we did build out an efficiency leaderboard as part of our data dashboard. And so, most utilities are required to report how much energy efficiency savings are they finding and helping their customers implement, with a view towards, you need to be doing at least 2% or maybe 3% per year in terms of energy efficiency savings compared to that utility sales in order to A, help keep energy affordable, but also B, as a critical piece of the climate puzzle.
John Romankiewi…:
And so we look at that in terms of residential customers and commercial customers, how much are the utilities helping those people and businesses achieve? And we found a pretty low average, only about 1% or maybe a little lower. Some utilities are doing 2%, but only a handful. And where we found good state policy backing that, I think Michigan, Minnesota are probably some of the better places for some of that energy efficiency focus due the interveners such as yourself. That is a good thing. But overall, the average is kind of abysmal, and that’s bad for equity is bad for affordability, et cetera.
John Romankiewi…:
I think the other equity lens is that a lot of these coal plants, many of them are in urban communities, and impact frontline communities with air pollution for… Not just now, but they have been doing that for decades. And it really provides an impetus to get this coal offline as soon as possible. There’s huge just health benefits that will really accrue to frontline communities if we get these coal units offline sooner.
John Farrell:
Really striking how it’s on both ends for a lot of these policies, whether it’s, like you just explained it, the coal plants it’s striking that you’re talking about the costs financially and environmentally have already fallen hardest on marginalized communities, on communities of color, and that continuing to operate them will continue to have that disproportionate impact, the health impacts and the cost impacts. Shutting them down is a win-win. And same things for energy efficiency. You not only get people who have lower bills and more comfortable homes, but then everybody pays less for energy because you have to use less of it.
John Farrell:
I keep thinking about that of course, with what’s happened in Texas, where they talk about the homes weren’t insulated and neither were the power plants. And so you have all of these cascading problems now from that. And it just makes me wonder, if homes in Texas had as much insulation as homes in Minnesota, certainly it wouldn’t be for the typical conditions, although insulation helps against heat as well as cold, how much of a difference that could have made? I don’t know. It’s really… It’s quite striking.
John Romankiewi…:
It is. I think a lot of that… Sorry, I just was reading that so many new homes are being built in Texas and yeah, a lot of them have electric heat. I would wonder how much of them are resistance seating versus heat pump heating. Because, we know heat pumps are… Both rely on electricity, but heat pumps are so much more efficient, and especially would work very well in a climate like Texas, even for those colder spells.
John Farrell:
So let’s pivot a little bit. I want to talk about… Sierra. Club’s not just doing this amazing work around the Beyond Coal campaign and talking about the enormous costs if we let utilities ram through these resource plans that are not in the customer’s best interest for their environmentally speaking or economically speaking. But it’s also led a really impressive and successful campaign to get US cities to adopt ambitious, renewable energy pledges, generally a hundred percent renewable energy, usually by a much sooner date than these utilities are pledging, like 20 30 or earlier. And you’ve got over 150 cities representing a hundred million Americans that have signed on.
John Farrell:
We’ve been doing a whole interview series for our Local Energy Rules podcast, talking to the cities that have made these pledges and asking these key questions about, well, how can you get there? What are the strategies that you’re thinking of? And I… First of all, I just have to say, I’m always amazed at all of the things that they’re thinking of, at the kind of planning that they’re trying to do, the way that they’re communicating with the community, that reflects in a lot of ways the organizing work that Sierra Club members have done. So I’m curious, have you spoken with some of the city leaders about this report? And if not, how would you imagine they might react, hearing that the utilities that they’re relying on in many ways to help them get to these renewable energy goals are going to fall really far short?
John Romankiewi…:
I think the first thing that comes into my mind is that in terms of these utility climate pledges, the first one out of the gate was in 2018, and that was Xcel. They were the first utility to make a big pledge, this net zero emissions pledge. 2050, of course, it’s far in the future. But they also had a 2030 pledge that seemed, seem pretty ambitious. And we know from city leaders that in Denver, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, those are all different cities that are in Xcel service territory, they passed resolutions and those resolutions put a lot of heat on Xcel to clean up their act faster. And those coalitions that have been built, continue to put pressure on Xcel, to not just have this goal, but to actually follow through on it.
John Romankiewi…:
And, for example, you mentioned that resource plan in Minnesota happening right now, there’s new gas proposed in that plan. And our report highlights that that new gas is a false bridge, a stranded asset, and potentially a huge risk for customers. So utilities lose points if they’re building new gas. So when our report came out, I think our coalition there was ready to highlight the fact that they shouldn’t be building new gas. That’s not really compatible with what they claim to be doing long-term.
John Romankiewi…:
The other thing I thought of is, yeah, there’s a lot of different avenues for these city leaders to take with their utilities. I remember a workshop that was convened by the Ready For 100 campaign in conjunction with city leaders, and the National Renewable Energy Lab, this was almost three years ago at this stage. And there was four cities up on stage. There was a Georgetown, Texas, there was San Diego, there was Boulder and there was Salt Lake City. So it was, like you mentioned before, all these different energy markets and types of utilities, there was four different kinds of cities and four different kinds of utilities.
John Romankiewi…:
So it was Georgetown, Texas, a municipal utility and deregulated ERCOT, which we’ve heard a lot about in the past week. Then you’ve got San Diego, which is San Diego Gas and Electric, but the utility was looking at forming a community choice aggregation. Boulder went through a huge municipalization campaign, but was in Xcel’s service territory. Still is, I don’t know if that campaign ended up winning, but it was a key tactic that city was using to try and get their goal.
John Romankiewi…:
And then in Salt Lake City, Pacific Corp or Rocky Mountain Power, is the local utility there. And I remember the city mentioning that they were using the franchise agreement that they have, that the utility is allowed to use part of the streets and byways for utility poles as a key kind of leverage, because the renewal of that agreement was coming up, in order for the city to get more clean energy that it wanted to supply its community. So there’s different ways of tackling it, but I think city leaders are being pretty innovative in terms of what’s the right approach for them and what are the citizens calling for.
John Farrell:
I was just thinking about too, I’ve worked with the city of Minneapolis here in Minnesota, which also used its franchise agreement as a point of leverage. And one of the things that they’re doing is that they have a full-time staff person now who pays attention to what’s passing all through the public utilities commission. What’s going in front of regulators regarding Xcel energy, the city’s electric utility and its gas utility as well. And they’re intervening in a lot of places as the city and saying, “Look, we’ve made these climate goals. We’ve established goals for local energy production. We’re trying to lower costs. We’re trying to address equity and make sure our low income customers, our minority residents, are having better access to clean energy.”
John Farrell:
And it’s really having a big impact in terms of changing the way that the commission thinks about, both who are the customers of the utility, traditionally speaking. That it’s not just the end users, but it also can be these municipalities that represent the folks that live there. Are there other things that you’ve seen? I think the examples you gave already are terrific. Anything else that you’ve seen about how cities can help hold the utilities accountable?
John Romankiewi…:
I love that you brought up that the cities as interveners example, I was thinking of that one myself. I think the other best practice we’re hoping our report can be is that this is an accessible tool with an easy to understand metric and grade, that the data set’s already ready, the citizens can look up their utility and can find out what grade they’re getting, can look at the more complex data set in the dashboard and be able to say, “What are you doing here?”
John Romankiewi…:
Most of the utilities in Florida, for example, where there’s been a lot of ready for 100 activity, a lot of those utilities are still getting D’s and F’s. And so citizens there could take our report card, and wave it in front of the utility as a more accessible way for any normal citizen to say, “What are you doing on coal and clean energy? Because this report card says you’re getting an F.” So we really that the Dirty Truth is a tool, and hopefully we’ll be keeping up to date each year. And it’s an accessible tool, A through F grading scale, that can really show what’s a good utility versus what’s a bad utility that’s really not moving on climate.
John Farrell:
Whether or not Sierra Club is working on it or not, just knowing that you’ve been in this space, you’ve been watching folks work on these issues, are there any transformative approaches on the table that you see that can help cities or communities or are folks advocating around climate and clean energy, that can either help bring utilities along or find some other way?
John Farrell:
I just… I keep thinking about Florida. It’s so funny, you know, it’s the sunshine state, right? And I feel like those utilities have been getting D’s and F’s for years on clean energy. And just wondering, are there things that you’ve seen that can really help change this game, and meet, as you said, we have this ambitious and urgent timeline by 2030 to really see transformation in the electricity sector.
John Romankiewi…:
There’s a lot of tools in the toolbox. Another way of looking at this would be to say, I know who my utility is. I’m going push on them. But also, who are my investments in? And so we’ve been thinking a lot about pension funds that are invested in these utilities. If you look at big pension funds, or big investment funds, like BlackRock, they own eight to 10% of all the investor owned utilities in our report on average. Vanguard, BlackRock, these big firms. So if they own that much of a company, they have a lot of influence in voting on what the shareholders should do and push for themselves, and where that… What direction that company can go. Concurrently, we know BlackRock’s such a big player, so we want to be hammering on BlackRock.
John Romankiewi…:
And we also want to be hammering on any state pension funds that might be invested in any particular, one of these utilities, even if it’s just a couple of percent, that’s a lot of voting power to bring forward shareholder resolutions, clean up their acts. We’ve seen that some of those shareholder resolutions, work with key utilities. And the people that work at the utility and investor relations, they’re very reactive to that. They don’t like to be in the press as a utility. That’s everyone’s saying, sell this stock because, nope, it’s not good. It’s not looking good financially for them because of their bad climate and clean energy plans. They don’t want to be on that sell side. They want to be on the buy side. And so investor pressure, I think is a pretty innovative approach, a little more wonky, but I think also a good avenue for cities to explore.
John Farrell:
I got just so many thoughts that bubble to the fore for me there. One is cities themselves often have pension plans for employees. So there’s… You’ve got 150 cities that have these pledges, how many of them are already using their pension funds as part of their clean energy advocacy portfolio? A second one is I feel like I read somewhere, and I don’t know if this was a change in a particular utilities approach to investor relations or if it was legislation being considered. But it was something about essentially saying, “How do we reduce the power of these institutional investors to pressure us to do better things?” And I can’t remember if it was a utility company saying, we’re going to dilute their voting shares or something, or not allow them to carry resolutions.
John Farrell:
I guess, rather than dwell too much on the way that utilities are going to push back, I’m curious, are there changes to the market rules for utilities, or to advocacy rules? Are there policy ideas at the state or federal or local level that you see as helpful in creating the pressure on these utility companies, or reducing their influence, or lifting up other actors that can help us get to the same goals, but rely less on winning over the utilities or pushing them to do something different?
John Romankiewi…:
I really think some sort of state or federal standard, if it could be swung, around the out the all source requests for proposal, that allows clean energy, and demand side technology, to compete on a level playing field with coal and gas. And I think that’s just a really key way that should be bipartisan. Let’s let the market speak, and let businesses speak and provide their costs and the performances of their various technologies, and compare them on a level playing field. Because I feel like that’s something we’ve just seen as pretty transformative practice for utilities that are getting A’s and B’s versus ones that are getting D’s and F’s. They wouldn’t touch on all source request proposal with a 10 foot pole.
John Romankiewi…:
And also, yeah, I think there’s other characteristics as F utilities that we didn’t highlight as much in the report, but bubble up from time to time or quite frequently. And it’s things around democracy and participation. A lot of F utilities don’t have compensation for consumer advocates to participate in commission proceedings. And so you don’t have those voices at the table. Sometimes they also just redact all sorts of information from their public documents. And so then the question is, what’s the point of having public participation in your resource plan if you’re just going to redact all the important information about your clean energy plans and your coal assets?
John Romankiewi…:
So we see that a lot. A lot of these F utilities are just taking the black highlighter pen and redacting out big… Most important parts of the documents, they’re just hiding things. And it’s very sad to see. So better practices a state could enforce around public disclosure, and public participation, in these different types of venues, I think are key. And then all source request for proposals requirement, and allowing those technologies to compete on a level playing field is also another key policy we should try and push at state levels.
John Farrell:
Well, John, I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk about this report. So the Dirty Truth About Utility Climate Pledges, we’ll have a link on our show page, make sure folks can find the report. Are there other resources of Sierra Club’s or otherwise that you think are important for folks to learn more about this important issue of utilities making pledges, but then not necessarily living up to them?
John Romankiewi…:
We’re certainly going to be keeping our report card up to date. Beyondcoal.org is the easiest website to find our different resources, our coal map about where the remaining coal plants are. And it’s also… Our report is linked there on that webpage as well. So that’s probably our best go-to resource where our members and supporters and our growing network can find the best information.
John Farrell:
Well, thanks again, John, for taking the time. Really appreciate your overview of the report and the great research. Looking forward to sharing it with as many people as we can.
John Romankiewi…:
All right, thanks so much for having me.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Building Local Power podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to archive.ilsr.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s archive.ilsr.org.
Jessica Del Fia…:
While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. We hope you’ll also take the opportunity to help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast, and supports the research and resources we make available for free on our website. Finally, we ask that you let us know how we’re doing with a rating or review on Apple podcasts, or wherever you find your podcasts.
Jessica Del Fia…:
This show is produced by me, Jess Del Fiacco, and edited by Drew Birschbach. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Jess Del Fiacco, And I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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37 min
March 04, 2021Is Amazon Picking Winners and Losers Among America’s Cities?
On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco and ILSR Co-Director Stacy Mitchell are joined by award-winning journalist Alec MacGillis to discuss his new book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. Their conversation focuses on how the shift toward online shopping — led by Amazon — has reshaped America. Highlights include:
How this shift has reshaped jobs and physical landscapes around the country.
