Building Local Power

Host John Farrell speaks with Marie Donahue, ILSR researcher, and Neil Seldman, Director of ILSR’s Waste to Wealth Initiative, about the harmful impacts of burning trash to generate electricity. The trio dive into ILSR’s recent report Waste Incineration: A Dirty Secret in How States Define Renewable Energy. They also discuss:

And I’d like to start with something very recent. Neil I was hoping you could explain how a recent city council decision in Baltimore will impact the Wheelabrator Incinerator that’s responsible for so much of the city’s industrial pollution.

The situation in Baltimore is slightly different from Montgomery County, which we can get into. But in Baltimore the Wheelabrator company owns a facility called Bresco. B-R-E-S-C-O. And that facility is about 35 to 40 years old. The city sends its non recycled waste to that incinerator in downtown Baltimore. Most of the materials generated in Baltimore go there, because the city has a very low recycling rate estimated between 14 and 19 percent. By comparison the national average is 34, and, of course, some cities are at 50, 60, and 70 percent.

So, if the city stopped sending its garbage there, in theory, because it’s a privately owned facility that facility can import garbage from anywhere they want to, Baltimore County, New York City, to fill in for the garbage that is not delivered by the city.

However, with the passage of this law … It is not signed yet. Mayor Pugh has said she was going to sign it, it has not happened yet. It will become law if she doesn’t sign it. In about five or six days it will become law. The importance of the law it will require any facility, private or public, to meet these new standards, and it will therefor prevent the incinerator from continuing to operate with private sector trash or public trash if it does not make the adjustments to pollution control that will allow it to meet best available control technology.

Vice President of the Wheelabrator corporation already mentioned that if this law came to pass they will probably … Actually he said certainly have to shut the incinerator, because the cost of putting on new pollution control equipment is about 70 million dollars, and that pollution control equipment will require about 11 million dollars a year of operating expenses. These expenses for the corporation are just too much for it to continue operating this plant. In theory, it could knock down the plant, and build a more modern plant, but that is highly unlikely.

The legislation can be used in at least 11 other states according to Mike Ewall, who wrote the bill. He works for the Energy Justice Network, and there are about 11 other states where this strategy can be used, and that would include at least eight other existing old incinerators. Detroit, Annapolis among those eight other cities that have existing plants.

I want to talk a little bit about why Baltimore took this direction in terms of the incinerator, and was hoping Marie that you could give us some of like big picture here. In your report about incineration and renewable energy you talk about three reasons that incinerators, in general, are a bad deal for communities. And I was hoping that you could just kind of walk us through those reasons, so we can understand why it is that a community like Baltimore is having such an issue with this particular facility.

The first being that the economics of these facilities really don’t add up. That incinerators are risky investments for the local governments and utilities that are helping support and subsidize them, particularly as energy prices decline, and that there are these more price competitive alternatives, which we’ll get into a little bit more as well. A growing number of these plants are unable to cover their operating costs, or the substantial investments needed to really maintain, or, as Neil was talking about, implement new pollution controls. And so, they’re costly to operate and maintain to remain competitive.

And so, we’ve seen recent examples in California and in Minnesota where existing facilities are not able to offer contracts for electricity at a competitive rate in that case. In California, for example, that helped lead to the closure of one of the states remaining facilities.

Related to this economics point the tip fees, or what waste haulers pay to dispose of waste at incinerators, are often quite a bit more costly than alternatives. So, we see two to three times higher rates of tip fee disposal than comparable recycling or composting costs. Which, again, I’m here with Neil our expert, so he can perhaps touch on some of that too as he gets more into the waste side of the equation.

And we also see that jobs, sort of local jobs, which are generated at incinerators, are quite a bit less than other alternatives. So, we see four times the number of jobs per unit of waste in composting sites, for example.

So, really there are better alternatives that exist when you look at these plants through an economics lens.

We also see the impacts on public health, and that was a big motivator for, it sounds like, the Baltimore case certainly. But incinerators are these classic cases of environmental injustice in the communities that they’ve been located in. They’re often sighted in neighborhoods that are predominantly made up of people with lower incomes, people of color as the Energy Justice Network has illustrated in some really great maps that we feature in the report.

And so, Neil has mentioned them. They’ve done some great work documenting, again, the harmful, costly, and avoidable public health risks that these incinerators present to the local communities that are living nearby.

And we also talk a little bit, I think, more about that dynamic with partners from EJN, the Energy Justice Network. And then also another great organization GAIA, whose done more work in a webinar that we hosted on the report in January. So, can point folks more to that resource.

And then, finally, we, especially in looking at this through our Energy Democracy lens, and the impacts that incinerators have on the energy sector, we argue the third point being that renewable trash, which these incinerators are often being classified under, is really a legal oxymoron. It doesn’t really make sense that burning garbage would be considered a renewable resource, but it is in the majority of states where incinerators are located. We have 52 plants operating in states that do classify trash burning as a renewable resource of energy.

So, these are three reasons that we definitely see communities pushing back against this dirty practice, and we highlight those three in our report.

I want to jump back and ask Neil, specifically, about how some of these large scale issues apply in the case of Baltimore. Just very quickly though, is Maryland one of those states that counts burning trash as renewable energy?

I’ve been fighting garbage incinerators for over 45 years now, and it’s fascinating that people get aroused because of the fear of pollution impacting their health and the environment. Ultimately it’s the economics that moves people to make the decision. In Baltimore, it was a healthy combination of both.

In terms of the pollution I’ll point out that John you mentioned 50%. The Bresco incinerator accounts for about for exactly 36% of the industrial pollution in the city as measured by the US EPA. And these health costs are very significant. Dante Swinton, an organizer for Energy Justice Network in Baltimore, did the numbers, and he estimated that the cost to the city annually, that is the city, the businesses, and the people in the city, is about 153 million dollars a year. And that comprised of absentee workers who are sick with asthma, and other ailments, school children that miss school, and also have to go to an emergency room for asthmatic conditions. That’s quite a hefty bill that the government, businesses, and citizens have to pay.

And the stimulus for trying to shut down an existing incinerator came from Curtis Bay, which is an industrially zoned community at the southern tip of Baltimore, and about four years ago the private industry was planning a 4000 ton per day garbage incinerator in the middle of Curtis Bay, which is already the heaviest polluted zip code in Baltimore. And this triggered simmering discontent in the community, which is low income, mixed white people, Black people, Latino people and Asian people, they were absolutely fed up when this 4,000 ton per day incinerator was announced, the plan for it. And through incredibly well organized citizens, led by united workers, and their staff all live in the community and went to Ben Franklin High School, these adults and young people … also adults, but just out of high school and in college, came up with incredible tactics, videos, small meetings, many, many small meetings, which mobilized the city.

Among their best tactics was a video produced by the young people in the community that was sent around to the museums, the school systems in the city and the region that had pledged to buy electricity from this planned garbage incinerator. And the video made it clear that this was dirty electricity. And one by one these institutions withdrew their offers to buy electricity from this source. That was a major accomplishment, and it led to lawyers, and doctors, and organizers from other issues on the environment to join United workers. Energy Justice Network did a whole lot of work, the institute, myself and Brenda Platt did a lot of work. The institute’s work was showing, pointing to specific examples of what government, industry, and citizens have been doing to implement alternative systems that do not have incineration.

We supported the Fillbert Street Garden, which is a community institution in Curtis Bay. We raised money to build a compost pad, that compost pad is now the basis for a collection program in nearby neighborhoods that picks up organic waste from households and businesses, brings them back to the garden for composting, and reuse. The program involves young people and also small children. There’s an elementary school right across the street, the children are growing flowers, fruits, vegetables, it’s quite an institution.

All of this mobilized the community both from the fear of pollution, and the possibilities that the 90 acres that was going to be devoted to the incinerator could now become a green industrial park with recycling, composting, solar energy projects. So the community was turned around into what’s possible, it energized their mobilization, and after the defeat of the planned incinerator in Curtis Bay, there was a seamless transition to focus on the existing incinerator, and of course, Environmental Justice did a great job in documenting the pollution.

I also want to tip my hat to Environment Justice Network because they also went deep into the weeds, working with communities surrounding the incinerator who suffer the most from the pollution, and raised money and developed a pilot recycling program. Baltimore has a very low recycling rate. There are reasons for it, the DPW, the Department of Public Works in the city just hasn’t paid attention to recycling and composting. And the Energy Justice Network pilots showed that citizens with the proper carts, proper information, and proper incentives, they were recycling at 39%. The city’s average is anywhere from 14 to 19%, so virtually a doubling of the recycling rate just by paying attention and proving that low income people, black, white, or green, will recycle and want to recycle.

But we’re going to take a quick break here and when we come back we’re going to talk about how many states are providing subsidies to trash burning through renewable energy definitions, which we touched on before. I’d like to dive into how industry consolidation is helping the incinerator industry. And then also to talk a little bit more about what we’ve already heard about, is what communities can do instead of hosting trash burners, in terms of waste processing and things that they can do to create jobs, and healthier jobs in their community.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Building Local Power with in house guests, Marie Donahue and Neil Seldman. This is the part of a podcast where you usually hear something about a mattress company, or a meal delivery service. But the Institute for Local Self Reliance is a national organization that supports local economies. So we don’t accept national advertising. Instead, please consider making a donation to ILSR. Not only does your support underwrite this podcast, but it also helps us produce all the resources, from reports, to podcasts, to interactive maps we make available for free on our website.

Please take a minute and go to ILSR.org/donate. Any amount is welcome, and sincerely appreciated. That’s ILSR.org/donate. We also value your reviews on Stitcher, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much. Now, back to our discussion of trash incineration and some better alternatives.