Amazon’s ever-growing influence on the Washington, D.C., metro area.
The troubling dynamic between local governments and Amazon, which often includes cities working on Amazon’s behalf.
The social and political consequences of the dramatic — and growing — gulf between rich and poor places in the United States.
Whether or not these changes are inevitable, and what elected officials can do to shape our economy’s future.
“You’re unable to even talk about problems because the issues manifest themselves so differently in different parts of the country. And housing is the best example. It’s just surreal to be in cities where the housing debate is all about high cost and affordability… And then you go to other parts of the country where the housing problem is the absolute reverse, where it’s just a problem of depopulation and blight and abandonment…. The most extreme or clearest example, of course, of this incomprehensibility to each other, is what’s happened in our politics, in our electoral politics, these last few years.”
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Transcript
Jess Del Fiacco:
Hello, and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast, dedicated to thought provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and communications manager here at the Institute for local self-reliance. For more than 45 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities where power, wealth, and accountability remained in local hands. In today’s episode we’re going to talk about how a shift towards online shopping, which was led in part by Amazon has reshaped our country.
Jess Del Fiacco:
I’m here with my colleague, Stacy Mitchell, the co-director of ILSR, and joining us is the award-winning journalist Alec MacGillis whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and many other places. Alec has a new book out, which is called Fulfillment, Winning and Losing in One-Click America. Welcome to the show. Alec, we’re happy to have you here.
Alec MacGillis:
Thanks for having me.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Could you just tell us a little bit about this book and why did you decide to write it?
Alec MacGillis:
This book has been in the works for a long time, and it’s really goes back many years to my upbringing in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, small city in Western mass. That’s gone through a really hard time after it lost General Electric and just becoming more and more worried about the huge gap, growing gap between places in America, places that all these towns and cities that really have been kind of left behind, even as you had these pockets, these other cities that were growing just more and more wealthy, more and more concentrated in their prosperity and watching this happening as I was about 10 or 12 years ago out on the road, a lot reporting as a political reporter for The Washington Post and going out to towns in Ohio or Wisconsin all over the country. And then coming back to Washington and Metro Washington, as it was becoming more and more intensely wealthy and kind of complacent in its wealth.
Alec MacGillis:
And this is around the time of the great recession, 2009, ’10, when you could barely even see the great recession hitting in Metro Washington and seeing this divide growing ever wider between places and being really bothered by it and really worried about it, and also surprised that more people weren’t talking about it. And then Trump gets elected in 16, which obviously had quite a lot to do with that issue of regional disparities. And then I decided I need to write about this. I need to write a big book about this. And then after quite a lot of thought, I decided to come at it from the lens of Amazon, using Amazon as the framework onto this problem. And that’s how I got going on it.
Jess Del Fiacco:
You do this really on the ground reporting for the book. And so the book is the reporting for my, I think it’s about eight or 10 different places. Can you just talk about one of the places that you spend some time and what you saw there?
Alec MacGillis:
Sure. I did decide to zero in on a relatively small handful of places because I really wanted to be able to go deep into places. And I settled on essentially two winner cities, winner take all cities being namely Seattle and Washington DC. And just as an aside, I actually picked Washington DC before it was chosen as HQ2 for Amazon. That was kind of serendipitous. But then the left behind places that I chose were various communities in Ohio where I’ve spent a lot of time as a reporter, mostly the Dayton area in Southwest Ohio, and then the small towns of Appalachian Ohio in the Southeast and then Baltimore, Baltimore is the other kind of left behind city. And Baltimore really is in a sense the kind of heart of the book, the Baltimore Washington divide is something that I’ve seen growing this last 20 years now I’ve lived in either, in the Baltimore Washington area and I’ve kind of gone back and forth between the two places.
Alec MacGillis:
And it’s just been so jarring to watch how, why the divide between the two cities that used to be much closer and sort of size and prosperity and have now just grown light years apart to the point where you cannot believe that it’s just 40 miles, you go from one to the other and it’s, you feel almost the kind of vertigo because the gap is just, it’s so large. And it was really watching that gap grow this last decade or two, that drove me more than anything to want to take on this book. But Baltimore itself offers a very powerful story for the theme of Amazon and what’s happened to the country, because Baltimore has now several large fulfillment warehouses.
Alec MacGillis:
And one of them is, a newer of them is located in this incredibly important place, which is namely the peninsula called Sparrow’s point. That’s just on the off the Southeastern edge of the city down in the water. And it was for many, for most of the last century home to what was for time, the largest steel plant in America and in the world in fact. About 30,000 workers at its peak entire company town of five or 6,000 people with a whole grid of streets and a downtown and the entire company town landscape, and just this enormous skyline of industrial might down there on the water. And in a place where once they got the unions in the 40s and 50s, someone can make a really good living in the mill and thousands did.
Alec MacGillis:
It was very dangerous work and very strenuous work, but it was also very purposeful and meaningful work with great camaraderie and great longevity, people spent their whole careers there. And finally went out of business in the first decade of this century, bit by bit. That mill and the entire town have now been wiped completely clear from this peninsula. It’s just astonishing. You go down there and it’s all gone. Although, when your GPS still picks up the old street names, it’s very eerie for driving sort of on the, it’s almost like a Tundra, you’re driving out there and your … and it still calls out A street, B street, C street, but it’s all gone. And in its place now, or the warehouses, it’s a big logistics hub, and Amazon’s got the biggest one there. And I actually found a man who had worked for 30 years at Beth steel, making those good wages and who then after it went under, ended up getting a job, driving a forklift at Amazon, making a third of what he was making at Beth steel and leading a much less sort of purposeful existence on his job.
Alec MacGillis:
And to me, that transformation of the place from this manufacturing, where people were making things and making good money while making them and living a life of some real purpose and dignity to now in that exact same place, making a third as much, picking and packing things that have been made halfway around the world with almost no interactions with their coworkers. That to me was just such a telling shift and it really kind of forms the spiritual heart of the book.
Stacy Mitchell:
Can I ask why Amazon? I mean, especially compared to how other tech companies may be, I’ve had a hand in this change, even in the DC area, how does their influence differ from other powerful companies, either politically or just geographically, how they’ve reshaped the landscape?
Alec MacGillis:
It’s a very good question. I decided to come at this book with an Amazon frame for two reasons. One was that Amazon is a driver of this problem of regional inequality, regional divergence between winner take all cities and left behind places much in the same way as other tech giants. What’s happening essentially right now is that as certain markets get more concentrated, so does regional wealth. So take the example of my business, my industry media used to have [inaudible 00:08:25] spread all over newspapers, TV, radio, getting along with ad revenue, into places where they operated now as more and more ad revenue is absorbed by Google and Facebook. What is it now? 60% or so of all ad revenue goes to those two companies, all that revenue essentially is kind of just sucked to the places, the place where they are, which is, in their case, the Bay area, Silicon Valley.
Alec MacGillis:
You end up with this dystopian level of wealth and inequality in the Bay area while all these news papers and other news media outlets around the country suffer mightily. And that’s sort of how the economic concentration leads into this kind of regional disparity. You see the same thing happening with Amazon and in retail, we’re all this retail business, retail revenue that used to be dispersed broadly around the country is now more and more drawn into this one company that is based in this one place. And so we ended up with this just incredible wealth, hyper prosperity in Seattle, in the few other places where they’ve got their white collar business. But the other reason I chose Amazon in addition to its being a contributor to this problem, a driver of this problem, like the other tech giants, the reason I chose it and not those other companies, is that it’s just a useful thread to take one around the country because it’s actually present all around the country in a way that the other tech giants are not. It’s present in a very physical way, right?
Alec MacGillis:
You have these warehouses, more and more of them. You have the trucks that are just ubiquitous to the point of it being eerie. Like the day that I sent off my book, I had a truck that pulled up outside for one neighbor just an hour ago, another truck pulled upside outside the other window for another neighbor. I mean, just it’s constant, right? There’s this ubiquity of the warehouses, the trucks, the data centers, just all the different physical manifestations of this company in the landscape in a way that the other tech giants lack, they’re more sort of in the ether, they’re affecting your life in all sorts of other ways. But it’s less in the landscape. And so Amazon just offered more of an actual, physical thread to take you around the country. And the way I like to talk, describe it as that Amazon, this book is not so much about the company itself, but it’s about what, everything that falls within the shadow of the company, because this company actually does cast a shadow. It’s that physical.
Jess Del Fiacco:
One of the places that’s so striking, I mean, in the book is Washington DC. The other end of the spectrum from Baltimore, from some of the places that you covered in Ohio, Amazon’s footprint is everywhere in DC, both visibly, but also invisibly. And that’s a city, as you noted has grown so much more wealthy. Do you think DC is starting to feel like a, I mean, is it a company town at this point. Talk a little bit about what you’re seeing in terms of Amazon’s influence there?
Alec MacGillis:
It’s extraordinary. I mean, you just can’t overstate it and I’d feel like this story has been missed, to be honest. And one reason it’s maybe been missed let’s face it is that the very good newspaper in a city, it’s a city that’s still has a really, really strong newspaper that could tell a story, but newspaper is owned by Jeff Bezos. And that does pose a very basic existential problem there. But the reason I chose Washington as my second kind of winner take all city alongside Seattle, even before HQ2 was cited there, is that it was already apparent just how much Amazon and Bezos were taking over the town. He bought the newspaper, he then bought the … by far the most valuable home in a city former museum that is bought for $23 million in cash, and then spent another 12 million to renovate.
Alec MacGillis:
And then to create salon space where you could have big Katherine Graham style parties. The company of course, is hugely ramped up. It’s lobbying at least as much as the other tech giants in town. It also just has a massive presence now through its cloud operations, which AWS has been so aggressive in seeking government contracts, got the big CIA contract a few years ago, came very close to getting the big Pentagon contract. Has a big convention there every year, the public sector conference, where you’ve just got thousands of people coming in to try to get the cloud business, the growing cloud business and government. And then on top of that, you got HQ2 with a company choosing Arlington, Crystal City for the next headquarters, 25,000 jobs, just massive investment capped off with this crazy looking building.
Alec MacGillis:
You end up with just this enormous presence. And yes, on the one hand they’re coming there, partly because DC now has a very highly educated workforce where you have a lot of the kinds of people that you can poach for jobs at HQ2, people working out in those tech contractors out on your way out to Dallas airport and all those kinds of glass boxes that you see when you’re driving around the beltway. You’ve got that whole workforce there that you can draw off of for the next headquarters, but let’s face it. The other reason that they chose Washington to build this enormous presence is that Washington is home to the federal government. And if you’re a company as dominant as Amazon is now, in a sense you have less to fear from other corporate rivals than you do from possible intervention by the government.
Alec MacGillis:
And the best way to head that off is just to be very big in Washington, not only for more sort of, for the kind of cruder aspects of influence wielding, but just in soft power ways. You’re more likely to have a complacent, benign notion of Amazon if the guy lives next door to you, or on sidelines of your daughter’s soccer game is an Amazon guy working down in Arlington who seems like a nice enough guy, nothing, much to worry about there. That’s what’s happening in Washington. It’s a takeover of that city by this one company that really has not been fully appreciated yet. And the book really tried to capture that.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Follow-up question on that, as a journalist, what do you think about the Washington Post? Do you think that they pull their punches on Amazon?
Alec MacGillis:
I’ve thought a lot about this and I have to be careful how I think about it and talk about it. Because I worked at the Washington Post myself for five or six years before Amazon came to town and I have many friends and they are still who work hard and are very good at what they do. And when they tell me that they never have to worry about Bezos calling them and requesting, or trying to squash a story, I believe them. And it’s not really about that. It’s about the stories you never even set out to do the self-censoring that you do, because it’s just such a existential problem that you are owned by this man. What I’ve noticed in particular ways is that the papers is quite aggressive in doing stories about Amazon as a business in Seattle, as a … they’ll do stories about counterfeit sales on the site or the other problems with Amazon, the business, kind of technical stories, but the story of Amazon’s power in Washington and its takeover of Washington, that is the story that it still hasn’t really been told in full.
Alec MacGillis:
And if there were another company that was doing this, this would be in the Washington Post wheelhouse, and this is what they live for. When I was at the paper, they were doing all sorts of stories about these huge contractors who were getting these massive contracts and maybe screwing up the contracts or wasting the money and SCIC and these various beltway bandit type companies. And now we have this company that’s operating on an even vaster scale and wielding influence and getting contracts in Washington. And now actually becoming the biggest private sector employer in Washington and in transforming an entire inner suburb of the city. And that’s not being told, the story is not being told at the level that it needs to be told.
Jess Del Fiacco:
We’ll continue with our conversation in just a moment, but first we’re going to take a short break. Thanks for listening to Building Local Power. I hope you’re enjoying the show. And I hope that if you care about supporting the workers and small businesses impacted by Amazon, that you’ll consider heading over to archive.ilsr.org/donate to help support our work. Any amount is sincerely appreciated. Now we can turn back to my conversation with Stacy Mitchell and Alec McGillis, who’s the author of the new book Fulfillment.
Jess Del Fiacco:
In the book you write about how these changes, I mean, this widening divide between the winner and losing, winner cities, loser cities has basically made some parts of our country incomprehensible to other parts of it. Can you talk about the consequences of that?