Okay, before the break we talked about how Baltimore’s incinerator is a classic case of environmental injustice. Aided and abetted by state policy that subsidizes trash burning. Marie, can you talk about how common it is that states allow burning in municipalities to counter renewable energy? You gave us the number before, and is that a subsidy that’s keeping incinerators afloat?

This designation allows incinerators to benefit from the support of renewable energy credits in states, both within states where they might be getting credits toward their electricity production, and then also has implications for out of state credits that city’s utilities may be buying to offset other sources of energy. And we see that in Maryland as well. We cited a report showing that in Maryland, for example, rate payers reportedly spent 84 million over the last decade to purchase these unbundled, out of state renewable energy credits from Virginia, which is another state that classifies incineration as a renewable resource. And that these credits were from … a majority of these credits are from dirty energy sources. So again, these are sort of indicative of how this industry is funded and supported by these renewable credits and that designation.

It allows the power that’s generated by facilities, and you’ll mention this a little bit just about how utilities, how these companies are able to market the energy as this renewable, attractive resource. And so, from at least a marketing perspective, in wholesale electricity contracts, with utilities, cities, or others, these power purchasers can tout that sort of green nature, and that green washing is really quite pervasive in the industry. It’s been used, and certainly they’ve changed the wording. Neil knows this history better than me, but that they’ve changed the wording to allow it to be more attractive and sound like it’s a better source or energy than it is, brushing aside the public health impacts and some of these other negative impacts that we discussed earlier.

That said, on the flip side of what state definitions and policies are, there are examples that we found, in Rhode Island for example, of clear bans on municipal solid waste incinerators, or ones that are keeping this explicitly out of their renewable energy goals and definitions. So that’s sort of a positive, small positive story even though that’s a rare occurrence in these states we looked at. In some cases it’s just not mentioned at all.

To be frank, the citizens and small businesses, there’s a playbook on how to kill incinerators, and you could read the playbook and organize your community, and it’s more than 50/50, much more than 50/50 that organized citizens will be able to stop it.

The consolidation of the solid waste industry is a critical component of this. The first consolidation started in the late 60s, early 70s over buying out haulers and consolidating haulers, and creating a virtual monopoly on hauling. At the same time, a virtual monopoly on landfill capacity was developed by these companies. When it comes to incinerators, it was just another form of the consolidators taking control and putting in systems that favored them, not the citizens or the environment.

But, as I indicated, that effort was stopped cold. And the effort by the waste hauling companies to add incineration monopoly to their landfill monopoly was shut down. There are remnants of those facilities that were built in the 70s and 80s, such as in Baltimore, such as in Montgomery County, actually, Montgomery County was built in the 90s. Citizens have been fighting existing plants for 20, 30 years.

The prospect of citizens winning in battles against the existing incinerators is now improving tremendously, and I think that Baltimore experience is certainly going to help citizens in Detroit, Indianapolis, Newark, New Jersey, and many other cities that still have these incinerators. There are about 50 remaining, 50 to 55 garbage incinerators remaining in the state. That’s down from over 100 a couple of decades ago.

The other important thing, as I said earlier, environment concerns, people breathing air that has mercury, and lead, and dioxide, and known killers, as well as oxides of nitrogen which are not killers but certainly impact health, gets peoples’ attention. But it’s very important for anyone fighting these plants to have a sense of what’s possible. And happily, the recycling movement across the country since the late 60s has shown what can happen, that’s both grassroots recyclers and small business recyclers. And that confidence, and that merging or pro recycling and anti incineration movements, has really made a tremendous different. And the transition away from these incinerators, it can’t be done over night, but it certainly can be done within a two to three year period. And it’s relatively simple, the transition is based on best practices. Composting, which comprises about 30 to 40% of the waste stream, is a very easy alternative to incineration and landfill. The big waste holding companies fight composting because it has the potential to take away 30 to 40% of their market, into a distributed system that’s based on local markets and local small businesses.

The other part that we recommend, it’s not essential, composting is essential. A very helpful tool, which I sometimes refer to as a magic bullet, if there is anything to get people to recycle, is unit pricing, or charging people by the amount of garbage they set out for collection, with composting set-outs and recycling set-outs either free or much, much less expensive for households to put out. This creates an immediate incentive for households to pay attention to their waste. In fact, we have documented cases through original research, as well as other research, other organizational research, that shows that when you put in unit pricing within a year to a year-and-a-half, your overall solid waste stream goes down by 40%. That’s a combination of people getting involved in recycling, composting and source reduction, meaning people don’t buy packaging that they’re gonna bring into their house and then have to pay to get collected in their curbside system.

The other thing about unit pricing, also called Pay as You Throw, Save as You Throw, smart save money as you reduce trash, is that it can help civilize American culture. The United States, people in the United States, generate 4-and-a-half pounds of garbage a day, it’s the most of any country by far in the world. It breaks out to about 3 to 3-and-a-half pounds per day when you take out the amount of recycling we’re doing.

There’s one other and last major area that cities need to pay attention to, and that’s the economic development side of recycling. As you recover materials from the waste stream and process them, you add value to them, meaning jobs and better, higher market prices. And then if you use that material in your region or in your city to manufacture new products, you get another way of economic stimulation. This is what the Institute for Local Self-Reliance is. Cities control this material, why not use it and create a local economy? And the job creation, as Marie mentioned, is very important, and to accomplish all this, cities need to designate industrial sites, whether they’re continuous or not, as some people call them, “Resource Recovery Parks.” Some people call them ecological industrial parks.

In California, where these types of recycling parks were created about 20 years ago, they’re called recycling market development zones. There are at least 30 of them throughout the state in rural and urban areas, and they give economic benefits, tax breaks, marketing assistance, to companies that locate in these parks and use the recovered materials from cities to create new jobs. There are over a hundred companies that have located in California, creating thousands of jobs, all because there are available industrial spaces specifically for companies that recycle, compost and reuse old products.

So Marie, tell us something from the report that communities can pursue, that can help them address this problem with incinerators around renewable energy.

Another excellent book is Plastic Ocean by Charles Moore, Captain Charles Moore, which deals with the plastic dilemma. The other thing I would suggest, and John already mentioned it, if you go to the Waste to Wealth blog page, we cover these issues of monopolies, single stream, the issue of China, which is important. And citizens can get a very good background just checking out our blog page at Waste to Wealth, at archive.ilsr.org.

Thank you so much for tuning in to Building Local Power. This is John Farrell, ILSR co-director. I was speaking with two terrific guests, Marie Donahue, ILSR researcher and author of Waste Incineration: A Dirty Secret and How States Define Renewable Energy, as well as Neil Seldman, ILSR co-founder and director of our Waste to Wealth initiative.

Check out the show page for a transcript, a link to Marie’s report, and other resources, and links to the recommended books via IndieBound. While you’re at our website, you can also find more than 60 past episodes of the Building Local Power podcast, and show us some love with a contribution to help cover the costs of producing this podcast. You can also help us out by rating this podcast and sharing it with your friends on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts.

This show is produced by the amazing Lisa Gonzales and Hibba Meraay. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. Please join us next time in Building Local Power.

Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

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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Susan Crawford, Author

Host Christopher Mitchell speaks with Harvard Law Professor and broadband champion Susan Crawford about her book Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution — And Why America Might Miss It. Christopher and Susan talk about bringing better connectivity to rural and urban areas.They also discuss:

I’m Chris Mitchell with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis, and I have one of my favorite guests back today, Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law and more recently the author of Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution and Why America Might Miss It. Welcome to the show, Susan.

And the second point is that, yes, that looks good as an upgrade to their existing capacity, but unlike hybrid fiber-coaxial lines, the glass fiber really is, as far as we can tell, infinitely upgradeable. There is a top limit to what you can do with those cable capacity that we’ll not approach what’s possible with fiber. So the two technologies are just not the same. And the idea of making sure that we’re matching the rest of the world with our basic wire makes a ton of sense to me. And it does to most people in these other countries that I keep visiting. So long story short, that is not a solution if it’s too expensive and not upgradeable without extraordinary effort.

Look, nobody wants to see cable not competing, except for the cable companies. So I’m happy for them to be successful businesses, but they have to be subject to competition like everybody else.

Increasingly, I’m excited about regional opportunities, not just municipal ones. Watching what’s going on in the South Bay just south of Los Angeles, where a whole bunch of communities are talking about getting together and issuing a joint RFP for dark fiber services. That makes a lot of sense to me. There are ongoing economies of scale that operate at the public level, just the same way they do at the private one. But the first step is getting everybody together, having a real consensus that this is important, and then taking the necessary block and tackle steps to figure out what needs to be done, what the gaps are, where the capital will come from, and what the plan is.

So far, every conversation I’ve had, let’s say with my dry cleaner or the local music store or anybody on the street, once you take the time to explain it, they just say, “Well of course that’s the way things should be. Why aren’t they?” And Americans don’t like to be behind, and we are so behind the rest of the world. So, I’m optimistic because of the American character. I’m very proud of being American. And I know that we want to get this right, and we won’t be frustrated by a few companies doing it.

There are all kinds of things the federal government could do, but setting the standard and declaring that this is a priority of the United States would be a very first step, and that the Obama administration did not do.

What I found was that Greensboro was sort of sinking into genteel irrelevance in a state that is booming really. Greensboro hasn’t really gotten over its past of excluding poor and Black people from the civic life, it was my finding, and can’t really see its way past its current Internet access situation, too. These things are really of a piece, so the reason why Greensboro is so important to the narrative is that the overall story here is that places that can think about fiber as part of the decent respectable life, just a basic affordance, can also think about treating everybody with respect and making sure that the entire community is thriving. That’s more and more true in places like Wilson, but it is not yet true in Greensboro. They haven’t made that turn. It’s still suffering from the past and kind of convinced that it’s important just because it’s Greensboro.