Alec MacGillis:
It really is one of the reasons I’ve gotten so worried about these divides, because you end up with these bubbles. I mean, they really are bubbles. And I realized just how bad the problem has gotten because I moved between them a lot. I tend to sort of, I’ve spent all those years working in the Washington media bubble, surrounded by all this prosperity and complacency. And then I would go out to these places a lot for my work that we’re doing much, much worse. And you see how you’re unable to even talk about problems because the issues manifest themselves so differently in different parts of the country. And housing is the best example. It’s just surreal to be in cities where the housing debate is all about high cost and affordability, and whether one should build more supply or cap rents with rent control that whole debate about supply versus limits.
Alec MacGillis:
And then you go to other parts of the country where you just have with housing problem is the absolute reverse, where it’s just a problem of depopulation and blight and abandonment. I find it deeply frustrating because in fact, the problem in both places would be partially ameliorated if we had less inequality, regional inequality to begin with. We would have far less extreme affordability problem and housing crisis in our winner take all cities. If we did not have as much wealth concentrated in them, but we don’t think about it that way. We’re in our one bubble and we’re not thinking about what’s happening over here and how much better off we’d be if there was just more of a balance across the board, but then the most extreme or clearest example of course, of this incomprehensibility to each other is what’s happened in our politics, in our electoral politics these last few years.
Alec MacGillis:
Where you end up with such extreme divergence that the person in the other place does become an utter stranger to you. And it is a source of such resentment. There’s this whole debate about how much economic resentment, how much of a role it played in Trump’s election in 2016 versus racism and xenophobia and misogyny in the … Where I’ve increasingly come down on this, is that there absolutely, they’re completely inextricably linked that it’s not one or the other. It’s the fact of the one making people more vulnerable to the other and likely to be susceptible to the other. It’s the growing economic resentment, seeing these other parts of the country that have just sucked in so much of the nation’s wealth and that resentment, then making one more open to really ugly appeals. They’re all bound up together.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yeah, I think that’s so true. I find, it’s hard to wrestle with. The democratic party has traditionally been the party, at least in the last a 100 years of economic justice, but many of the winner cities that are really prospering are places that we think of as very progressive. Cities like Seattle and DC, which feature heavily in your book. They’re some of the bluest places in the country. They’re also increasingly some of the wealthiest places in the country, their home to a lot of democratic party voters, but you write about how they’re progressivism and they’re extreme wealth are increasingly at odds with one another. And you had this line in the book about hyper prosperity was not only creating the side effects of unaffordability and homelessness, but injecting a political poison into the winner cities. Can you talk about what you mean by that and you just where this dynamic in these prosperous places and supposedly progressive places is going okay?
Alec MacGillis:
Yeah. It’s a huge problem for the Democrats. I mean, you really have, now the party has become increasingly a party dominated by upper-middle-class highly educated professionals and they’re living in these winner cities and there’s a lot of denial on the democratic side about the extent to which this is happening, but it just is, if you look at the numbers, it’s right there. It’s really an existential issue for the party, because it has, of course, historically been in the party of the underdog. And so what happens now, if it is increasingly a party that is identifies with and is dominated by very high earning, very highly educated professionals in these cities that are fabulously wealthy. And one of the awkward aspects of this is what you see within some of these cities themselves. And the line you quoted comes from Seattle, where you’ve had in the last couple years, this really sad turn to a ugliness in the local politics, politics that are in general, of course, very progressive as regards Donald Trump or any other national issue.
Alec MacGillis:
But locally you’ve had this big debate around the housing and homelessness crisis and attempts to address it partly by raising money in the form of higher taxes on Amazon and other big employers in Seattle to pay for more housing and homelessness services. And what happened in Seattle was that not only did Amazon manage to launch a very effective lobbying campaign to push back a new law that had passed to raise money, a new tax that had passed to raise money to address this terrible problem. But you also had a general turn within the electorate itself. It turned against these efforts, a fear that that raising money to address homelessness would A, end up simply wasting taxpayer dollars, wasting these companies dollars. And at the most kind of visceral getting affordable housing built on your own block in your own neighborhood, a real basic nimbyism reaction.
Alec MacGillis:
And Amazon was so successful in beating back this tax because it actually had quite a lot of allies in the local allegedly progressive electorate. People who just came to see any kind of government spending government attempts to address this problem as wasteful and doomed to fail. It was almost a tea party at the local level, liberal version of that antigovernment strain. And it revealed something in the local quote, progressive landscape that a lot of people found very disconcerting. And you see versions of that in all sorts of different wealthy, allegedly progressive blue cities around the country. And it’s not pretty.
Alec MacGillis:
The big question away is whether the democratic party can sustain itself as what is essentially becoming a coalition of, it sounds a little bit harsh, but it’s the coalition of people who, wealthy upper middle class people, who buy a lot of stuff online. And then on the one hand, and then the people who package and deliver those things for them. That is that’s increasingly what the democratic party is becoming. The highly educated elite coupled with that’s, of course, mostly white professional lead coupled with still very strong support among black and Hispanic voters, working class voters, in these cities that as we saw just last fall, that that coalition was already showed some signs of cracking. You saw Donald Trump of all people make some inroads with working class Hispanic voters, and even to a lesser degree with black men, but that’s the coalition the Democrats are now trying to hold together. It’s very unwieldy. We’ll see if it can sustain itself.
Stacy Mitchell:
That’s so true. If looking at the last year quite literal, I mean, there’s those of us who have been able to stay home and order things online and have them delivered to us. And then there’s the people who are doing that delivering just really couldn’t be, it might be harsh, but it couldn’t be more obvious in my mind. And then I think just another piece of this, you took a really close look at the dynamic that exists now between local governments and Amazon, which in many cases seems to kind of result in these cities most working on Amazon’s behalf. Could you talk a little bit about that and specifically the inside look that you got into this relationship in El Paso?
Alec MacGillis:
Yeah. I tried to do some real, I’m an investigative reporter at heart and I saw it. The book does have quite a lot of digging and muckraking, I did a lot of public information requests and did sloughing ground in the country. And managed to get quite a lot of good material. I thought pretty eyeopening material on the whole game of Amazon trying to get tax credits and tax subsidies to open up these warehouses and data centers, places that are desperate for any kind of investment at all. And so I managed to get some nice little behind the … pulling back the curtain on some of those communications between the company and the towns around those subsidies. And then I went down to El Paso to do a whole chapter on, essentially the fight by a group of small business owners in this case office supply dealers to survive against the Amazon threat. And the Amazon threat in El Paso, like a lot of places had a lot to do with the complicity of local governments in making Amazon their main supplier for all manner of procurement, all manner of basic goods of government.
Alec MacGillis:
And you have these office supply dealers in El Paso, these are companies with 10 or 20 people at most typically who’ve been getting by over the years by selling their goods, both to local businesses, local accountants or lawyers, and to local governments and school districts. And you then had the Amazon suddenly coming to the picture and making an aggressive pitch to the local governments and in school districts to simply start buying from Amazon instead. The Amazon directly saying, “Hey, look, why not just use us? You use us for everything else in your life, so why not just use us for your government procurement as well?” Oh, don’t worry about those local businesses that you’ve been buying from all these years. You can still buy from them online.
Alec MacGillis:
We’ll just set them up on our site and you can just make your one click from them there, it’ll all just be much easier for everyone. Well, what’s of course left out of that pitch. That happy picture is that when the sale goes through Amazon, as the middleman, Amazon takes a large cut, basically anywhere from 15 to 30%, depending on how many services the local business feels that they need to buy from Amazon to be able to survive. And so I went down there and not only managed to talk to the businesses about this pressure that they were under, and this fight that they’ve been waging, but also managed to get again, to get lot of emails back and forth between Amazon and the El Paso city government. And I managed to actually slip into a session at the convention center in El Paso, where some very high level Amazon executives were directly pressuring the local business owners to come on to the website to start selling through Amazon instead of directly to their local purchasers, and sort of got to see how that actually happens.
Alec MacGillis:
And it was a really remarkable moment to see them making this very happy pitch to the business owners, while withholding until the very last moment, just how much it was going to cost them to come on to Amazon. Basically only conceding under the duress of questioning for one particular persistent local business owner that it was actually in cost them quite a bit to start working within the Amazon empire.
Jess Del Fiacco:
That chapter, that whole scene, just made my blood boil. Just the fact that this city not only sort of entering into this contract, but set up this whole event, very much on Amazon’s terms, just absolutely infuriated me. One of the things that I think, in the book is it’s just so excellent. It’s really one of the best books I read in a long time. And I hope everyone will pick up a copy because it’s really deeply engaging. And it’s really told from the standpoint of people that you talk with across the country and these places and these events that you attend. I think like what it also does really well is just show that all of these things are product of deliberate decision.
Jess Del Fiacco:
I think one of the things we’ve been brainwashed into this idea that these forces are outside of our control and that growing problems in our economy are owed to globalization or these other things that we can’t control and that are the product of decisions. I’m curious on the one hand, I think there is some better recognition of the fact that there are decisions being made, but there’s also, there’s a lot of resignation out there and there’s a lot of resignation in the book. And I’m curious since you started this project, if you have, are you feeling more hopeful or less hopeful? What do you see on the horizon?
Alec MacGillis:
Boy. For starters, I’m glad that you’ve identified that turn toward, that I see a lot, and I’m really kind of frustrated by this notion that, well, these things are unfortunate, but these are all just the bigger structural forces and what can you do about it? That was actually pretty much exactly the argument that I got back from Amazon itself. I, of course, reached out to the company, spoke with them quite a lot, and their basic defense for all this boils to, look bigger, things are happening in the economy, they have been for a long time. The rise of online shopping, what’s going to happen no matter what. We just happened to be the ones who were here at this moment, if it wasn’t us, it’d be someone else. With that kind of talk overlooks is that there were specific things that the company’s done, specific ways it’s behave, specific choices it’s made that have made things as extreme as they are, whether it’s on the tax avoidance game or where to site its headquarters or how it treats its workers.
Alec MacGillis:
These are all things in which the company does have agency. And I think it’s important never to lose sight of that. I should also say that this is something that this is a realm where we’re all of us have agency. I do believe that all of us, as consumers and as citizens do have a say in this matter, and I find it depressing when people throw up their hands and make it all about the larger structural systemic contexts in which our world is now. No, we still have choices about how we live our lives and where we, not just where we shop, but how in all the different matters of our life, sort of how much we engage with the world around us and resist the turn to the one-click life.
Alec MacGillis:
And in that regard, this last year has been really, really tough to watch. It has gotten so much worse that that inward turn, the fact that people now had, in a sense, an excuse to turn inward and to live the one-click life. Before that was something that was attached to some, for at least some of us came with some sense of … shame is probably too strong of a word, but some sense of stigma that we shouldn’t be just buying everything online and leaving our local communities bereft. But with a pandemic, it was a way of living that almost became attached to a sort of self-righteousness by doing everything online, we were just being, doing the safe thing. We were flattening the curve, bending the curve, we were just doing what the public health experts told us to.
Alec MacGillis:
And that was true to a certain extent for a certain time, spirit of time. But I do worry that even as we hopefully come out of this relatively soon, that those habits that were accelerated and exacerbated and intensified are going to stay with us to a great degree, that a hole that we just have a really at risk of forgetting what it’s like to actually be out in the world around us. To be connected to people. And perhaps we even find that when we go out, if we do venture out, back into the world, that a lot of the places that we used to go to are actually gone now, because we left them adrift and bereft for a year, and that’s something great we’ll have been lost. And I worry about that a lot. And I do think we all have a role to play and in making sure that we re-engage.
Stacy Mitchell:
I do think that’s a really good place to wrap up this conversation, but I will just say, thank you so much for joining us today and reiterate that everyone should check out this book. We will definitely have it linked in the show notes for this episode on our website. Yeah. I’ll hand it back over to you guys.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Yeah, thank you so much, Alec. It really is just a terrific piece of work, and I hope everyone picks up a copy.
Alec MacGillis:
Thank you. I hope so too.
Jess Del Fiacco:
Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Building Local Power podcast from the Institute for local self-reliance. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to archive.ilsr.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s archive.ilsr.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. We’ll be also take the opportunity to help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast and supports the research and resources we make available for free on our website. Finally, we ask that you let us know how we’re doing with a rating or review on Apple podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts. This show is produced by me, Jess Del Fiacco and edited by Drew Birschbach. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_Al. For the Institute for local self-reliance, I’m Jess Del Fiacco. And I hope to join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
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37 min
February 18, 2021How Recycling and Reuse Created Thousands of Jobs and a $1 Billion Boost to Austin’s Economy
On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Brenda Platt, Director of ILSR’s Composting for Community Initiative, and Gena McKinley, Strategic Initiatives Division Manager for Austin Resource Recovery. Their discussion touches on:
The economic and environmental benefits of the Circular Economy Program in Austin — including highlights from a recent economic impact report that found it resulted in more than $1.1 billion in total economic activity and approximately 6,300 permanent jobs.
The importance of the city’s Zero Waste Plan and how the plan has evolved over the past ten years.
The many different reuse and recovery programs Gena’s team helps facilitate, including fix-it clinics and skill-sharing events.
How Gena views the role of local leadership in tackling the climate crisis, building equity, and creating a sustainable economy.

“I mean if you’re talking about $1.1 billion, then definitely we want to continue to invest in this in our community, so that we can be prosperous and we can encourage the sector… the benefit of the way that this program is configured within the government organization itself — by having it housed in the solid waste utility but partnered with economic development, especially coupled with solid data verified by an independent consultant — that really is powerful.”