What I’ve found was that, although there’s some champions in Greensboro, they’re not gaining any traction because the local government isn’t really interested in fixing the Internet access situation which is dominated utterly by Spectrum and there doesn’t seem to be much will for overcoming this somnolence, really the sleepiness of the city’s business approach. That’s why it’s important. It was in contrast to these other places.

What she was really excited about was that her sons grades were improving because they could do their homework from home. She can’t get them to the library. She has no ability to drive anywhere and public transit in Wilson isn’t great. She knows that they are doing better and really focusing on grades because of the network’s presence in her home. She’s also getting new training, medical certification, for new sorts of jobs by having this fiber connection right there.

Whenever I tell this story across the country, people just gasp. Of course you should be able to just treat this like a utility and pay an affordable amount and have it present wherever you are, in public housing, expensive houses, wherever. Wilson really saw this through and they said, “Look, we’ve got this network cost going to public housing. We’re going to make this available to people in multi-dwelling units in public housing across the city, and we’re very proud of it.” It’s one of my proudest moments in this book was being able to report that, and then have other people from other cities just gasp when they hear this story.

This is essentially a natural monopoly service. It only makes sense to have one wire connection going to homes and businesses, and that wire should be fiber. The way to create competition, we’ve known for a hundred years, is to make sure that that facility is shared and shared according to really clear rules that keep the operator of the wholesale facility from having any incentive to pick and choose retail providers. That’s where we need to get, and the problem is that absent any restraint from law or oversight, these companies and legislators, everybody will act in their own self interest to keep the status quo in place.

Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.

Host Stacy Mitchell speaks with Maurice BP-Weeks, co-director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE). After spending years as a community organizer, Maurice now works with community organizations on campaigns that fight wealth destruction in communities of color. Stacy and Maurice talk about ACRE’s work at the intersection of racial justice and Wall Street accountability. They also discuss:

While that is true, I mean I think all your listeners probably know that that’s obviously true, it also doesn’t really quite tell the full story of intentionality and actual function and how the economy is working. So, it’s more than just dispirit impact, but the very design and baked into how our economy works is based on wealth extraction. Those are the things that end up causing those dispirit impacts. They’re not just going into a mystery box and then popping out of the other end. So, I think most everything that we experience as what we would identify as economic justice problems for black and brown folks are, can find their roots in this wealth extraction model, and therefore if we’re going to change them, we really have to go after the entities and the forces and the messages and everything that drive that model forward. So, that’s why we started ACRE and that’s the very short answer of what lies at that intersection.

You can take an example like the city of Chicago, which had what are called, I won’t get too wonky, but what are called interest rates swaps, which basically right after the foreclosure crisis, Wall Street firms sold this deal to cities like Chicago promising to save them money over time, but after the economy crashed, those deals were actually really really bad. Wall Street knew that this was going to happen and then didn’t let the cities out of the deal. It ends up costing millions and millions of dollars. Of course, when cuts need to happen in our cities because of these deals, they happen in communities of color. So, we hear often that financial arrangements that the city is in are the reasons that we have to cut services to black and brown schools or not provide lighting or parks, or some common decencies to black and brown neighborhoods.

I think that that’s one of the least visible immediately visible ways, but a huge way, that wealth extraction and Wall Street targeting of communities of color happens.

Given what you’ve outlined about the essentially extractive nature of the economic model, how do you present a vision of what the solution looks like? What is the economic model that upends that and changes it into something else?

Many of the cities quickly found out that not only is it really really difficult for them to pull out of Wells Fargo, the other places that they could possibly reasonably go were banks like Bank of America and Citibank, all which have really similar, if not the exact same practices as Wells Fargo. This really from unexpected sources brought the conversation of public bank back up to the top as, “Hey if this industry is just systematically extracting wealth from people, maybe we just need a new model.” I find that kind of thing really promising and really an opening for us as we reach this crisis in these extractive models where we’ll probably see a lot of them failing. I hope that we start to tend towards looking for public options like that more than not.

Unfortunately even today, you can still find some of the same things on the website. I think one of the things that it points to for … There’s many problems with Amazon’s role in our economy and our country. One of the things it really shows is that Amazon is really too big to deal with problems like this. They have a hard time really managing how to keep these things off of their website. It’s either that or they just really don’t want to. They really don’t want to develop the algorithms or hire the staffing to keep these things off our website. Really both of those are just unacceptable to us. It shouldn’t be listing up some of the worst hate speech in the country on the main platform for buying and selling things in the country.

So you look at that level of kind of minute control over what’s happening on the platform, and then you look at other things, white supremacist propaganda, you look at the counterfeit stuff that’s on the platform, and they don’t seem to have the same ability to police it or they sort of selectively police it. So it’s hard for me not to conclude that they’ve just decided it’s in their interest either because it’s just cheaper to be lazy or that they actually profit off this stuff.

So yeah, I think that it’s right to sort of call into question how Amazon is really enforcing these policies. I think it’s very important to do specifically for Amazon because they are such a large marketplace. They’re kind of the marketplace in the country, and they’re requesting so much from so many of our cities and states. You have to sort of be able to police hate speech if you’re going to be this large and request this much from the public in our view.

I remember, in the many instances where people really did lose their foreclosure fight, them having to move all of their stuff into the ACE office that day because they really had nowhere else to go and this all because of an unjust, totally, in some instances, illegal foreclosure that was happening. So that really deepened my really commitment and how hard I was fighting for things really and deepened my understanding of how terrible things can be because of how the economy is set up. So I cut my teeth doing real community organizing work and now run an organization that does campaigns and research.

One thing that I certainly learned doing organizing is that those two elements are very important. You sort of can’t move forward in broad scale ways unless you have a plan to make some of your organizing work connect to other things, so like a real campaign plan, and the research that shows you really who the main targets that you should be fighting are. So yeah, that’s how I got to what I’m doing.

Then at the same time, I mean we are right now having a nationwide debate on whether being a billionaire is a moral thing at all which that’s actual an important conversation to have. That money has come from other folks in this country and it is being concentrated in a way that I and thousands, millions of other people think is unjust. That’s an important conversation to have. There are more and more public figures that are sort of picking up that platform of “We need to really restructure the economy in bigger and bolder ways.” One of my favorite new Congress members, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, comes to mind with really proposing huge, big, bold ideas in her freshman term which is incredible. Even candidates that have been around for a while longer and may not have been as critiquing the economy as radically as someone like AOC, we’re seeing some of the messages of critique even seep into their language.

Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

Photo Credit: Bob Simpson via Flickr

Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.

Host Stacy Mitchell speaks with Leah Douglas, a staff writer and associate editor at the Food and Environment Reporting Network. As a reporter, Leah focuses on corporate power and political economy in the food sector. Her work sheds light on alarming consolidation in the food industry and its implications for farmers and consumers.

Leah Douglas, Journalist

Although grocery stores offer an illusion of choice with many different brands lining shelves, most brands are owned by just a handful of companies. Leah and Stacy unpack how consolidation in the food industry is bad for both consumers and farmers. They explore this problem by examining the poultry industry, where vertical integration of the supply chain has rendered chicken farmers dependent on the whim of their corporate buyers, forcing farmers out of business.

Stacy and Leah also discuss the dairy sector. Dairy farms have long been the backbone of many rural towns across the nation. Leah explains why the number of dairy farms in America has dwindled from 600,000 to only 40,000 today.

Stacy and Leah discuss how a major change in U.S. farm policy in the 1970s led to the consolidation we see today and the growing debate about whether we should reverse course and return to supply management, a policy approach that’s more conducive to independent farming. They also explore some encouraging examples of communities fighting back against giant corporate actors including the success of a small town in Missouri, which blocked a large scale livestock farm from coming to their community.

Tune in to hear how advocates, local communities, and states are taking on agriculture monopolies!

And so the reality is that as few as two or three companies control just an enormous percentage of the meat that we’re eating.

And then the company, the same company owns the distribution that comes and picks up the chickens, brings it to their company owned slaughterhouse and controls their own packaging. And often even transportation to the retail store. So that consolidation is not just that they control 50% of any one of those operations. But it’s the entire supply chain has become vertically integrated. And the role of the farmer has become diminished and along with that, the power of the farmer has also become diminished where farmers are now in most of these sectors price takers rather than price makers. And are really subject to the whims of their corporate buyers.

And so that’s getting some attention and momentum on capital hill and certainly shores up what a lot of advocates and farmers have been saying for a long time, which is that the farmers are controlled so much by the corporate processors and sort of the end buyer that they don’t have the authority and agency that we would associate with an independent business person.

That they should reevaluate whether the loans are actually serving the farmer or if they’re serving the corporation. So there’s been a little bit of movement on it. We’ll have to see whether the SBA does move ahead with shifting its loan giving practices.

And cooperatives were originally conceptualized in the sector as a means for farmers to have a bargaining power against powerful middle men. But over time the cooperatives themselves have become so powerful that now we see more like a relationship between the cooperative and the processor than the cooperative and the farmer. And so that has become a very difficult thing for many farmers to navigate. And particularly in the northeast, there is often issues trying to switch between different cooperatives. Farmers will find that other cooperatives aren’t taking on new farmers or that their cooperative has an unspoken agreement with the competitor that they won’t sort of poach each other’s farmers.

And so if farmers are struggling to make ends meet with the prices they have, basically their only option is to tough it out or to sell their cows. And that’s why we’re seeing such a dramatic drop in the number of farms.

I know that we’ve seen in California and Arizona these huge dairy farms with thousands and thousands of cows. Is that something that, if we can get cheaper milk through these big farms, isn’t that something that we should be in favor of even if we feel nostalgic about the lost dairy farm?