Related Resources
City of Austin: Fix-It Clinics
City of Austin: Host a Fix-it Clinic Guide
City of Austin: Zero Waste By 2040
City of Austin: Circular Economy Program
City of Austin Report: Recycling and Reuse-Related Economy of Austin
Austin Approves New Zero Waste Plan
Austin Universal Recycling Ordinance
City of Austin, TX, Reuse Programs – Gena McKinley presentation (12/2/20 to Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments)
Repair Revolution: How Fixers Are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture by John Wackman & Elizabeth Knight
Transcript
Jess:
Hello, and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast dedicated to thought-provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power, a communications manager here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For more that 35 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities where power, wealth, and accountability remain in local hands.
Jess:
In today’s episode, we’re going to be discussing how cities not only can cut waste, but they can do so while creating local jobs and otherwise boosting the local economy. And we’re going to be talking specifically about the City of Austin. And here to join us is Gena McKinley, who is a longtime environmental planner with the City of Austin, and now manages the Strategic Initiatives division of Austin Resource Recovery. Welcome to the show.
Gena:
Thank you. Good to be here.
Jess:
And also with me is Brenda Platt, who leads our Composting for Community initiative at ILSR. Welcome, Brenda.
Brenda:
Hi, nice to be here.
Jess:
And do you want to kind of get us started with a question?
Brenda:
Sure. It might not be a question. I just want to say, it’s so nice to have Gena here representing the city because the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, we have such a long history working to cut waste with the city. We helped defeat a planned trash incinerator I think more than 30 years ago, and the city had already invested something like $40 million in that incinerator but still canceled it in order to get on the path of zero waste. And we helped develop the first zero waste plan in Texas with this city, which I think was approved back in 2009. And that set that goal to reduce the amount of waste by 90% by 2040.
Brenda:
And now we’ve been advocating for zero waste planning around the country for so many years, and I always point to Austin, always. Austin is such a model in zero waste planning, your resource recovery master plan, and you have so many innovative programs. This is what we’re going to talk about today, your Fix-It clinics and your reuse directory and your rebates for home composting, which we’ve actually featured and helped to replicate. So again, it’s not a question, sorry Jess and Gena, but I am thrilled to have this opportunity to spotlight your work so others can be inspired.
Jess:
Thank you Brenda. That was a great introduction. So one piece of your work is the Circular Economy program in the city. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of the program and how you’re involved?
Gena:
Sure. And like Brenda said, the City of Austin is a city with a zero waste goal. So we did start with a strategic plan back in 2008, 2009 like you mentioned, Brenda. And then in 2011, we did formally adopt our zero waste plan which really set the roadmap for us to achieve zero waste, which we defined as 90% diversion from the landfill by the year 2040.
Gena:
So what I do in the department is a lot of the planning, policies and programs hit that target, and one of those programs that I think we’re going to talk about today is our Circular Economy program. That’s one of a handful of programs within my division. And the focus is really to model our city’s economic system on the natural system that we live in. By transitioning to a circular economy, we can not only reduce our environmental impact as a community but also create a higher quality of life for the individuals that live within it, and also create a more resilient community.
Gena:
So the program really got its star, the Circular Economy program, in 2013, and it started with really a single staffer that was focused on recycling economic development. And it was fully funded by my department which is Austin Resource Recovery at the city’s solid waste utility, but also in very close partnership with our economic development department because we saw really a great opportunity for collaboration between those two departments when it came to building up our circular economy here in Austin.
Gena:
And then let’s see. From then, we did add an additional staff member in 2017, and then we added another position just last year. So it’s still a relatively small but mighty team. We have a program coordinator and an economic development services coordinator and a program manager who reports up to me. And we have a bunch of different programs that we do with just a relatively small staff. Some Brenda mentioned, and I’m sure we’ll talk about more of them today.
Gena:
But we have a goal to make Austin the most vibrant circular economy in the United States where materials get reused, repaired, shared, and recycled to their fullest extent within the local economy. So that’s kind of what we do. We work with businesses and residents to try and make that happen.
Brenda:
Do you think Austin is unique in connecting… instead of calling it it the, you know, Division of Solid Waste Management, it’s the Resource Recovery agency? And then partnering with the economic development department, how unique is that in the US? I mean it seems there aren’t enough cities making those connections.
Gena:
Yeah, you know, and that was intentional, moving from referring to ourselves as a solid waste utility to now calling ourselves Austin Resource Recovery, because we really wanted to shift the mindset of our community away from thinking of materials as waste and something to be discarded, kind of that linear make, take, dispose economy, and looking more towards a circular economy. So we wanted to wherever we could emphasize that these are resources we’re talking about and we don’t need to be discarding them.
Gena:
In terms of being unique, you know, around the globe I feel like there is more emphasis on circularity. There are more even countries that might have circular plans, whereas you don’t see that as much here in the United States. But I do see the City of Austin as a leader in this space, using the terminology, talking about not just zero waste but how can we truly create a circular economy, which in my mind is kind of that next step in kind of how you operationalize your waste. So I’d like to say that we’re leading the way here in the United States.
Brenda:
Certainly sounds that way to me. So tell us about some of the programs, like I mentioned the Fix-It clinic. So that’s, I just think like every city should have Fix-It clinics. We shouldn’t be throwing away our electric toothbrushes and toasters and lamps and computers. There’s just so many things. Clothing, textiles.
Gena:
Yeah. So this team, I think it’s one of the most fun pieces of my work because there’s so much creativity that goes into it. Like you mentioned, one of the programs we have are around repair and reuse. So we do host Fix-It clinics where we have local fixers who volunteer their time to set up shop either in a public library, we try to find community spaces on the weekends. During the week, we vary the hours to try to make it accessible, and also the geographic location in the city. In kind of non-COVID times, that’s our norm. Yeah, so the community can sign up and bring in the material.
Gena:
It’s kind of amazing to me that these local volunteers, you know, you can bring in a toaster that’s broken and they somehow magically know how to fix a toaster. But we’ve seen all kinds of things. And the reason we do that is to really promote extending the life of things, because we can recycle items. We can donate items so they can be reused by someone else, but if we can extend the life of something with the person who has it, that’s even better. So we do host those.
Gena:
We also have repair clinics where we teach people skills to make those repairs on their own. So it could be anything from soldering to sewing, basic bicycle maintenance and all kinds of things. So that’s one aspect of what we do. And we have a lot of educational campaigns that we run. One that happened not too long ago over the holidays is Give a Great Story, where we encourage the community to, instead of your typical gift where you buy something from a retailer, that you consider repairing a beloved item, giving a gift of an experience or just kind of thinking more intentionally about how you’re gift-giving throughout the holidays.
Gena:
So those are some of our reuse and repair. We have a focus on not only the residential community, kind of an individual behavior change, but also on our business community. So that’s a big part of it. One of the programs you’ve likely heard of is the Austin Materials Marketplace, and that’s a business to business byproduct exchange. So basically find a business that has a byproduct and sending to the landfill, I can put it on this online exchange board and other businesses can look and see if that might be a material that they could use in their process. So we’ve diverted a lot of materials from the landfill just from these trades of businesses being able to communicate with one another about what they have that they’re discarding and what some other business might need.
Gena:
We work with local universities to capture items that honestly are in great condition that are often overflowing at a landfill dumpster when students move in and move out. And it is, I mean I volunteered for that event and it is incredible the amount of material and the quality of material that’s just tossed aside. So we partner with our local thrift and reuse organizations and nonprofits to help create stations where we can collect that material. But the list goes on. I don’t know how this team does all the things that they do. We do a lot of really fun stuff I think.
Jess:
Yeah. I’m just curious, so were you able to, or did you have to adapt any of these programs for pandemic times? I assume that’s been a challenge, especially you were talking about the Fix-It clinics, if you can’t set up shop in a library as you once were.
Gena:
It has. And in some cases, we’ve actually seen greater and different participation from people because we have virtual opportunities to do things. But the Fix-It clinic, that was a tough one. That’s probably one of the most difficult to rethink during the COVID times. But we did try out a Fix-It clinic that was virtual. We had asked people to sign up and give us a description of the items that they needed to be repaired, and then we would try to find a fixer who we could set up kind of a one-on-one Zoom style consultation to get the item fixed. So it would be more coaching, “This is how you fix it” rather than putting the item in the fixer’s hand and them getting it back. And it honestly wasn’t that well-received, so we kind of stopped that.
Gena:
But was has been successful is repair series. So we have a fix it at home series that we’ve launched where we’ve done all kinds of repair, like similar to the classes I mentioned that we do typically. Sewing, bike repair, we’ve had musical instrument repair. And those have been really popular. And because they’re virtual, we can record them. We have now a library of these videos that the public can access at any time. We’re working with our parks department and our library system to get those logged there so that they can be promoted for access to the general public. So yeah, there’s definitely been some modifications. Some were harder than others.
Brenda:
So over the years I’ve documented jobs through reuse and repair operations comparing it to recycling, comparing it to composting, and certainly comparing it to landfill and trash incineration. And we found that for every 10,000 tons sent to a landfill or incinerator, you create one job. If you’re composting it’s like four jobs. Recycling, sorting recycles like 10 jobs. But reuse and repair, it’s like orders of magnitude greater. It’s like 100 jobs. I’m just curious, have you been tracking, like to try to sell the programs to the city or the constituents, do you track the value to the city in terms of jobs or economic development?
Gena:
We do actually, and we use that figure that came from you guys I believe, that the 10,000 pounds of trash is one landfill job versus like 25 if you’re looking at re-manufacturing. So yes, we definitely use that and promote that. But we commissioned a study in 2015 because we did want, like data’s very important to me in how we plan our programs and how we figure out “Where do we emphasize our efforts?” We want to be responsible with taxpayer dollars. So we did have a study in 2015 and we contacted out to measure the economic impact of recycling and reuse in Austin. And we recently updated that last year and attempted to expand the scope to include a wider definition of industry activities that are really recycling and reuse related. It’s not perfect, but we tried to improve upon what we had done before.
Gena:
And based on that new definitions and expanding it, we found in the past five years, the total direct circular economy employment in Austin rose from a little over 2,500 jobs to a little over 3,000, while the direct payroll climbed from 74.5 million to 165.8 million. And then the total economic impact of the sector, if you include the indirect and also the induced impacts of these types of jobs, it’s roughly $1.1 billion of economic activity and the support of approximately 6,300 jobs. So having data like that can really help. I mean if you’re talking about $1.1 billion, then definitely we want to continue to invest in this in our community so that we can be prosperous and we can encourage the sector.
Gena:
And as part of honestly the benefit of the way that this program is configured within the government organization itself by having it housed in the solid waste utility but partnered with economic development, especially coupled with solid data verified by an independent consultant, that really is powerful in trying to look at economic development activity in your community directly in the department that’s doing it. So we can advocate for incentives in this industry and we have data to prove that it’s really worth the effort because it adds so much value to our community.
Brenda:
Wow. $1.1 billion tied to 6,300 jobs. Did I get that right?
Gena:
That’s correct.
Brenda:
And the population I know of Austin is growing, but what’s the side of the city?
Gena:
I don’t actually know, but right around a million.
Brenda:
Yeah, okay. But that’s amazing. Wow, congratulations.
Gena:
Thanks. Yeah, and if you’re interested, at austintexas.gov/circulareconomy, you can find a link to that study. There’s a lot of detail on how we came to those numbers, what we did, and it’s a great resource if you’re interested in looking even at replicating it in another community.
Brenda:
We will put the link on the show notes for this episode. And there’s something you said before that I think is worth underscoring, that you’ve been able to do these programs with very little staff and very little budget. So let’s talk about that, because I think you and I have talked before about this point. And I think this is where it’s just, you know, other cities might say, “Oh, you got that impact but you probably had to carve out this huge chunk of your budget.” That is not the case, right?
Gena:
Right. It is not. I mean we’re fortunate to have great partners in the community so it’s not all funded by the City of Austin through taxpayer dollars, and partners throughout the city organization too. And we’re very collaborative in nature as a city organization. But yeah, if you would ask me specifically “What does it cost to run this program?” And if you exclude, I mentioned it’s a very small staff. There’s a program manager, two employees that report to that manager, and then we do have interns that join us typically throughout the year on a part-time basis. So if you exclude the cost of that small staff team, personnel cost, it really is around $260,000 to run this program. Which is you think of that impact and all of the different programs that we have in place, it’s really a great value I think to the community, and is only growing.
Gena:
We’ve got a lot of exciting ideas from this team that we plan to grow, which we will advocate for more resources to be able to do some of those things. But still, we try to find ways to be more efficient where we can.
Gena:
An exciting project that I think is kind of cutting edge for, at least in the United States, we’re calling the Circular Cities project. And it’s just in its infancy, but we are looking internally. So turning that lens into us, the City of Austin. I don’t know, this is an estimate, but we’re around 13 or 14,000 employees just that are employed in the local government. And so we want to take a look at all of the departments, survey employees to find out, what are you throwing away? What are you using just maybe very infrequently? Where are there opportunities for us to really save cost as an organization? And I think that frees up dollars and can help fund some of these other programs.
Gena:
But I’m really excited about what we might find. I think there’s a lot of redundancy likely, not just at the City of Austin but in any government agency, especially of this size. There’s a lot of siloing, and you just don’t know until you dig in and really get the data, and that’s what we’re attempting to do is really mine that data down to the individual employee level and figure out how we can operate more efficiently as a local government. And that can be a model for the businesses within our community too. So we really like to walk the walk before we try to push things out onto others.