And I think that that’s a set of policies that, now, is seen as antithetical to capitalism, antithetical to American values, but we forget that that was our sort of guiding agricultural philosophy for a long time. And it was only the introduction of the idea of quote “free market” agricultural economy that overturns the plan management and moved us more towards industrial production and more towards the types of farming that we see today, such as you mentioned farms in California that have hundreds of thousands of cows for dairy production. And so I think that it’s important to recognize that there was a decision to make that transition that was federal policy-makers decided that this was the way we were gonna go for a variety of reasons and incentives, and that there are other models, if we look to other countries. For instance, Canada has always had certain types of supply management in their dairy economy. And if we also just look back to our own history not so long ago.

You’re listening to Leah Douglas, a staff writer and associate editor and the Food and Environmental Reporting Network. I’m Stacy Mitchell, with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, we’ll be right back after a short break.

Hello everyone. Thanks again for listening to Building Local Power, I hope you’re enjoying today’s episode. I wanted to take just a short break today to let you know about a few of the other ways that you can get involved with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. If you like this podcast, you might also really appreciate our newsletters, and we have several. The one that I’d recommend if you’re particularly interested in following issues of corporate concentration, a growing movement around addressing monopoly power, is our Hometown Advantage newsletter. It’s got our latest writing on corporate power, companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart, plus it’s got great stories and resources on how communities are effectively fighting back.

So you can sign up for the Hometown Advantage newsletter and all of our other newsletters by going to archive.ilsr.org, our homepage, and scrolling down to the bottom and clicking on the big, orange “newsletter” button. Thank you.

Alright, and we’re back with Leah Douglas, staff writer and editor at the Food and Environmental Reporting Network. So, just before the break, we were talking some about supply management, and I wanted to just dig in a little bit more to why that shift happened. As I understand it, in the early part of the 20th century, we used to have policies that, as you said, basically put a floor below which the prices that farmers were paid couldn’t drop. They had to get a minimum sort of price, and there was also a management on the overall supply so that the market wouldn’t become so flooded with milk, for example, that prices would crash and then farmers would be left not able to get the money they’d put in to producing milk back out of it.

My understanding, from looking at some of your reporting on this, is that that system seemed to work pretty well, that it was a pretty sustainable way to go for rural economies, pretty good for maintaining a good, affordable supply of food. Tell me a little bit about the moment when we abandoned that, and how that came about.

And so, as a result, in the decades shortly after that, there was a massive shift towards producing certain types of commodities very intensively in a practice that’s now called “mono-cropping,” which means planting the same crop over hundreds and hundreds of acres without much rotation, without much regenerative soil practice. And that was a period of time where we saw this major change taking place.

Though I will say, I think that these are still controversial ideas, and I think that there’s … I’ve heard from a number of farmers that the idea of particularly drawing land out of agricultural production in order to control supply is something that’s quite controversial because farmers feel very sensitive to wanting to work and the idea that certain land would not be worked in order to maintain a certain commodity level, is very unappealing to a lot of farmers. There’s certainly a good argument to be made there, too. So I think that there’s …What’s interesting, and I think unique, about this moment is just the amount of conversation and openness to new ideas and to pushing back on this sort of system that’s become so overwhelming and so the harms of consolidation are becoming so apparent that new partnerships are being made and new bridges being built between different types of producers who can all identify that this sort of era of corporate control is not serving them.

This is an issue for low-income families of all races and across the country, but it’s been a particular issue for black farmers in the Southeast, where there’s a very high concentration of heir’s property-owners. And so there’s been decades of advocacy done on behalf of those farmers and by those farmers to change some of the laws and regulations in USDA, the Department of Agriculture, because if you don’t have a clear title to your land, then you’re not able to participate in most types of USDA programs, including getting loans through the Farm Service Agency, which is known as quote, “the lender of last resort,” for farmers who have trouble accessing capital through other means.

And because farming is such a loan-dependent industry, FSA loans are really essential tool that heir’s property-owners have been boxed out of. And so, this farm bill, in large part due to the work of the Congressional Black Caucus, which really took on this issue, includes some stipulations that USDA is going to provide some services to families that own heir’s property to help them figure out who might be a clear owner to the land, and help them simplify their titles, and then also to lower the bar for accessing a farm number, which is the piece of information you need to get into these USDA programs.

So this is the first time that this issue’s been taken up by the farm bill, and it’s quite exciting for many advocates who have been working on the issue for a long time.

One area I think is really interesting is to look at certain laws that have been taken up by farm industry groups as sort of vehicles for deregulation even though on their face the laws are pitched as protections as farmers. So a couple examples of these laws would be Ag-gag laws which are laws that prevent documentation of farms, farming operations. And then some states it goes so far as to prevent even photo journalism or other types of public interest documentation of what’s happening at large scale farms.

Another bucket of laws that’s similar to this is right to farm laws which exists in every state. And are basically, were originally imagined as just protecting farmers from basic, sort of nuisance lawsuits. So if a neighbor didn’t like the smell of five pigs living next door they couldn’t sue the farm out of business. That bucket of laws has been taken up by the food industry and their perimeters have been greatly expanded through lobbying at the state level to encompass all types of restrictions on what farms can be sued for. So, and to be clear, when I’m saying farms, quote on quote, the visual is more like a contained animal feeding operation, a massive industrial scale farm, not a mom-and-pop operation.

Unfortunately, in the case where those CAFO’s are driven by a corporate factor, what we’ve also seen is that if one community succeeds at fending off the introduction of a new CAFO the company can pick up and move to the next state over or the next community over where maybe the people there have less resources, maybe they just don’t have enough capacity to fight it off. And they can then plant the CAFO there. So that’s another way where it can be still important to think about the national context of these corporate entities. Because as long as they still have that national reach they’re still able to move their operations around and dodge some of these fights. But with that particular example of, Lone Jack is the name of the town in Missouri, is quite optimistic.

Well that’s great. I have just a couple of last questions for you. I’m gonna ask you for some recommendations, both reading and drinking recommendations. But first, I was actually curious to know a little bit about how did you get into this? How did you become such a passionate advocate for food systems and so interested in reporting on it?

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Jeremy Schroeder, Minneapolis City Council Member

Host John Farrell speaks with Minneapolis City Council Member Jeremy Schroeder. Jeremy and John discuss the city’s plans to combat climate change, increase affordable housing, and make sure Minneapolis is accessible to all residents.

They explore how Minneapolis is working together with their utility companies to transition to renewable energy equitably by 2030 through the Clean Energy Partnership. The partnership serves as an alternative to the city taking over the utilities and instead hopes to leverage policies such inclusive financing to make sure folks that haven’t had access to energy efficiency upgrades are able to finance them.

John and Jeremy also dive into Minneapolis’ 2040 plan, a comprehensive zoning plan developed by the city every 10 years. The latest rendition of the plan includes a controversial change allowing up to 3 units on a single property. Jeremy explains how this density change will enable more affordable housing to be built and help mitigate historic redlining that has divided communities and kept people of color out of certain neighborhoods.

As Minneapolis is planning for a 10% population increase in the coming decade, Jeremy explains the importance of intentionally centering equity in policy discussions.

In the energy sector, the challenges for cities overlap as in more than 30 states including Minnesota, the utility companies that provide electricity or gas service have monopolies that are given to them by the state. Cities don’t control the utilities or where their energy comes from and yet, Minneapolis is one of a hundred cities that have, for example, committed to get 100% of its electricity from renewable resources in a decade. Jeremy, I want to start off by just asking you what I hope is a relatively simple question which is why has Minneapolis made this commitment to 100% renewable electricity?

You see cities step up with what they have and we’ve had to be pretty creative. We’ve had to really be scrappy about how we do that but it doesn’t supplement for what we would hope to see from the federal government and from our state government.

An example of one would be inclusive financing. It’s a policy that if we can word that everyone including the utilities is committed to working towards but again, that’s also in its infancy. If we’re able to have inclusive financing commonly called kind of a “pay as you save” model … I’m in the room with two experts, so if I pause a little, I’ve been waiting for you two to jump in but something like that is going to be able to let folks that don’t have access to energy efficiency, we call them “upgrades” but I mean, as time goes on, these are needed things for their household. They’re going to have access and if the utilities can help us leverage that as well as look out for their consumers, I think the Clean Energy Partnership would be a benefit.

Of these two thousand cities that have municipally utilities, most of them were formed 100 years ago and were the first utility to occupy that space but a few of them are the result of cities actually taking over using their power of eminent domain to basically buy out the utility company and you already kind of alluded to this, there’s some promise out there for this thing to develop. It’s already been going on for five years and I’m curious if you or maybe if other city council members that have been around a little longer following this are feeling like you’re getting near the break up point or if you feel like you still want to keep following through and seeing what can come of it.

I think the promise of the Clean Energy Partnership is still there, but as you pointed out, it didn’t start with me. It started many years ago and so the clock is ticking. We are watching the utilities pretty closely and pushing them because I think when the Clean Energy Partnership was started, it had the backing of all Minneapolis residents and I think that’s the power that the city brings forward to talk in that partnership. Another part of it is the residents are holding us accountable. We need to make this city a sustainable city. We need to see outcomes and that’s not just on the city and its enterprise but on the utilities as well.

In fact, I think they’re very close to issuing the final order for the takeover of the utility but all this time has been essentially just building up to, “Are we actually going to take over?” Meanwhile, the utility and the city haven’t really been able to work together very effectively. I think I share your optimism to some degree about this partnership being able to be a quicker way as you say but there is a lot of urgency, obviously, in terms of what we’re doing.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t address another major policy change that the city has recently adopted, so it’s not just an energy of course that cities are doing interesting things but across a whole range of stuff, so this is around the Minneapolis 2040 plan, or the new city comprehensive plan. I’m hoping you can start by just explaining for people like me who are not experts in things outside of the energy sector, what is a comprehensive plan? Then I have a few other things that we’d like to know about. What makes Minneapolis … Why is Minneapolis all of the sudden getting in the news for this comprehensive plan?

We’ve been doing it for quite some time now. This isn’t the first comprehensive plan and that kind of leads into some of the other questions but to go a little bit further of what it does is it really talks about kind of the high level of what kind of growth … Looking at our population projections, how much growth are we having? Where are you going to put new housing? Where are you going to allow for transportation? Where are you going to allow … Make sure if affordable, the housing is an issue for you, where would you put that, where would you put workforce housing?

All those questions are there and some of it, when you think about Met Council, they want to make sure you’re not putting your sewage treatment plant on the city line next to another municipality and vice versa. I think it’s how do you play all well together is kind of one part of it and why Minneapolis was getting in the news is we took that a step further and we took that pretty seriously on a couple different fronts.

One, zoning has been used historically as a way of redlining, as a way of dividing communities and a way of dividing the equitable growth of a city. We have a 2040 plan, it’s important to think about how we grow, how that wealth is distributed, how all the people that are contributing to this great city get their share of that and get some benefit. How can we do that?

One part was really making sure that there are more housing options throughout all the city. I mean, that’s something that we got, I think, a lot of local news. There’s a pushback as well as cheers for right now. You can go up to three units on a single lot that’s staying within the same setbacks to get a little bit more in the weeds.

Wouldn’t it be convenient for Minneapolis to stick it right on the border with Saint Paul and let them share in the unpleasantness, of course ignoring the fact the rivers are a border for a moment? We’re doing these plans every 10 years? Are they always forecasting out 20 years? Is that kind of the way it goes? It’s a 20 year plan every 10 years?

One of the things I would have liked to see more in the 2040 plan is really seeing it as a visioning document of what do we want to be as a community. Seeing that the type of growth we’re projecting is disruptive no matter where it’s going to be in the city, so how do we address kind of the ratio inequities that we still live with as we look at homeowner and income disparities throughout the city, how when we look at which parts of the city have access to transportation and what type of housing is available on every area.

If we really are about equity and access for all, what does that look like? I think some of that came out in the plan but for myself, the city did hundreds of meetings to form this document. I, myself, have been at over a dozen of them and I think there’s a lot of discussion of what people didn’t want and I would have liked a little more discussion about what we did want.

I remember in my first South Minneapolis neighborhood, which I think was also in your ward if I’m not mistaken, but I remember a woman who lived across the street who raised three kids essentially in the basement where they curtained off different bedrooms and I have that in quotes. Obviously, the style and the expectations of families were different.

Let’s just dive right into that kind of big meaty thing in the comprehensive plan. Obviously, there’s a lot of pieces to it but the thing that got all the attention was this notion of what can you build on a particular piece of property, so could you explain a little bit about how that changed? It probably will start to explain for people when you mention lots of folks came out to say what they didn’t want that this was in the cross hairs.

How do you encourage more people live in that same area? We have my own single family home where we live, we had a much bigger family living there and you see that throughout the city. In our area around, we have some bigger homes that could be easily broken up into duplexes. We actually have some rather small duplexes, World War One time that are already in the neighborhoods. It was really more about allowing more options than prohibiting anything. I think that got lost in the discussion too. It doesn’t prohibit single family homes.

If someone wants to build a single family home, that’s there, but what it also does, is expand what’s possible for seniors, for people on a fixed income, for new families, like being able to have those options that we don’t have.

One other thing I would add is between 2010 and 2016, Minneapolis had tremendous growth, so we are known for our affordability and for our housing options throughout the city that you had that choice. When we saw that growth, the affordable housing worked. People found it and people are there.

In our neck of the woods in South Minneapolis, I would say the affordable housing is working, but the issue is, we’re just out of it.

We see people coming in. They decide that the 1,500 square foot home that was built in the ’40s or ’50s is too small for them, for their single family, and they build a 2,500 square foot home.

I think one of the things, as you said, that got lost in the mix in terms of the changes, the size of the structure isn’t really what was at issue because people can already build a giant home on the property as long as they respect the setback and the height limitations and whatnot, so we’re really just talking about subdividing what could go on the property. Right?

They’ll be fewer people in the city and all we’re really saying is why don’t we subdivide our lots a little bit more so that we can allow them to live in different configurations than they did before. Does that pretty much capture what we’re talking about?

People were really concerned about what could happen. I think that a lot of folks really felt that we were going to see lots being combined that we would see bigger homes. One of the issues, I would say, was that early on, people started talking about … The earlier proposal was for four units. They talked about it as a four-plex.

What that really brings to mind, even to myself, like you think about those apartment buildings that are out to the property lines that are not as thoughtful about permeable surfaces and neighbors and all of those things. That’s what the image really was of. I think that people were worried about losing their community and that’s serious.

I mean, I think that the plans very different then their fear, but I think that the city needs to address what they’re afraid and be able to talk to how we are able to do our best to make all these goals possible.

It seems like this is going to address some of these different issues. I’ve now broadened my question way beyond what I wanted to, which is, maybe let’s just start with the issue about redlining and racial discrimination because for a lot of people, they look at this and say, “Oh, I don’t want my neighborhood to change.”

But there’s also a lot of people who live in Minneapolis for whom they have always been prohibited by policy in a lot of ways from being able to have the flexibility to live in different places, to be part of communities in different places. How does this help address some of those issues about for people of color, for example, being able to find affordable places across the city?

Our history has shameful examples of when we had families of color move down in neighborhoods around us and just the horror of what they had endure just to be able to have the right that every person should to be able to live where they want and where their means allow. That just wasn’t possible.

Where the 2040, I wouldn’t say that we’ve corrected that, but I would say we’ve stopped the needle. We have been able to, with the plan, look at our frankly shameful history and say, “You’re no longer going to be able to tell where people of a certain wealth are.” It’s zoned by something that goes throughout the whole city and tries as best as it can, to be equitable about it.

So by providing more options throughout the city, we’re hoping that we’ll be able to see more development that will allow more affordable homes, more homes that would fit the character.

I mean, we haven’t really talked really about the energy efficiency and resiliency and what the plan would do for that, but it’s the mixed communities are going to be the most healthy, those that have diversity of folks on income and background that are going to be able to be resilient and be able to thrive as their own small community.

It was obviously an interaction on the market where banks would say, “We’re not going to loan to people of color if they move into these areas.” It was also an economic pressure about, for example, the size of the lot and the size of the property, making it economically infeasible for folks who weren’t wealthy or to live in certain neighborhoods.

How might a neighborhood … How does this plan address that? So, if I’m in a neighborhood like I live in, where it is a lot of single family homes right now, and fairly large lots for an urban area, anyway, how might that change over time?

It’s going to change slowly because of course, most people aren’t going to change their property while they live there. It’s going to change when they sell. Previously, people would buy a small house and tear it down and build a bigger house.

So, that was the kind of change we saw in neighborhoods. What’s going to happen now that’s going to be different that helps to address that economic barrier that was there for folks of being able to, for example, and go to Hale Elementary School, where right now, it feels like you need to have $400,000 ready to buy a house to go to that school. We want to make sure that people have access of all means.

Something that I’ve been working on with the council president to make sure that when developers are developing, they are held accountable to having some affordable housing.

My goal is something that would be throughout the city and make sure that every neighborhood is approached equitably so that when people are looking at a home, regardless of their background, they will have some options available.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Building Local Power with guest Jeremy Schroeder, City Council member, from Minneapolis, Minnesota. This is the part of the podcast where you usually hear something about a mattress company or a meal delivery service, but the Institute for Local Self Reliance is a national organization that supports local economies, so we don’t accept national advertising.

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We also value your reviews on Stitcher, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much. Now, back to our discussion of cities and climate with council member, Jeremy Schroeder.

So, we’re back and I wanted to talk a little bit, I mean, the comprehensive plan is such an interesting thing, but I want to talk a little bit about some of the news that I was reading about it. Because as a resident of Minneapolis, like you said, it was in the local news all over the place. The discussions were going on.

They were lawn signs going up saying either people are saying my house is going to be bulldozed. There are other signs saying, we’re all happy to have more neighbors, but then I started, after the policy passed, reading stories in national publications.

Seeing them linked to on Twitter or other social media, people were like, Minneapolis is really done something about affordable housing in a way that other communities haven’t. You’ve addressed this notion.

The issue is essentially that not everybody needs a single family home and in a lot of our neighborhoods, there hasn’t been accessibility to the kind of housing that people need, or that we’ve essentially used it up in the growth that we’ve already seen.

So, I guess what I’m curious about is how much have we actually accomplished. We’ve got this comprehensive plan. How much does that reflect if I’m a developer?

Let’s just say, I’m a homeowner and I decide, you know what? I’m going to buy a house somewhere else. Like many people, I might want to rent out my current property but instead of just renting out this single family home I’ve got, I’d like to follow this new policy, build a three unit building there that could be some affordable housing, contribute to this goal of both addressing climate change by a little more density.

I’m addressing affordable housing. Can I just go do that now? Is it that easy? Can I build some more properties and go find a different house?

It’ll look at the city planners. Depending on the height and what change would be at that site. It may need to go through the planning commission and maybe city council itself.

All that stays the same. As things are … I talked a little bit about we have the comprehensive plan, but the next part is the zoning change. That’s going to be the part that you’ll be able to see what else is possible on the property.

The comprehensive plan is really the beginning. As I talk to my constituents and others concerned about it, just saying, you’re right to push if you have concerns, because this really sets everything else up. The comprehensive plan has these high level goals and the zoning really flows from that.

So while we still have to get into the specifics, the specifics are written from the comprehensive plan.

The goal of the zoning then that’s going to follow this is going to have to guide. The idea is going to be to establish some guidelines that you don’t have a lot of developments coming before the city council. Right?

You’re going to be trying to simplify this process so people understand, “Okay, if I meet X, Y, and Z, is there going to be like a cookie cutter standard for it?” I know it’s not the right term.