Brenda:
That makes sense. I want to segue to organics, or food scraps, yard trim green waste. Because there’s a few programs you have in Austin that I think really build self-reliance and community empowerment that your businesses and citizens can do. And one is the home composting rebate, up to $75 for people who I think take a training and then if they buy a home composting bed. But the other thing I love, and this may not fall under your program so feel free to tell me “That’s somebody else, Brenda,” but I love that you have a similar rebate for building chicken coops if I’m not wrong. And I think, you know, if you have chickens in your backyard and the city’s supporting you doing that, not only are you producing your own eggs, but chickens eat food scraps. So building the knowledge to convert food scraps into compost, black gold, go back into local soils for people. The city doesn’t even have to collect it so you’re saving money, building resilience.
Brenda:
So can you just talk about those two programs and how you’re starting with the training and the economic incentives? It’s this idea of taking something small like that, a small investment. But if your community residents are doing these things, then they’re going to continue doing it for decades.
Gena:
Yeah, you’re right. We’ve had the backyard home composting rebate in place since I believe 2010 is when we kicked it off, on Earth Day of that year. And it’s designed to, at that point in time… The City of Austin services single-family homes. So it’s about 15% of material generated in the city is collected by the City of Austin at primarily single-family residential homes. So we have curbside service, and that included trash, recycling, but at the time only weekly yard trimmings collection. So just like leaf and lawn clippings, but not food scraps.
Gena:
Coming forward to today, we just actually this month are rolling out our final phase of curbside composting. So all of our customers will have access to a cart-based composting system where they can put food scraps and yard trimmings and all of the things. So in 2010, none of that existed, to here where we are today, now we have more systems in place.
Gena:
But in 2010, we really wanted to just kind of pave the way, because I really think it’s important to bring people along with you as you move to zero waste. Incentivize things so that you can try it out. It wasn’t a mandate. If you were interested in trying to save money and create your own compost that you could use in your own home to benefit you, we were willing to give you a rebate to try it out. And so you had to take a class. You had to be a City of Austin customer, take a basic class about composting education to set you up for success so you knew what you were doing, and kind of take some of the fear away from it. And then you could buy a composting system of your choosing and we’ll rebate you $75.
Gena:
So that rebate program is still in place today. Fortunately, we still see a lot of participants in the classes. And we’ve converted to virtual classes now, which has been seamless and fine. We still get a lot of participation. We’re seeing less people actually apply to the rebate, but what that tells us is that people still need the education, they still want the information about how to compost.
Gena:
And like you said, I forget which year, but we did add chicken keeping to that program as another method of composting. And with that program, it’s a little harder in the kind of legal way that we can rebate folks for chicken keeping. I don’t myself have chickens because I think it would see its death with my dog. But I don’t think purchasing chickens is all that much of an investment. So we rebate coops and other types of equipment that you would need for the chickens. And we don’t see a lot of actual rebate applications. But again, like the other program, we see a lot of people, it’s a very popular class. A lot of people taking the class wanting to learn more.
Gena:
So I don’t know if it’s just they haven’t taken that next step to actually get the chickens and start chicken keeping. Maybe it’s that behavior change theory, they just need to take it step by step, or if maybe they don’t need the coop but they really want to learn more about how to keep chickens. I don’t know.
Gena:
But yeah, those are programs that we have in place still. And even, you know, we’ve talked about since we have rolled out the composting program too our community, maybe we will rethink the rebate. What’s the next thing that we need? One of the things we’re looking at now is organics requirements for multi-family properties which are collected by private [inaudible 00:22:06], so it’s not City of Austin collections. We don’t manage that material. And for that, that’s like 85% of material generated in our city is not controlled by the city, meaning it’s collected and hauled by the private market.
Gena:
And so because we area city with a zero waste goal, we still need to influence where that material is going. And one of the ways we do that is through local policy. So we have a local ordinance in place called the Universal Recycling Ordinance, and that does have some minimum requirements for commercial and multi-family properties, a minimum requirement to have access to recycling. And for businesses with a food permit, there’s an organics diversion requirement. So that’s just a small chunk of that group.
Gena:
What we’re looking at now is composting or organics diversion in multi-family properties, trying to gather data about what that looks like, how it could be successful. So we might do some sort of rebate type system for certain properties. You know, we want to try small, we want to try the huge, big ones, to see how it works. What do the tenants think? What do the property managers think? So I went kind of on a tangent from your original question, but there’s a lot related to organics. And because we are a city with a big goal, we have to look at all the places it’s generated and figure out how we can do something other than throwing it away.
Brenda:
Absolutely. And I’m glad you mentioned policies because I was going to ask you about that. One of our co-founders of the Institute [David Morris 00:23:36] coined this term, “We make the rules and the rules make us,” meaning, you know, you need the rules to guide the kind of world you want to live in. And talking about chicken coops and even home composting, a lot of cities, especially older urban cities, have archaic laws on the books that basically say, “You can’t have yard waste or piles in your backyard,” which would prevent home composting. Or in the case of having chickens there’s, “Oh no, you can’t have chickens.” And it just seems like Austin is thinking about not only enacting the zero waste plan to begin with, the city council who passed that was setting this institutional framework to guide the programs that you’ve now been able to develop and partner with other sister agencies, but also institutionalizing some of these policies for the residential and commercial sectors to make things happen.
Brenda:
So can you just talk little bit about the role of having the zero waste plan in the first place as just your guiding framework as well as all this wide range of policies? With the city council passing that, does that also help you get the budget you need to do these programs? Like there’s probably a symbiotic relationship between policies and the programs.
Gena:
I mean absolutely. Having the plan in place has been a tremendous benefit. Not only does it guide the staff so we are all on the same page about what we’re trying to achieve and how we plan to get there, but also like you said, this is a plan that was adopted by our city council so you have that policy framework that you can reference when you go to council to say, “Okay, in this chapter we said we would do this because we’re trying to achieve this.” And so it does provide some more emphasis and data on, “If this is what we say we want to do as a city and you as our policy makers say this is a goal we have, we as staff have to present you with the best way to achieve that, and we have this plan to back us up.”
Gena:
So I think it’s really important. It identified the mechanisms that we needed to move materials away from the landfill over time, and also it set benchmark targets. So that gave us a reporting back mechanism to the council.
Gena:
We are actually in the process of updating our plan. It was adopted in 2011, so it’s been in place for about a decade. And you know, it’s been a good process because if you pick it up and look at it, and my team is the one that’s working on updating this plan, we’ve done a lot of the stuff we said we were going to do, which is fantastic. But at the same time, we’re not quite as far on diversion as we thought we would be at this point. So we’re taking it, you know, what did we learn? What’s worked? What hasn’t worked? What do we need to tweak to make sure that we stay on this path? So having the plan is great. It’s a great way to talk about all the things.
Gena:
And the industry has changed because it’s been a decade, so there’s new technology, we have more information, we’re talking more about a circular economy where it wasn’t really a big part of what we were talking about in 2010, 2011. So all that has changed, and there’s opportunity. And I think even one of the things we’re looking at is, are we measuring things accurately? Data is so important, and diversion is really hard to measure, because how do you capture reuse and repair? How do you quantify repair happening in your community? It’s really challenging. And for whatever reason, we like to compare ourselves in the United States. We like to compare city to city when we have such different frameworks, regulatory frameworks and methods of calculating stuff, so I think it’s really hard. So one of the things we’re looking at is, how can we refine our measurement? Looking at maybe per capita disposal. That’s a cleaner number to be one of the data points that we can look at to measure our progress towards zero waste.
Jess:
If the end goal is zero waste, are there benchmarks you set for yourself, either over the past 10 years or that you’re looking forward to the next 10, you know, that you want to accomplish within two years, five years, seven years, anything like that that have shifted or changed?
Gena:
We have. That original plan in 2011 did have benchmark targets. I don’t have them in front of my, I apologize. But we did establish benchmark targets, and we’re a little bit behind those targets. So that’s what we have in place right now, and I believe it’s every five or 10 years there’s a diversion target that we’re aiming towards. So as we update our plan, we’re looking at that. Was that a realistic number? Why didn’t we hit it? What would it take to hit it? Is the measurement an accurate measurement? So we’re just taking a real big look at that. We’re not shifting our end goal or our end date. We still, our eye is on that main target. It’s just we’re really trying to figure out, “Okay, we’re at 2021. Our goal is 2040. We got a little less than 20 years to figure this out. How can we update basically our timeline and our benchmarks with activities and policies to show how this much diversion is attainable in this timeframe?”
Brenda:
So this might be a good time to take a break. And when we come back on the other side, Gena, I’d love to ask you more about the power of local government to help build home-grown, healthy communities.
Jess:
Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Building Local Power podcast. If you’re enjoying the show, I hope you’ll consider making a donation to ILSR. Not only does your support underwrite this podcast, but it also helps us produce the resources and research we make available for free on our website. Please take a minute and go to ILSR.org/donate. Any amount is welcome and sincerely appreciate. That’s ILSR.org/donate. Thank you so much, and now back to my discussion with Brenda and Gena McKinley with the City of Austin.
Brenda:
Gena, since our inception, since we were founded in 1974, we’ve recognized the power local government has to build self-reliant communities. And something you mentioned about just when we were talking about policies a few minutes ago, I know in the field that I work in on composting, the biggest obstacles to doing more on composting are really a lot of decisions that happen in the government field, whether it’s state or local. Seems like 80% of the obstacles are like, government could help fix them. And you’re just such a great example of a city and a local government leader doing these things, passing policies, doing the cross-sector work with economic development. What does being a local government leader mean to you?
Gena:
Well you know, I think as a local government employee, I’ve been in the local government sector my whole career, and I think there’s a lot of responsibility that’s entrusted by your community to make good decisions that take into account the needs of the entire community, and kind of the best outcomes for everyone. So I think we as a local government have an opportunity to lead the way and to establish policies and programs that can create that sustainable future that I think we all want even if we don’t know it.
Gena:
So as a local government, we have to take responsibility for that and figure out our way forward. One of the things… Some other things we’re looking at right now in the update of our plan is making sure that it’s equitable and that we can look at who we’re serving in our community to make sure that we are truly serving all of those folks. And we have to recognize and take responsibility for our contributions to some of the historical and structural disparities and quality of life outcomes in the community. And I think people might not see that tied to your solid waste utility, but I think it is. So as a local government, I think making sure we’re looking through that lens to create equity, take responsibility for any contributions we’ve had in creating bad outcomes, acknowledge those, do better and work towards a path to create really good outcomes for the whole community, that’s the job. And it relates to all aspects of local government.
Gena:
I’m proud to be a local government employee that can take that on and really come to work every day to be creative. I feel very fortunate that this is… to me this is very creative work, working in trash. It’s what I’ve done my whole career, which is never what I thought I would be doing. But yeah, I mean that’s a little bit of it.
Brenda:
Awesome. And you know, I’m glad you raised the equity issue because… and when I look back at the last 20, 30 years I’ve been working in this field, it’s so clear that trash and environmental justice have been tied together historically. You know, where landfills get sited and certainly where trash incinerators get sited in urban areas and underserved communities, and unfortunately too often communities of color. You know, Baltimore, Detroit have had highly polluting incinerators, and Austin kind of was able to dodge that. So is there anything more you can say about how you’re building equity and inclusivity and diversity in terms of thinking about the zero waste plan in particular?
Gena:
The existing plan that’s in place right now, one of the things that we’re trying to add that’s actually put into the plan, it’s not to say we’re not doing the work on a regular basis, but reference an equity tool that’s specific to Austin and really build that out and have that as part of the plan so that it’s clear that any of the programs or policies, the activities that we’re putting through in the plan, we are intentionally evaluating equity as a part of that planning.
Gena:
And I think just having a circular economy program, because if you think about a linear economy, it really causes economic and environmental harm to our residents, and disproportionately, as we said, disproportionately typically affecting low-income individuals or communities of color. And if we can transition to a circular economy, we can not only reduce our environmental impact, but we can create a higher quality of life for individuals, a resilient community, longterm business growth, and a more future-proof economy. And I think that’s something we all would say we would want.
Brenda:
Absolutely.
Jess:
I’m curious about the presence of community voices in this plan or in your work just in general. Is there a sense of a lot of enthusiasm from the community for these programs and for your work, or do you do a lot of outreach and education?
Gena:
We do. Another part of my division is I manage the public information and marketing team. That is the team that does a lot of the work you’re mentioning, though I’d say everybody in our department has this responsibility to be out educating our community. Austin is a pretty vocal community, but I think if you really take a look at who those voices are, it’s not representative of the whole. So that’s something we’re really trying to do is take a look at that, and for the voices that are not at the table because they’re maybe not able to be or they’re not as loud, how do we engage and make sure we’re listening?
Gena:
As part of the plan update, there’s definitely a huge community engagement component and community involvement, community feedback part of that. We’ve already put out kind of an initial survey which is just to prime the pump. There’s a lot of activities, focus groups and things like that that we plan to have. But we’ve worked with a consultant to host a storytelling workshop just for internal staff. And as a result of that, one of the things that we put on our plate for this year is to do like a story listening tour. So how can we go out into the community, and rather than tell our story, let’s just listen. Like especially repair and reuse, because we might talk about wearing vintage clothing or shopping thrift and it’s become trendy and hip, but people have been passing down clothes or reusing materials for decades. But how are they talking about it and what language are they using? Because we realize that perhaps the language that we’re using is really limiting and it’s not representative of the way everybody’s talking about it.
Gena:
So this will probably be an ongoing project that we build upon, but it’s my hope that by doing this story listening in all areas of our community that we can even create an internal playbook. “Okay, when we talk about reuse and repair, these are all the different ways we can talk about it, and the ways that the community’s talking about it,” in hopes that we can resonate more and reach a broader audience. I don’t know if that answered your specific question.
Jess:
No, yeah, that was great. As a comms person I’m like, yes! This is what I want to know about.
Gena:
[crosstalk 00:36:31].
Brenda:
Getting back to that, circling back just to the… I like the circular economy, circling back to the idea of the role of cities and the power of cities and local government, not just on waste as we’re talking about but just centering it in economic development and local jobs and preventing climate disruption. I think you kind of talked about this with the Circular Cities project you mentioned earlier, but anything more to say about the role of cities and the power local government has in this space?
Gena:
For those listening, I don’t know the full audience of this, but I think it’s really important to stay engaged in your local government to the extent that you can and make your voice heard. Because as a local government, our job is to represent, like serve the community, and so it’s really important for us as local government employees to be mindful of that, but also for the community at large to make sure that they’re voicing their opinions and their concerns about issues in their community so that we can do the best that we can to serve.
Brenda:
You hear that folks? You got to advocate. Push! Call your city council or county council rep. Let them know what you want, what they can do. So much power. Power of the purse.
Brenda:
So can you share a top tip or two for other cities looking to move towards a zero waste economy? Any key lessons learned?
Gena:
Yeah. I mean I think for me, and I spoke a little bit to this, is that it’s really important, especially if you’re starting kind of from never talking about materials in this way, to bring the community along. That’s my opinion. That might take a little bit longer, but I think you’ll get more buy-in over time. So that’s, you know, we talked about the rebate program. That’s providing an incentive that’s voluntary, it’s not mandatory. Gives you an opportunity to really kind of test out some of the things we’re talking about.
Gena:
And I think that’s the same for policy. The policy development team is also within my division, and I really like for us to gather data first. Look around the country, see what’s happening. See what other data around the globe. What can we find out about what’s happening now?
Gena:
And then test things. So I like to have pilots. I like to get actual, localized data for the things that we’re thinking we want to implement at a policy level to test things out and see how they can be effective. That not only makes the policy stronger, but it also helps to bring whoever is going to be on the kind of end of this mandate to tell us how it can work for them. And so collectively we can create the best policy, you get more compliance, less complaints, and you can reach your target more efficiently that way.
Gena:
So I’d say to the extent that you can, don’t come in with a stick. Come in with some carrots first, and really ease your community along. And then I think good data. So take a look at where you are now. Even if you’re not using the language around zero waste, you might be doing something related to zero waste. Just take stock of what’s happening in your community and where the easy things, like that low-hanging fruit we talk about. What are your easy wins that you can really show high impact? If you’re in a position where you’re really needing something to leverage getting an investment or getting the buy-in, what are the easy wins you have that can help you do that?
Gena:
And think about measurements. I talked about some of the difficulty of measuring diversion. Diversion can mean so much. So thinking I think from the get go, out of the gate, how are you going to measure your progress? And see how to do that before you get too far along.
Brenda:
Yeah, those are great tips. And you know, we probably should’ve talked about this at the beginning, so my bad. But we talk about zero waste. A lot of people when they first hear that term think, “Zero waste? I mean we’re never going to get to zero.” And I like to tell people and communities that it’s like a goal like if you have a goal for zero crime in your community or zero drugs. It’s not that you might not get to zero. It’s a planning construct. So if you’re not for zero waste, how much waste are you for?
Gena:
I was going to say, that’s exactly what I was going to say. So what’s a good amount of waste to have?
Brenda:
Yeah. So to have a zero waste plan, that’s what you want. You want to plan for a zero waste economy, that all the discarded materials are a resource for another enterprise, another job.
Brenda:
Anyway, thanks for leading so much in this space, Gena, and for your other colleagues in the city that you work with. I look forward to following Austin’s trajectory on this. And one of the things we like to end a lot of our podcasts with is if you have any suggested reading recommendations.
Gena:
Yeah. You know, I’m juggling virtual school, virtual work, and a handful of other things so I don’t get to read as much as I would like. But since I have so little time, I decided to pick up recently President Obama’s memoir, The Promised Land, which is, you know, a little under a thousand pages so [crosstalk 00:41:49].
Brenda:
Just some light reading.
Gena:
I kind of miss, he’s such a great orator, and missing… It comes out in the text. So it’s been nice to start the book, and you can kind of hear his voice as you read it. But that’s what I’m reading lately.
Brenda:
Awesome. I got that as a holiday gift and I haven’t picked it up, so you’re going to inspire me to take a look at it. There’s one book that I’ve cracked the cover on that I also got as a holiday gift that I’ll just share because it’s related to what we’ve been talking about. And it’s The Repair Revolution: How Fixers are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture by John Wackman and Elizabeth Knight. And our colleague [crosstalk 00:42:30] at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance actually has a quote on it. [inaudible 00:42:34] “presents the what, why and how-to of bringing repair and reuse to every town in the USA.” So I’ve heard great things about it and I told my family I wanted it and they got it for me, and it’s already February [crosstalk 00:42:46].
Gena:
I actually flagged that for my team, but we have not gotten it yet.
Brenda:
So we’ll add a link to that to buy from an independent bookstore, right Jess?
Jess:
Yes we will. Yep, we’ll have links to both those books as well as all the other resources we mentioned in the show notes for this episode. And with that, I think we are just about out of time. So thank you again, Gena, for being on the show today. Thank you Brenda also for joining the conversation. This was really great.
Brenda:
Just a pleasure, Gena, to have you. We’ll have you again some time in the future.
Gena:
Yeah, it’s great. It’s nice to sit and reflect, so this has been fun.
Jess:
Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Building Local Power podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to ILSR.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s ILSR.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. Finally, you can help us out with a gift that helps produce this podcast, gets us great guests like Gena McKinley, and helps us provide original research and resources on our website. You can also help us out by rating this podcast and sharing it with your friends on Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts.
Jess:
The show is produced by me, Jess Del Fiacco, and edited by Drew Birschbach. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_Al. From the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Jess Del Fiacco and I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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44 min
February 04, 2021Connecting Indian Country to the Benefits of Broadband
On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by three members of ILSR’s broadband team: Christopher Mitchell, Program Director; H. Trostle, Project Manager; and Sean Gonsalves, Senior Reporter, Editor, and Researcher. The first half of the discussion is focused on new ILSR resources on tribal broadband projects and the second half features an overview of an upcoming report on municipal broadband projects throughout the country. Highlights of the conversation include:
The diverse benefits increased connectivity can bring to tribal lands, including increased local economic development.
The importance of spectrum sovereignty, which treats spectrum like a natural resource and respects tribes’ right to manage spectrum on their land.
How the road to success can differ greatly between different municipal broadband projects.
The progress we’ve seen on municipal broadband projects throughout the U.S. over the last 10 years.
“They thought if they just kept asking for small amounts of money for some of their community need, that that would eventually be enough. It turns out that [the Fond du Lac Band of Ojibwe] needed to dream big, be clear about their community needs, and then the federal government was able to fund their network in a way that actually works for the longterm.”

Related Resources
Building Indigenous Future Zones: Four Tribal Broadband Case Studies
Indigenous Networks resource page
Transcript
Jessica Del Fia…:
Hello, and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast dedicated to thought provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I am Jessica Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and Communications Manager here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For 45 years, ILSR has worked to build driving equitable communities where power, wealth and accountability remain in local hands. And, Hello. Today I’m here with a few of my ILSR colleagues. First up is Christopher Mitchell who you have heard on the show before, more likely than not.
Christopher Mit…:
I’m ready to provoke some thought.
Jessica Del Fia…:
That’s what we try to do here. And we also have two other members of the broadband team, H. Trostle, who is our Project Manager on the Broadband team.
H. Trostle:
Yes, I am a Project Manager.
Jessica Del Fia…:
And we have Sean Gonsalves, who is a… oh my God, what are you, Sean? Reporter, researcher, writer?
Sean Gonsalves:
All of that.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Senior reporter.
Christopher Mit…:
All of that-
Sean Gonsalves:
It’s a terrible title, and then some.
Jessica Del Fia…:
You guys, we’ve got to standardize these. They are going to talk about some exciting new research that they’ve been working on, and I think, unless Chris you want to say anything to set us off here, we will start with our Native Networks report.
Christopher Mit…:
Just that this is an exciting time. I think I’ve said before, I’ve been disappointed at the level of government response to the pandemic, and we’re going to talk about some things that we’ve been seeing happening. But I will say, I feel like government’s catching up now, local, state, federal. I’m hopeful that we will see more seriousness, and there’s a lot of good stuff happening out there at the local level.
Jessica Del Fia…:
2021, a year for seriousness. H, do you want to start us off by explaining why did you decide to do a report on Broadband projects and tribal lands across the United States?
H. Trostle:
Yeah. This is an area that requires so much more information sharing. So, you know how Muni Networks is the clearinghouse for information on municipal networks. Well, there isn’t the same thing for our tribally owned networks. And this is just like a huge gap in the research. This is a huge gap for policy makers who are trying to figure out what to do about the continual lack of access in Indian country. And so, what we decided to do was write a report, and do basically a census of all the tribally owned networks in the US. This report features four of my favorite little case studies about specific tribally owned networks, and really brings forward this model of tribal ownership of internet infrastructure, the infrastructure of the future.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Right. And then so along with this, you also have that new research or resource page which is basically a census of all the projects that are happening right now, correct?
H. Trostle:
Yes. I went through all of the federally recognized tribes in the US and tried to figure out who is doing some sort of broadband project, who is thinking about a broadband project? Who is applying to the FCC for licenses, for a spectrum? Who is trying to work in partnerships with the local co-ops, like what is happening in Indian country around broadband is huge, and it hasn’t been clearly answered. And we don’t even have very good data.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Yeah, I was just going to ask. So it’s not even that this is all kind of new information to bring together in one place. But do you think policymakers even had a good idea what internet access is like on tribal lands, like at all?
H. Trostle:
They’ve been trying to track that for a while. And by they, I mean, the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC has released every year, where they think broadband is. And every year it completely overstate the case. To be clear, tribal lands generally across the US, at the end of 2018 they had only 72% coverage with broadband. So it was like 30% of people on tribal lands couldn’t get access to decent internet service. And that is one of the best case scenarios. And it’s actually even worse if you look only at the lower 48 states. When you look at the lower 48 states, you find out that only about 57% have access to broadband.
H. Trostle:
And this is supposed to be the best case scenario, and this is what we have. And it’s just not very useful for policy makers trying to figure out how to improve things. And it’s also not reflective of what’s actually happening on the ground, what the Native nations can see in their own communities. And so, we were trying to keep track of all the different ways that people have tried to tackle this problem.
Christopher Mit…:
There’s a couple of points I wanted to add on. One is to get a sense that, when the FCC says 57% of these tribal lands have internet access in the lower 48 states, there was people in those communities who were looking at the areas that supposedly had access. And they’re saying, “What? There’s no access here.” And so, I mean, we know that there’s a major problem there. To give it a sense, I mean the FCC would say that the number of Americans that have broadband access is in the 90%s. And that is considered a significant overstatement. So you can imagine that 57% is just really a problem, and something that really needs to be solved. This is a major challenge. And one of the challenges that H faced in doing this research is that, they had to look at all of these online markers, to try to figure out if a tribe was connected.
Christopher Mit…:
But you can imagine that if a tribe has no internet access, they may not have much of a web presence. One of the things we found is, that there’s a significant lack of middle mile access. And so that’s to say, some of these tribal lands in Indian country, they might be tens or even 100 miles away from a place where they could get that high quality internet access, that they would have to first bring to one spot in the land, and then be able to start connecting homes and businesses with it. So, it’s a major problem. It’s one that has largely been overlooked. But we’ll talk a little bit I’m sure about some signs of hope there as well, and the fact that some people are taking this seriously.
Jessica Del Fia…:
The thing, when I think about this huge digital divide, especially on tribal lands is just like geographically this means people… there’s already a struggle to get good healthcare, access to the hospitals, it’s just a long drive to get there. And obviously high quality internet access would make telehealth more easily accessible, same with education. But in this report you talked a lot about how important it would be to economic development. So is there anything you just want to touch on there a little bit, before we get into the more specific projects?
H. Trostle:
Yeah, definitely. Improving internet access in Indian country just… it opens up new markets. It allows for more expansion of microenterprises of all these little businesses selling arts and crafts. And previously they were restricted to people who lived nearby. And with the introduction of more internet service, you’re seeing them enter into business on Etsy, you’re seeing more business opportunities available. And that’s just like one small section of the economic development potential there. Chris, I don’t know if you want to say a little bit more about it from the more government institution perspective.
Christopher Mit…:
Actually, a direction I would like to take it is one I’m quite excited about because of what I learned for the Indigenous Connectivity Summit from the Internet Society. Which by the way, Internet Society made this research possible. So I definitely want to thank them. And Internet Society is an organization that treats this very seriously, and is working to try to connect Indian country all over North America. But when I went to the Indigenous Connectivity Summit, one of the things I saw was just incredible applications that local entrepreneurs were creating to preserve culture, to help teach languages that are in danger of disappearing. And so there’s a lot happening out there that can really be done, that go beyond just economic development and even education, but actually preserving culture before it’s potentially lost forever.