I’m trying to think about is this going to become easier for folks to follow than feeling like, I’m going to end up in front of my local neighborhood board with people talking about it. It doesn’t fit the character of the neighborhood because there’s always going to be two people like that on the neighborhood council, maybe five people. There’s a lot of them.

I keep thinking about, I used to serve on a neighborhood council in one of the wealthier areas of Minneapolis that shall remain nameless, and there were proposals, even for just the mother-in-law unit on the garage. Gosh, there were an awful lot of retired people that came out to say that nothing that changed the neighborhood at all was in the character of the neighborhood.

That’s what I’m curious about is will that get addressed as you go through the zoning process and whatnot so that stuff can actually happen or are we going to see … Are you, as a city councilman, going to spend the rest of your term reviewing development applications for triplexes?

I think the rest would also be a balancing act. Like, there are things that are important to the city. Like one, combating climate change. Making more affordable, making it accessible, the city accessible to everybody. These are goals of the city.

So if there is a way, how do we make sure that we have enough process to assure that the city goals are being reflected in the development that’s happening? At the same time, hold developers and others accountable to meeting those goals.

So, while the 2040 plan ideally, it is the zoning that comes after it. It’s easy for people to do developments. It’s easy to add on and do things that are going to fit with what the city is going toward in its goals as well as what fits in the neighborhood, but it’s something. I think it’s too early to say, like where’s that balance, because that’s rather tough.

I can give you an example through inclusionary zoning. It’s something that the city has tried to make it easier for a lot of developments as in the recent years, like a lot of things have been streamlined and in a pretty good way to help the development in some of the areas we wanted more economic development to happen, but it is something that when we’ve given those things away, these are things other cities have done. I’ve been able to offer as incentives and one example is parking. We really reduced, before I came on the council, reduced a lot of the parking, and that’s helped a lot of developments become frankly, a little more affordable, in scope, but also be something that a developer would push for.

If they were a little bit more pushing back on the ability to do more affordable units, that’s something the city, other cities, have leveraged to say, “Well, how about you do less parking and you can do this many more units?” That’s something we don’t have.

So, it really is a balance of how do we be a good place for people to invest in and really have people that are building buildings for 100 years. How do we have that and at the same time, make sure that we have our core goals of being a city for everybody and a city that’s going to be thinking about the next generation and our impact on the Earth?

Like developers, when you see a development go up, they plan for a certain amount of parking that they’re going to need just to get people to buy, either buy the units or rent the units. If that’s not possible, then they add that in. But that said, there have historically been an over, other cities have asked for a lot more parking because the fear is always the people will move in and this will disrupt the community.

It’s really that balance and in recent years, Minneapolis has moved away from that standard where other cities have kept a much higher standard for it and then they’ve been able to bargain down for other goals.

We seem to be moving toward a way that a lot of people are living now. Like, they’re graduating from colleges. They’re moving to an urban area. They’re maybe not owning a car.

How does this fit in with this whole notion of mobility, which is something that a lot of cities are focusing on and how is Minneapolis able to make sure that if people don’t have access to a parking spot, they’re still going to be able to get their way to a job, for example.

But, as you talk about the comprehensive plan and as we think about future in the city, it’s taking on a much different thing. Like transportation’s changing so rapidly right now. What we are seeing is that the things that millennials and like new college graduates are asking for are the same things that many seniors are asking for, and it’s something that makes a lot of people want in their community.

Some of that is not reflected in many Minneapolis communities. So, how do we have that growth be there? How do we really have that relationship with the community to know what they need? I know around us, people would love a coffee shop, south of the creek, and it’s just a where would it go in our current form? If there was development, how would we have a space for that?

It’s really on one hand, thinking about the development in that nuts-and-bolts, on paper, way, and also just doing the groundwork of talking to people, talking to neighbors, and really knowing what they would want if things were to change.

You alluded in our casual conversation over break that you’ve got a lot of new people on city council and you’re starting to get familiar with the fact that we maybe have a little more power to direct where the city’s going to be for its future than we thought of before.

How has Minneapolis been able to stand up to or even co-op some of these big players and what advice do you have for other cities in terms of them building their own sense of power and agency over some of these really knotty questions, whether it’s mobility or affordable housing or energy?

An example we talked about over the break was we’ve seen with my new colleagues, just an increase of awareness of the need for affordable housing and a push from city council members when developments coming up for having that.

Even seeing some developers come and say, “Well, we’ll do this much, a certain percentage,” and a council member going, “Well, you could do better than that,” and the developers come back with it.

I celebrate that as a win, but also want to take a pause and make sure that other cities learn that’s more than that. Like, we still haven’t fixed the system. We still don’t require affordable housing. Like, I mean, that’s something that an inclusionary zoning policy, it’s not going to matter who’s in those seats. The city itself will be just, and think about, how everyone can live here.

That level of change we haven’t hit yet and so that’s where something I work on, and my colleagues work on, but just know that work isn’t done.

The other thing for cities is really to bring together all these problems. As we think desperately about how we are going to combat a problem as big as climate change, while looking at the affordability crisis that we have in Minneapolis as well as other cities, as well as transportation and its impact on all of these. How do we bring that altogether?

That’s something where there’s so much going on in the energy sector, not just how energy is generated, but also how buildings are built. How do we live? How is transportation structured? All these things have ways that can be more sustainable and more resilient to climate change.

In the end, when it comes down to it, cheaper. We need to think long term and not just the point where we are now, looking towards what the change will look like, but look toward what the outcome will look like and look at, after a capital investment, are we going to be operating at a much cheaper rate?

I mean, we’ve seen some of that just with the change to LEDs light bulbs, to put it on a really small scale, but when you think about all the things from owning two cars to how our food systems operate, all these things, while they seem very daunting, that amount of change that would happen.

When you look five to ten years down the road, is that the world we want to be living in? Is that the way we want to explain the world to our kids? It’s a struggle and it’s tough, but that’s really where we have to go.

You’re in some ways taking on their interest, right? They have a particular way that they’re used to doing developments. Maybe they never cared about affordable housing. Maybe they like to do a lot of parking.

Do you feel like there’s any backlash? Do you feel like there’s any threat to a city in trying to tackle some of these thorny issues in a systemic way given that some of these are pretty powerful entrenched interests.

So when you’re dealing with a developer or others, they hear the same stories we do. I’ll also say that it’s not just me. It is every single person I represent. They have had their thoughts about what it is to succeed in Minneapolis shaken. It used to be you get your kids to the U. They get a good job.

You’ve done your job as a parent, but now, they’ve got that good job and they still can’t find housing. They still have to think about a really long commute in a place that’s far away from family. It’s something that’s going against our values and when people have that level of faith shaken, they’re on your side too. That’s really transcending everything from housing developers to utility companies.

It’s something that every elected official right now is being held to a different level of accountability and I think we’re better for it.

It really talks about what other cities across the world are doing. I just found it fascinating to see what’s possible, to really look at the really scary truth that we’re three days from our grocery stores being empty in any major city you go to.

The thought of why I have a garden that barely gets me a couple of salads a summer, so it’s something that we have to think very carefully. We have really become accustomed to how we’re living and we have to think very seriously about what our options are.

It carries these theories through to our age of Donald Trump. It’s really an instructive tool in understanding the basis for a lot of the political arguments that I think we’re living through today and engaging in today. I think it’s really deepened my understanding of what folks who may not agree with me are thinking and why they’re thinking it.

I read it maybe a little but smugly as a way to craft my own arguments better in those situations, but I think what it’s really given me instead is this deeper understanding of where conflicts exist in our current systems and equipped me with some tools to think more creatively about ways to overcome them instead of just smashing through them with new and better arguments.

That’s my grand hope for it anyway, and I guess it takes two to tango, so hopefully, we can come together with those we disagree with in a constructive way.

You can also find out more about the Minneapolis Clean Energy Partnership at ILSR.org/energy. While you’re at our website, you can also find more than 60 past episodes of the Building Lower Power podcast and show us some love with a contribution to help cover the cost of producing this podcast.

You can also help us out by rating this podcast and sharing it with your friends on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. This show is produced by Lisa Gonzalez and Hibba Meraay. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunctional. Please join us next time for another episode of Building Lower Power.

Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

Photo Credit: City of Minneapolis

Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.

Host Chris Mitchell speaks with community broadband pioneer Billy Ray. Billy is the Superintendant of the Glasgow Electric Plant Board, the municipally owned electric power, cable television, and internet utility for the City of Glasgow, Kentucky. He brings a plethora of experience in building local power as a longtime advocate for both municipally owned electricity and broadband.

Chris and Billy make the case for restructuring the electric grid and generating power locally rather than relying on giant, centralized utility companies that extract wealth from communities. Billy shares his insights on why it matters that electricity is generated locally and how making the switch can save customers money.

They talk about the parallels between the movements for municipal electric utilities and community broadband networks. The two also identify the ways in which the Internet fight against monopoly is almost word-for-word replaying the electric monopoly history. As a veteran of the movements, Billy explains what a difference it can make to get your internet from a community broadband network versus a monopoly Internet service provider, like Comcast.

Tune in to hear more about overhauling our energy system and Internet infrastructure and how far we’ve come in the past 30 years.

So I have been interested in all elements of local economies and local control and trying to implement pretty much the electric power micro grid concept with respect to all aspects of a local economy. There’s gotta be a way to make it work by eating your own dog food as I like to say, and concentrating on things that people are gonna buy that can be provided locally.

So I’m curious, you’re there in Glasgow Kentucky, a place that many listeners may not even be familiar with, but you’ve been thinking about small towns for what I can gather, is your whole life. So what are people missing today when you’re hearing news analysis on the TV and things like that about the way small towns should be thinking about their local economies?