Sean Gonsalves:
That’s an important point. Because at the heart of the concerns of Indian country of course are all about sovereignty and to be able to be self-sustaining communities. And the whole history of… One thing I like about this particular report is that, even though it doesn’t give any sort of definitive history of the relationship between Native nations and the United States Government, it does provide some valuable context in terms of what the United States sort of fiduciary and moral responsibility is to support these communities and the history and the historical debt that we owe Native nations in this country, and that economic development piece.
Sean Gonsalves:
Particularly at a time when Native nations are trying to diversify their economies, and not be wholly reliant on their ability to build a casino. This is important infrastructure. We’re not talking about Native nations being able to enjoy Netflix on reservations. We’re talking about essential infrastructure that’s important for economic development, for access to healthcare and things of that nature. So, the report really puts all of that into that context, and then gets into specific examples. So it’s a great product I think.
Christopher Mit…:
Although many of them also do enjoy Netflix.
Jessica Del Fia…:
I was just going to say, I think that could be essential too, you know?
Sean Gonsalves:
For sure.
H. Trostle:
Netflix is essential during this pandemic. We need to get a little bit of joy every day from different areas as much as we can.
Christopher Mit…:
Yeah. I mean, I think for many of us… I get a little annoyed sometimes. Not at someone like Sean of course, who I find endlessly endearing. But like, Netflix is I think… people don’t appreciate it. There’s a lot of art on Netflix. And whether you want to disagree with me about my favorite kinds of movies and about lots of explosions, whether they’re art or not. There’s a lot of really good documentaries. There’s all kinds of stuff on streaming services that we should not pretend are not important. We often really don’t value art and culture enough. And I think it is important to make sure everyone has access to that.
Jessica Del Fia…:
I just want to go back to jump off what Sean was saying, which is spectrum sovereignty is a word that comes up a few times throughout this report. And I think both of those words can confuse people. So, H, could you unpack that a little bit? Like, what is spectrum, and what do we mean when we say it should be treated like a natural resource?
H. Trostle:
Thank you for asking that clarifying question. Spectrum sovereignty is a term that comes up a few times during the report. And let’s just unpack that a little with, spectrum is all around us. It is a natural resource. It is how we get radio waves. It is how we get television service.
Christopher Mit…:
I think it’s how midi-chlorians are distributed.
Jessica Del Fia…:
I’m thinking about that… you know, in the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory movie, the kid who gets sent through the TV. Like when you say spectrum, that’s what I’m thinking about. Is that right?
H. Trostle:
Yes, that’s is a great explanation of spectrum. It is the electromagnetic spectrum. The way sometimes that scientists like magic is very much spectrum. And specifically the FCC is in charge of managing spectrum for the United States. And one of the things that has happened because of this is that Native nations are no longer in charge of the spectrum over their lands. It is all running through the FCC. And the FCC has partitioned it in such a way, that sometimes it is like dividing reservations in half. It is very difficult for our Native nations to form radio companies and get those particular licenses that they need. And spectrum is also now increasingly used to provide wireless service.
Christopher Mit…:
And it may come as a surprise to listeners of this show, but the Federal Communications Commission has often distributed spectrum on favorable terms to very large corporations that do not have very much interest in building out over Indian country. And they may have exclusive control. So even if they don’t do it, others may not be able to use that spectrum in those areas.
H. Trostle:
Exactly. And then you also have this term, sovereignty. And sovereignty comes up a lot. This is about the importance of being able to have that self-determination to decide for yourself what the future is going to be, like to be able to make choices and to be able to function separately from the Federal Government in some ways. And it really comes down to recognizing that there’s that government-to-government relationships between Native nations and the Federal Government itself. And it doesn’t run through states. It doesn’t necessarily run through the Federal Communications Commission. That is just like one small section of our Federal Government. Like, this is… Sovereignty is much, much bigger than that. And so it really comes down to who is determining the future.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Thanks for clarifying that. I think that’s super helpful. Has anything changed recently? I mean, is the Federal Government doing anything to change things around spectrum sovereignty?
H. Trostle:
There are a couple of things that have happened recently. One of them is, the FCC is trying to prioritize tribal lands for certain licenses and windows within their programs. But there is also a bill that was introduced by now interior secretary Holland, and Senator Warren, called the Digital Reservations Act, that would fully recognize spectrum sovereignty, the rights of Native nations to manage their own spectrum over their own lands. So, it’s an exciting space.
Jessica Del Fia…:
And it doesn’t have to scare people with two big words. So I want to get into the fun stuff here. There’s four different case studies in this report. Could you just give a very brief overview of what Native nations you were working with on this? And then maybe pick one to go a little bit deeper into sharing their story?
H. Trostle:
Sure. I spoke with folks at Fond du Lac, folks at St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, people at Nez Perce and folks over at Coeur d’Alene. So there were two Native nations out in Idaho, one that splits the US Canadian border out in New York, and one that is here in Minnesota where I’m from. And I just really want to recognize that these are stories that they shared with me for this report to get this information out there. For more Native nations to learn from, from their particular experiences. And the one that really struck me was Fond du Lac. I interviewed Jason Holliday out there from their planning department. And he talked about how they kept applying for grants. And they kept not getting the grants because they weren’t dreaming big enough.
H. Trostle:
They kept applying for grants specific for wireless networks that would serve only a portion of their reservation, that would not fully meet their needs, but they felt like this was a stopgap solution. And once they were like, “Okay, we need to take a step back. We need to reevaluate the market. We need to reevaluate our whole approach and actually identify what the community needs are, and what would best serve us longterm in the future.” They ended up putting together a really great application, and worked with the Blandin Foundation here in Minnesota to get a Next-Generation fiber network out to all the homes on their res.
H. Trostle:
And they’re slowly still expanding that. But they just needed to dream a little bigger than what they had initially thought. Because they thought if they just kept asking for small amounts of money for some of their community need, that that would eventually be enough. It turns to that Fond du Lac needed to dream big, be clear about their community needs, and then the Federal Government was able to fund their network in a way that actually works for the longterm.
Jessica Del Fia…:
So, they build the network. Does this mean, do most homes have high quality internet access? Are there any benefits you could point to now?
H. Trostle:
There are quite a few benefits from the network. It serves about 1500 to 2000 people on the reservation. And they were able to actually use this better connectivity to create programs for use to learn how to build apps for phones and websites. And a lot of these apps are focused on cultural content. So that the youths are interacting with their elders and learning more from them about the tribe and it’s history, and it’s language. And then they are able to use this great fiber network to actually build the content and fun sort of games that other youth on the res can also use. It’s really great. It’s a hard to quantify benefit is what I’m getting at.
Christopher Mit…:
And I don’t remember if we actually named the title of the case studies, but it is Building Indigenous Future Zones for Tribal Broadband Case Studies.
Jessica Del Fia…:
and we will definitely link that into the post for this podcast. So if you’re looking for it, you can go there, on ILSR.org. Were there any big takeaways, either for other Native nations, or for policymakers in general, that you would want people to walk away with? After reading this report, what are you hoping people takeaway?
H. Trostle:
I’m hoping that people recognize the need for internet access in Indian country. And I’m hoping that policymakers takeaway from this, that there is a need for a centralized location for funding, that we need better access to the capital necessary to build these networks in Indian country. A lot of these case studies are people trying to put together different grants, different loans, trying to work with the USDA, trying to work with their state government to figure out a solution that works for their community. And they have to be very creative with their financing. And it is so important to be able to have a one-stop-shop, where Native nations can go and look to see what funding programs are out there. What do they qualify for?
H. Trostle:
Are there programs where they don’t have to necessarily compete with co-ops, or compete with the private providers like CenturyLink for funding? And this comes back to recognizing sovereignty, recognizing that it is so important to know who is in charge of the infrastructure, and what that means on a day-to-day basis. Like, people over at Red Spectrum Communications are just constantly working to try to improve the wireless and fiber infrastructure there, to meet the needs of the pandemic. And because community needs are changing, it is better to have a local company or the tribal government, or someone who is on the ground there who recognizes how the needs are changing and can modify the network to meet that.
Jessica Del Fia…:
I have a feeling that theme might come up again. But is there anything else that you wanted to add, either H or Chris, before we move on?
H. Trostle:
I feel like you usually have a very good short summary of incentives, Chris.
Christopher Mit…:
I think it is important to really reflect on who owns the network, really will depend on how well it meets their needs. The fastest thing to do might be to figure out how to get AT&T to deploy some kind of wireless service in these areas. But they’re never going to really do a good job of trying to make sure people are connected. They’re not going to offer low prices. They’re not going to manage the network in a way that will maximize benefits in Indian country.
Christopher Mit…:
And so, by making sure that however we build these networks, that the actual tribes involved are involved, that they take ownership of it, means that, when people are paying their bills… We’re talking about 1000 people paying $50 a month, you’re talking about a half a million dollars, more than that, per year. Is that going to leave the reservation, or is it going to stay on the res? And so, it’s really important to get this right. This is money that’s going to be spent year-after-year for the next 100 years I’m guessing. And the decisions we make right now will determine several decades worth of where that money goes.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Thank you, guys. Before we hear about Sean’s latest research, let’s take a short break.
Christopher Mit…:
Yes. I think we should take a short break, and just recognize that this show is sponsored by the inefficient local companies all around the United States, the local businesses that do this work, and people that are around me lately, know that I’ve been insufferable on this, because I’m really annoyed at certain people, maybe on Twitter and other places that talk about larger, more efficient chains and things like that. And I’d just like to know that that kind of businesses, the local businesses that make the backbone of our economies, the ones that support our work in many cases, they’re inefficient. What that means is, that if you have a problem, they solve it quickly.
Christopher Mit…:
You don’t wait on the phone for an hour to talk to someone, waiting on the phone for an hour. That is efficiency that the Comcast Call Center gets. And that’s considered a good thing by a lot of the people that tell us how we should structure our economy. And so, I wanted to suggest that we are being sponsored by the inefficient companies that are doing the work, the companies that you like to deal with. Those are the ones that are behind us. But, you can support us too by going to ILSR.org/donate. We do a lot of interesting and important things. We have a growing staff that is frankly really excited to do a lot of really great work. And you can help us to get it done by going to ILSR.org/donate.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Thanks, Chris. You really handled that whole thing for me.
Christopher Mit…:
You know, I also just want to say, we try to make it easy on you. I’m not going to sit up here and say anything about www or https:// none of that. We’re just straight up, ILSR.org/donate.
Jessica Del Fia…:
All right. Let’s move on with our conversation and go back to Chris actually.
Christopher Mit…:
Sean’s about to come on real strong though.
Sean Gonsalves:
Yeah, yeah.
Jessica Del Fia…:
He has the whole rest of the show. So, there’s this big undertaking to document all of America’s municipal broadband networks, right? And what we’re calling the municipal broadband compendium at this point, we might come up with a flashier name at some point. But we’re going to say compendium a lot in this show. Chris, why have you decided to do this?
Christopher Mit…:
Well, we started muninetworks.org with a goal of documenting what’s happening out there. And it turns out that at this point with, I don’t know, maybe 5000 pieces of content, when somebody says, “What’s happening with municipal networks across the United States?” If you tell them to go read 5000 pieces of content about it, they don’t do that. So we decided that it might be helpful to have a one document that has information about a lot of these networks in one place that’s just nicely indexed. So it’s something that Sean has been working hard on, and we’re trying to get out the door.
Sean Gonsalves:
Exactly. Yeah, we haven’t come up with a great name for it yet. I think of it as sort of like a muni-pedia, a muni-net-pedia, like a one-stop-shop. But I think that will be a valuable resource. Because you need that place where you can go to and easily find what’s going on in various parts of the country with these community networks. As communities across the country are contemplating building their own, or in the process of building their own, it can be a handy reference and resource.
Jessica Del Fia…:
So how have you been putting this together? I mean, some of it is maybe research we had in our archives. But you’ve been hopping on the phone with people all across the country, right? Who have built these networks, who are running these networks?
Sean Gonsalves:
Exactly. I mean, Chris thankfully really built a strong foundation. And I have essentially just been adding to it. As we identified various communities that have come online over the years. And just sort of updating, checking in with these various communities, local officials, folks on the ground. Getting a sense of where things were, how far along they were, or what the take rates are, what kind of services are being offered, what the feel is on the ground. And so, the challenge of course is really to… and this is important for this as well as that. We didn’t want it to be unwieldy. So each of the entries, we’re trying to keep to consider to be a snapshot of at a point in time. And this is also a document that will be an evolving document as we continue to add communities even after we are ready to unveil this to the world.
Jessica Del Fia…:
So can you share… I mean, do you have any favorites that you could point to? Or if not favorites, particularly interesting community stories you could share here?
Sean Gonsalves:
I mean, obviously the most well-known story is Chattanooga of course, and what they’ve done down there. And recently, there’s been this study that was released this week, it’s out of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. An independent study that found that $2.7 billion in the decade that’s it’s been in operation, you can attribute to these… has delivered these economic and social benefits worth $2.7 billion. And that comes in the form of jobs that have been created. I think the report says that somewhere in the neighborhood of 9500 jobs have been created, which is about 40% of all the jobs in that county. And then there’s other additional benefits.