And we operate a public power system and a public broadband network in this small community of 15 thousand people and it’s probably a rare board meeting that I’m involved in where if somebody wants to get way down in the weeds of the individual services that we provide and just look at the profit and loss characteristics of an individual piece of the puzzle without thinking about the whole puzzle. And really for a public power system, the whole puzzle should mainly be focused on, “How can we make people’s lives better in this community? And how can we keep this community from being used by some distant corporate board to feather their nest at the expense of our local nest?”

So yeah, I think that’s kind of a epidemic of people that don’t take the time to become fully involved or fully informed or even worse, they allow themselves to be pseudo informed by social networks or what have you and somebody quoting some kind of a indirect reference or just blatantly false reference to the success or failure of one of these networks, is the real problem as communities try to figure out how to make themselves stand on their own two feet. It’s not normally a five minute conversation to really consider all aspects of these things. They’re not simple and people really love simple these days. They like to make decisions based on a 40 column inch Facebook post and a lot of these things are just more complicated than that.

And the status quo with respect to electric rates is that they are just classically socialized. And it’s not that the people that are designing electric rate structures are socialists, it’s that we have for 100 years, used technology to measure electric power that provided not anything like enough information. For example, everybody gets an eclectic bill, it usually is based on kilowatt hours or some unit of energy that is not differentiated according to time and so it’s just a monthly charge.

But the utility that’s sending you that bill, when they either make the energy or buy it from someone else, they’re not buying it simple, wholesale rate environment like that, they’re paying different during every hour of the day depending on the mix of generation they’re having to run to provide that energies.

There’s a lot of information to be sent back and forth, information that is dramatically more important than have a better Netflix experience by virtue of having a faster broadband network. That stuff is okay but the center of the universe really is in enhancing the most complicated machine that man has yet constructed on this planet and that is the electric power grid.

So using broadband to make that grid work better and make it more capable of exploiting this practically free wind energy by helping people employ appliances and what have you that recognize energy at night is free. Lets figure out a way to heat and cool the house mainly at night and to restructure the way people use energy with the attempt of trying to make sure that we don’t ever have to build any new fossil fuel generation.

The electric utility business moves so slowly. And there’s some amazing dynamics that I’ve watched across the country as a few utilities have attempt … Every time it seems that a utility go to a state public service commission and asks to make a move in the direction that I’m talking about by restructuring the price of energy where that it’s more a fixed cost and the actual value of the energy going down to mimic the actual cost of producing it, public utility commissions have a knee jerk reaction, they’re against it. They wanna maintain the status quo.

Every customer or consumer advocate group known to man automatically, against it. It’s this struggle to help people who seemingly don’t wanna be helped. If you restructure the energy industry and price it appropriately so that people begin to demand less capital investment for serving loads that very wildly and unfortunately use most of their energy during three hours of the day, there’s no better way to help consumers than forbidding those additional capital outlays. But we’re struggling to get to that point because consumers apparently prefer the status quo, even though the status quo is screwing them.

Remember, the electric power industry is only 100 years old. It follows that we haven’t figured everything out, and we need to be open to learning from nature about how they have learned to manage energy and what is an effective microgrid. An individual human body is a microgrid.

So, let’s switch over to community broadband a little bit, just because being conscious of time, there’s so much more to discuss there.

Just noticed they’re about to do a one or two day seminar called Fiber University, to talk to … these are the same people that are operating the most complicated system on earth, the electric grid, but in 2019, we still need to have kind of an elementary explanation of what broadband is good for and why you might want to do it. That surprises me. I know there’s 10,000 cities across the United States, and everybody can’t do it all at the same time, but in 30 years, I would think that everybody could have done it by now.

So that gives an opportunity for those who want to extract wealth from the communities, to try to take it over, it seems like.

The whole concept of natural monopolies and being regulated by state public service commissions was invented to try to protect people, but by 2019, long before 2019, but that just happens to be when we’re talking, to a large extent the state public service commissions have succumbed to the siren song of the electric utilities, and often they are kind of a handmaiden of the electric utilities, and suddenly protector of the consumers, because they too find it really attractive to stick with the status quo, you know. Whatever we’ve been doing probably is good, and we outta just keep on doing that.

But if you really dig into the electric utility industry, and there’s a great book that I would highly recommend for any of you listeners that are turned on by any of this and want to learn more about it, the title of it is “The Grid”, flat cop flat footed here, I can’t remember who the author is. But it’s a really great book that explains all of this. I mean I bought 50 copies to get all of my team to read it, and every time I get I new board member, the first requirement is they’ve got to read this book.

I have a really good prediction about what life with Comcast is like in your city, and that is that you’re pretty much on your own. If you have some strange issue with your service that you can’t figure out, your download speed is not what it should be, you just are confused, that you got a new laptop and you don’t know how to get it set up on the system, my perception is that you might spend weeks trying to get your problem solved. It may take days out of your otherwise productive life if they need to make a site visit. And just the classic monopoly service, big company, little customer.

With respect to cable TV, and this is another absolutely economically perverse situation, but you know, even though all the prognosticators with respect to video entertainment write off cable TV, and I’m probably one of them, it’s going to be dead in X number of years, we just can’t figure out what X is. Everybody’s gonna go to streaming. Well the thing is, there is, percentage-wise, a huge number of customers that are never going to go to streaming. They won’t even use the program guide which is available on all the TV products that we sell now. They still change channels by the plus and minus key. And if somebody sits on that remote and gets it off of the right input where they can’t get that, they often … That’s the only entertainment option that they have, and they expect us to send a truck over there with somebody that will walk in the house and get their TV back on the right input.

And that’s a service we provide. It’s economically insane, but it makes happy customers. We understand that that’s the basis for our existence is because we live in a rural area. People are not going to get this stuff made easy for them. They didn’t get it in 1910 with electricity, so the public power concept came along where people would teach them how to use their washing machine, and it’s just being repeated again in 2019, or in our case, since 1988 when we started building this network. We recognize that it’s fairly easy to get a flow of electrons or a flow of bits to go through conductors and arrive at your home. It’s much more difficult to democratize the technology which is constantly evolving. But that’s the difference … You asked what the difference is. That’s the difference.

I understand where our customers are. It’s more than an inconvenience. It can border on fear that I’m not going to be able to live my life here because this system, this technology is broken down. You know, we understand that the basis for the electric power utilities, at least the public ones, were born of that same fear.

But I want you to tell me about you going to be a guest of President Clinton’s at the time. What was happening around there?

Once, when I was … They had a press release to talk about this, and I got to make a talk at the National Press Club. And that night was the State of the Union address, and they told me to be at a certain bar right there on Capitol Hill right there at a certain time. I showed up and they gave me a ticket to get into the House, which didn’t get you into the chamber. And then somehow, before the speech started, they handed a ticket that was going to let me get on the floor of the House. No more instructions other than that.

Well, you know, I’m just an old boy from a little town in south central Kentucky. And so I went to the door keeper person and presented the ticket and he opened the door and let me in. Of course, there was no place to sit. Every place I tried to sit was taken by somebody important. And I got run out of a couple of seats and I finally wound up just standing through the whole address and President Clinton finished.

Since the only place I could find to stand was right in one of the doors that goes onto the floor of the House … So when it was over and the doors swung open, I was the first one to leave because I was standing in the door.

The only place I knew to go was the last place I had seen my host, which was the office of the guy that introduces the President at the State of the Union address. I can’t remember if it’s the Sergeant-at-arms, or what the right term is.

I turned back around from opening a beer and I was looking right in the face of a Secret Service guy, and right behind him was the President. And so I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next, so I just said, “Mr. President, that was a great speech. Would you like a beer?” And he said, “I’d really like that, but I’d better not.” Of course he was hoarse, sounded like he really needed one. He asked me who I was and I told him. And I’m going to tell you, he said, “Oh, Glasgow. That’s the place where y’all built the community broadband that worked.” I said, “Yeah! That’s right!”

So he either was just a voracious consumer of information, or these guys told him I was going to be there, but I left there impressed. I have no proof of that because there were no pictures made.

Yeah no, it is amazing to think of how little has changed, just looking at this and the same sort of discussions. But I do think we’re at the precipice. And I’ll say that in five years, I think things are going to look different, finally.

Well thank you so much for coming on. It’s always a pleasure to hear from you, and I’m really glad to know that you stuck around in Glasgow. Because I think it’s easy for people to hop from job to job to job, and it’s hard to see something through. And I’m glad that you saw it through and have continued to inspire people.

Thank you all for tuning in to this episode of the Building Local Power Podcast from the Institute for Local Self Reliance. You can find the links we discussed today at ILSR.org, 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 the Internet socials. Take a second to rate us, or even shout the name of this show out a window. I’m pretty sure that’s how word-of-mouth works.

This show is produced by Lisa Gonzales and Hibba Meraay. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunctional. For the Institute for Local Self Reliance, I’m Chris Mitchell. We’ll be back in two weeks. Let’s build local power!

Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

Photo Credit: Rennett Stowe via Flickr

Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.

Host Chris Mitchell is joined by ILSR Co-Directors Stacy Mitchell and John Farrell for a year in review. The trio take a look back on developments in the movement against corporate concentration in the past year and reflect on what more it’ll take to grow local power in 2019.

Stacy explains how public opinion on Amazon has shifted this year as more and more people realized the search for HQ2 was really a play to gather data and further advance Amazon’s stranglehold on the economy. Chris and John discuss how they saw the truth about Amazon come to light in the media.

They also discuss massive shifts in the energy sector, as batteries proliferated this year making it possible for people to store the renewable energy they produce locally. John details how individual actors are collectively transforming the energy system, including the million customers in California that have installed solar on their own rooftops.

Tune in for a lively recap of 2018!

The big question on my mind is will Santa sleigh the monopolies? That’s my big hope for the end of the year.