Sean Gonsalves:
Because of this fiber network they’ve been able to do things to their Smart Grid that’s translated into $30 million almost worth of savings in customer’s electric bills. So there’s all of these sort of economic and social benefits that come with these community-owned networks. Where the money and the resources aren’t being extracted from a community and going elsewhere. They’re staying and circulating within that community. So Chattanooga is certainly one of the more well-known examples. But you know, ECFiber which is in East Central Vermont is interesting. And actually what they’re doing in Vermont is pretty interesting.
Sean Gonsalves:
So, Vermont like many states, there’s these various obstacles for municipalities to get into building broadband networks. And in Vermont what they’ve done is, they’ve established these what they call CUDs, which stands for Communication Union Districts. And really it’s a way for multiple municipalities to come together, kind of in an consortium as a municipality essentially, and operate similar to like a sewer district or a school district, that allows them to build these networks. And ECFiber was really the first of these to come online. And they right now, have a very robust fiber to the home network that as of October 2020, we’re talking 5200 customers across 31,500 premises.
Sean Gonsalves:
And we’re talking, if folks aren’t familiar, this is a very rural part of Vermont that actually for city folks, all of Vermont is very rural. So in rural areas, building these kind of networks can be a challenge because of the lack of density, and the cost of construction and so forth. So I think ECFiber is an interesting example of how multiple communities can come together and build a community network which is different than Chattanooga. So, those are kind of two examples that come to mind right off hand. Chris knows this much better than I do. Chris, I don’t know if you’ve got any other examples.
Christopher Mit…:
Yeah, we try to go with a variety of examples that kind of bring home again, some of the context. So it’s not just all about the take rates, which is often important for understanding the financial feasibility. But also some of those stories. I mean, Chattanooga for instance, all the kids in the school, that are in the free or reduced lunch program now have free internet access for 10 years because of that municipal network and local organizing around it. I mean, Clarksville, Tennessee is one of my favorite stories. Because you know, Chattanooga has really hit it out of the park. They’ve done a lot of great things, and they also received a significant amount of money from the Department of Energy which sped up their build.
Christopher Mit…:
But Clarksville is one of these communities that is more close to the average of what we’ve seen from municipal networks. Which is that, they’re not like running away with market share. They have to scrap for every gain that they have. And they recently started offering enhanced telephone services for local businesses. So that local businesses would have more options to add telephone lines and manage them. One of the things that happened was, one of the local businesses found that their old telephone solution, they were missing a bunch of calls of potential customers. And once they got a better phone system, they were able to add more people to staff, and significantly expand their business.
Christopher Mit…:
Because they were not missing easy sales. So, these are the sorts of things that make a difference. Small business owners, they’re not experts in how telephone systems work from different companies. They just want something that works for them. And we see communities trying to provide these solutions. It generally works out for the benefit of a lot of folks. So you know, we talk about Wilson, North Carolina, Chattanooga, and some of the others that are well-known. But in here, we also try to talk about other ones. And so Sean just dug into Conway, Arkansas, which has a network that basically no one really knew anything about outside of Conway, and found that they are a very interesting, very successful network over the past 20 plus years.
Christopher Mit…:
They’re upgrading their network to much faster speeds, not having to borrow anything because they’ve been so responsible and quite successful. And so that’s really exciting. And then I guess, let me just say that, we’ll couple that with really great news right now. Which is that we’re seeing bills move. Bills have been introduced for years, and we always try to track them, that will get rid of state barriers to more community networks. And in Arkansas we’re seeing a bill moving. And in Washington we’re seeing a lot of attention on a bill. We’re seeing potential in Nebraska for getting rid of some of the barriers that prevent public power from making a difference there. And so, at the beginning of the show when I said there’s things to be positive about, we really are seeing a hope that we’re making cracks in the monopoly artifice that really restricts our options.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Not to bring down the conversation, because there certainly are so many benefits and so many success stories here. But I’m curious if you addressed any of the not so rosy aspects of building a network like this and making it successful? I mean, are there bumps along the way that communities go through? What does failure versus success look like for projects like this?
Sean Gonsalves:
For sure. I mean, I think it was important to us. Just in terms of, if this document is going to be of value, particular to communities that are considering building their own network, it’s important for us to document, not just the gloss and the shine of some of these networks like you see in Chattanooga, but also to share different struggles and challenges that different communities have faced, just in terms of lessons learned. And it’s not necessarily that they’re necessarily failures. They may be perceived failures, it sort of I think depend on kind of in part on the time frame that you look at. We’re talking about expensive capital projects on the front end.
Sean Gonsalves:
And so there’s communities where there’s sticker shock in terms of how these things are funded, bond issuances and so forth. And whether or not, like for example, in Loveland, Colorado, there was a lot of debate about how that should be funded, whether or not there should be a referendum vote. In the end the city council decided that, “You know what? This is a capital project, just like building a road, or building a bridge. We don’t put that up for a referendum vote, we’re going to move forward.” They took some flack over that. They did move forward. And then there’s also sometimes people early on are very concerned about, “Oh, you know, the take rate is too low. If we don’t get to 30 or 40% quickly, this is going to end up being a boondoggle.”
Sean Gonsalves:
But as Chris knows well, these things take several years usually to really start to see any type of real return on investment. And it’s obviously important that, it’s a different set of values that community broadband networks are after. They’re not after maximizing profit. They’re about providing as universal of access to broadband as possible, introducing competition in the markets, offering more affordable, more reliable networks. In Fort Collins, is another community that’s in the process of building a fiber to the home network. They’re off to a really good start. They’ve had some hiccups along the way. One of the criticisms that we’ve heard, even from supporters of the project is that they haven’t been as transparent as that they’d like to see.
Sean Gonsalves:
So for example, they haven’t published maps of what areas have been completed, which ones are up next. And the reason why that can be a problem if you’re for example have a contract with Comcast, and you can’t wait to get a fiber connection because you can’t stand the service and the expense of Comcast. But you also don’t want to get locked into a longterm contract and then, oh, a week later, “Oh, they’re lighting up my neighborhood. I wish I would’ve known that ahead of time so I didn’t sign another one year or two year contract with Comcast.” So those type of things we also cover in these. And those are important to cover. Because those are valuable lessons that other communities can learn from.
Christopher Mit…:
Yeah. We recently did an interview with UTOPIA network in Utah. And this is a network that’s often been considered one of the biggest flops, because it was so aggressive launching in 2004. It had this ambitious goal of building this massive network that would have multiple service providers competing on it. And one of the people that’s been involved in the project said, “If you want to know every mistake you can make, we made them all, and we made some of them twice.” I mean, it’s a humble way of noting that they’ve certainly made some bad decisions that other communities have learned from and not made again. UTOPIA also suffered from really outrageous changes in law that Comcast and CenturyLink pushed forward.
Christopher Mit…:
The Federal Government actually settled a lawsuit later after pulling funding from the rural utility service for them. And it was found to have done so inappropriately. So, there were some things that were outside of UTOPIA’s control. But for a lot of years they really struggled, and they got a bad name. And for the past five years it’s been this amazing growth. And they’re one of the highest rated networks according to rankings like customer rankings on Google. They’re just growing massively now as people recognize how much better that network is than your DSL from CenturyLink, or your cable from Comcast. So, we cover those sorts of things.
Christopher Mit…:
And there’s other cases where, like in the case Burlington, Vermont, it looks just like there was malfeasance in the mayor’s office and it was something that resulted in real problems for the municipal fiber network. But I don’t know that those kinds of things are related to fiber. We see those sorts of things with all kind of of public infrastructure. You do thousands of public infrastructure projects. Some percentage of them will have corrupt deals as a part of them. And we need to root those out. We really need to be serious about this. You know, if we want to promote public ownership, we need to be serious about making sure it’s good and it serves the public interest. So, we don’t want to sweep those things under the rug. We want to make sure people are looking out for them, and that we’re not accepting that.
Sean Gonsalves:
On the flip side of that coin, there’s a number of things that when you start to look across multiple communities in multiple states all across the country, you start to see some kind of common things rise to the surface in terms of building these networks. First of all, these are longterm intense projects. And in successful community networks, early on you have strong community champions who are involved. You’ve got sound feasibility studies. You’ve got robust education campaigns. Because there’s so much bad information out there.
Sean Gonsalves:
In various instances some of the monopoly providers, or the big telco, they’ll come in with lobbyists and try to really sow doubt and discord in terms of, as communities are trying to launch networks. And so, there’s those type of things. But you know, one of the things too that is not as easy to quantify is, you hear these stories all across the country about how satisfying it is from a customer service perspective, that you’ve got people in the local community who are doing the support work, and are who are doing the customer service. You’re not on the phone for two to three hours on hold with Comcast, or whomever. You’re getting your problems fixed. So that-
Christopher Mit…:
That sounds inefficient.
Sean Gonsalves:
That’s, yes from that stern economic sort of dogma that we hear about the importance of efficiencies, I’m sure ruffle some folks feathers. But when you actually talk to people, that’s one of the things that actually separates a lot of these networks from their competitors. Is just how thrilled people are with the customer service and the responsiveness.
Jessica Del Fia…:
I’m conscious of the fact that we’re running out of time here. But I would like to hear, especially from Chris and from H, who’ve got like a little bit of longer term perspective on this than Sean, no offense, Sean. You’ve certainly dived in deep over the last few months. But, just your thoughts on the progress of municipal broadband over the last five years, 10 years, and how you’ve been tracking these projects.
Christopher Mit…:
Yeah, I’m curious how H responds to that.
H. Trostle:
Well, I am one of those people that, every time you bring me on to one of your predictions podcasts, I’m like very optimistic. I guess we’re going to see so much growth. Yes we’re going to see lifts of bands on muni networks. But I am also deeply pessimistic. But I love hearing about how this compendium has grown and changed. I’m really excited about all of the opportunities that we can finally sort of see, by putting all of these networks next to each other.
Christopher Mit…:
You thought we would have conquered the world by now, and you’re disappointed that it’s 2021 and there are still cities that do not have locally owned networks.
H. Trostle:
In many ways, yes. I am disappointed that local and tribal governments are not in charge of our internet infrastructure, and instead we still have Comcast, yes.
Jessica Del Fia…:
But maybe these reports together, it’s going to be what changes it guys.
Christopher Mit…:
Well, we’re seeing progress, right? I mean, if you step back and you look at it, in Western Massachusetts, you see very similar communities that you’ll find in Northern New York from what I can tell. I think, Sean, you probably know better than me. You’re nodding along, so it sounds like I’m not totally off. And right now, the Berkshire Towns in Massachusetts are getting fiber to the home that’s locally owned. Because they’ve been organizing around it, and the state wisely put some money into it. In New York, you’ve had this very technocratic reverse auction that spent even far more money, and boy, are people in New York livid about how bad the solution has been.
Christopher Mit…:
They’re not seeing the same level, they don’t have the same level of hope in many places. So, you have like 20 municipal networks being built in Western Massachusetts. I don’t know, probably like 300,000 people are in between Fort Collins, and Loveland, and Estes Park on the front range, are looking at municipal fiber. There’s interesting studies all around the country. There’s so many things that are happening. There’s fiber networks that are popping up in Texas, which really tries to discourage it. So, there’s been a lot of progress. We have a lot of ways to go. But we see a real movement continuing to build, and it’s exciting.
Sean Gonsalves:
One of the big takeaways that I hope folks takeaway from the compendium and the Native nations report is, I’m a huge believer of, if it exists it’s possible. And I think for a lot of communities across the country who are wrestling with some of these questions, be they in Indian country or in the rest of the United States, is that you see multiple examples of the possibilities. Various models, various routes to success, and that to me is very hopeful. And to be able to have a reference guide that is proof positive of that I think is something worth looking at.
Jessica Del Fia…:
I think on that note, it’s time for us to wrap up. But is there any last thoughts anyone wants to share?
Christopher Mit…:
I don’t know if you can have a better last thought than Sean just shared.
Jessica Del Fia…:
All right. Then that’s it. And just to reiterate, all the links to these resources will be available in the show notes for this episode. And we hope you check them out.
Christopher Mit…:
Not the compendium, because we have no idea when that’s-
Jessica Del Fia…:
Eventually, I was going to-
Christopher Mit…:
… going to be published.
Jessica Del Fia…:
… specify. Eventually it’ll be there, keep an eye out for the research as it comes out. And it will be coming soon, sooner rather than later. All right, thanks everybody.
Sean Gonsalves:
All right.
Jessica Del Fia…:
Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Building Local Power Podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to ILSR.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s ILSR.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media, and hope you’ll also take the opportunity to help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast, and supports the research and resources we make available for free on our website. Finally, we ask that you let us know how we’re doing with a rating or review on Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your podcasts. This show was produced by me, Jess Del Fiacco, and edited by [inaudible 00:43:49]. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_Al. For the Institute for Self-Reliance, I’m Jess Del Fiacco, and I hope you join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
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45 min
January 07, 2021 Should Big Utilities Pay for Their Bad Choices? — Episode 117 of Building Local Power
Host John Farrell, Co-Director of ILSR, interviews Leslie Glustrom, founding member of Clean Energy Action, an organization working on accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to a clean energy economy. They discuss how we can equitably transition to a clean energy future.
50 min

About Building Local Power

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Building Local Power brings you thought-provoking stories and new ideas for breaking the hold of corporate monopolies and expanding the power of communities to chart their own futures. We deliver insights from trailblazing lawmakers, scholars, business leaders, and advocates. Plus, conversations with in-house experts at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance help reveal the patterns and policies that shape our economy and communities. These stories and conversations help map solutions that distribute power to everyday people.