I mean, you know, it’s funny, we were talking a little bit about how we were afraid won’t think it’s very exciting, but frankly this is just the future of like whether or not the planet is habitable, what price we’re paying for energy, and things like that. So we’re going to talk about what John’s been looking at and the timeline in which the entire electric system is changing, where we get our energy from.

We’ll talk a little bit about broadband regarding AT&T buying Time Warner and the Department of Justice really trying to challenge that, even though it has kind of a flawed argument and it seems clear that the world is stacked against it.

But let’s start, Stacy, with Amazon, a year in review. And is it two years ago you released your big Amazon report around this time?

And then this year was a moment when people started to really look at what those intentions are and became increasingly concerned about the ways that Amazon’s tentacles are reaching into every part of the economy, and not just dominating markets, but really controlling markets in ways that are deeply disturbing.

But I think … You know, I think there was … You know, that acquisition I think got some people starting thinking, but then, you know, Stacy has been relentless in terms of putting out more information to help people understand what’s going on, so she had a report about procurement and the way in which Amazon is involved in public procurement that I saw, you know, circulate in a lot of circles.

I saw her stuff about H2Q as that decision was kind of coming to an end, so I … To me it’s like within the last six months all of a sudden it has gone from being like there were a couple of different like select pockets of people that were caring about this, economists, you know, folks that look at online shopping or something like that, and all of a sudden now everybody is talking about it, like this is the thing to focus on when you talk about concentration in the economy.

And then Amazon at some point in the year announced that they’d whittled the list down to 20, and there was another like flurry of media coverage. And then something began to happen in right around September of this year. I think a lot of people started to realize that this whole thing was a ruse. I mean it was like it had worked as a publicity stunt for them for months and months and months, and then something started to shift in the public consciousness.

And it was really interesting to watch, because the reporting started to change. Amazon, the way that they talked about it, started to change, so it was really clear that people suddenly started to think oh, this is a company that is using its power to gain government favors, to manipulate all these local governments into turning over this incredibly valuable data, and that this was really a ploy by a monopolist basically that’s a threat not just to the economy and like the opportunity that we have as workers and producers, but like a threat to democracy and to like our ability to run our own cities and our own lives.

And even at times I remember thinking oh, like I agree, but I don’t want to alienate, you know, my few followers that still listen to me by just harping on Amazon. But definitely toward the end it seemed like everyone was saying this is not good and this is a sign that something is wrong.

Now let me ask you this Stacy. You were on the Hasan Minhaj show, The Patriot Act, on Netflix, talking about this, an entire episode about Amazon and antitrust. To me that’s another sign that things have shifted. What did you take away from like a popular show aimed at a non-policy audience talking about this?

And I got a little … As you mentioned, a little cameo along the way in his montage on Amazon, and I just … It was so encouraging, because I thought there’s a way in which this has entered the mainstream popular discussion. I couldn’t have ever guessed that this would happen, but it’s critical, because I think, you know, we have, as you noted, economists and some policymakers and other folks who are looking at this and are deeply concerned about Amazon and about monopolies in general.

But what is going to actually make action happen is going to be popular will. And so the fact that this issue is resonating, I think people in their own lives know that there is something fundamentally wrong with economy. We’ve got polling on this now that shows that most people, the vast majority of people in both parties believe that monopoly is a problem, that big companies have too much power, that our local economies, or job opportunities are all being squeezed by these company.

So I mean it’s interesting in the context of Amazon, because there’s this way in which we’re sort of of two minds. A lot of people enjoy Amazon as consumers, and at the same time are deeply concerned about its power, and those things can be true at once, and we really saw that this year.

And then all of a sudden we start to see New York City Council members re-tweeting Stacy’s stuff and saying hey, this is really kind of crappy, like this might not actually even be a good deal for us. We don’t want to be an HQ2 city. We could more profitably invest this in a lot of other local initiatives.

So I think that’s where for me it felt like this notion that Amazon is a problem really had some traction. When you have cities willing to turn down the potential to host this headquarters and say actually we have lots of other ways we think we can support our economy that are a much better deal.

And, you know, I think John is right. I mean I was surprised, and it’s been great to see … I sort of expected that people would be maybe upset about the subsidies and there may be some debate about getting something in return for those giveaways, that kind of thing.

But instead what we’re seeing is people are like definitely no subsidies, and we don’t even think we want Amazon here at all. And it spoke about we don’t want to be part of supporting this monopoly and all of the negative impacts that it’s having, but it’s also like looking at what this is going to mean Queens and all the ways in which local people are going to lose because of Amazon.

It’s just galling too when you have the world’s richest man … I mean Jeff Bezos is worth something like $160 billion. It fluctuates, but something like that. The idea that taxpayers, in a state where the school systems are really struggling and there are a lot of other problems, are going to be ponying up this incredible amount, billions of dollars. It’s just so galling to people. There’s something about that that I think is really crystallized what’s at stake with Amazon.

So I’m curious if you can respond to the argument that New York, even though they’re giving all these subsidies, is better off because Amazon is coming because of how it’s structured?

I mean the reason Amazon is going to New York and also the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC is because that’s where they think they can find and attract the tech talent that they need, and that’s the only reason. The reason they split the HQ2 into two locations is because they recognize that they wouldn’t be able to find enough of the right kinds of workers in one locations, so there are very few places that actually work for what it is that Amazon needs.

So, you know, a smart negotiating strategy on the part of the city is to recognize that and say oh, you need to be here. You need New York, so what is it that you’re going to do to support this city, to help us alleviate affordable housing, the strain on the transportation system? I mean that’s the right way to go into that negotiation, instead of let me figure out how we can give away, you know, the public bank to a private entity.

So it’s all these second tier cities, and rural areas and small towns are really struggling. And one of the things … At ILSR, we’ve been getting a lot of email for the last couple of years about dollar stores. People writing us and saying, “I’ve got Dollar General coming in, and we’re really concerned about what it’s going to do to the community, or maybe after it’s come in, the impacts that it’s having.” And so we decided this year to take a deep look at this. And Marie Donahue on our staff led our research on this and started looking at this question of dollar stores. Dollar stores had a … The two major chains, which are Dollar General and Dollar Tree, which owns Family Dollar, they had about 20,000 locations in 2011, at the end of the financial crisis, and today they have about 30,000 locations. And they have plans to grow to a total of 50,000 locations in the next few years. They’re expanding in places where they feel like that the economy is hopeless and that they can find sort of a permanent state of poverty and economic distress.

And we’ve now … Since this report came out, we’ve just been inundated with email messages and Twitter messages, people telling their own dollar store stories from New Orleans, Detroit, rural Louisiana, and there’s this consistent pattern of these companies targeting areas based on race.

And then I think you’re right. I think another part of this may be that they think, “Well, these are areas that don’t have political power.” I mean, in Tulsa there are dollar stores that are sometimes just a few blocks away. I mean, they’re packing them into this district. And I wonder if these companies think, “Well, if we try to do that in a whiter neighborhood, we probably wouldn’t get away with it.” But there’s a lack of political power, at least that they perceive. In the case of Tulsa, the neighborhood has fought back, and they’ve now passed an ordinance that has become a model that cities across the country are looking at. So it’s great to have a story of some of that political power coming back.

And so … You used the term food desert there, which is that one plausible explanation, right? They’re coming in where there hasn’t been a grocery store. But in some ways, it’s more like grocery deforestation, right? It’s Wall Street coming in and saying, essentially, “We’re going to eviscerate this neighborhood by not lending to the people that live there, to the entrepreneurs that would provide the full service grocery store, or any of the other kinds of services. Instead, we’re going to back these extractive companies that come in, build overwhelmingly to drive out other local merchants that would help retain some local wealth, and not even give people access to the basic things that most people expect in a neighborhood, like a grocery store or fresh produce.”

Walmart, in the region, has pulled all the dollars away for the most part and then left these places that are like a denuded landscape. It’s like an ecology. It’s like when you have a landscape that’s been compromised in some way. And then the dollar stores are like the invasive species that prey on that and just multiply and come in. And in doing so, they’re not just a symptom or a byproduct of the deeper problem, they’re also making it worse. They’re coming in in such numbers that they make it hard for new local businesses and grocers to get started.

And in some cases … I mean, they’re not just going into food deserts. As we talk about in the report, there are a lot of places where they’re going in and there is still a local grocer that managed to hang on through Walmart and all the rest of it, and the dollar store is the thing that tips them over and causes them to close. So you’re right, we’re increasingly living in this world that’s two different places. There’s Whole Foods land and then there’s dollar store land, and people don’t cross over very much. And if you live in Whole Foods land, it’s very hard to even see that there is a dollar store land.

So, my turn to ask the question. So the first one I have is … It’s the end of the year, and we’re in our big annual fundraising drive to try to scare up the donations that matter so much to us, and to what we’re able to do in 2019. So Chris, why do you think people who are listening to this should chip in to help ILSR?

But the fundamental effect is that it’s organizations like ours … I mean, in particularly, I would plug Stacy. There’s a reason we put so much emphasis on your work at the end of the year. There’s no one else doing the kinds of stuff you’re doing, and we need people to support that, to make sure that we can keep doing it.

ILSR tries to do that in all of the different pieces of the economy, to help us understand, how is it that the players that are out there work? Who is it that has the power in the economy, and in what way are they trying to use that power to either advantage or disadvantage our communities? And so Stacy’s work does that with Amazon. Your work does that to help people understand that basic question of access to the digital economy. In my work, we talk about the fact that energy is this opportunity to transform to not only an environmentally benign way of doing business, but a way that communities can keep wealth in their economy.

Our Waste to Wealth program talks all about all of these inputs into our system that can be preserved, rather than burning them or throwing them away. And we fundamentally do that in a way to explain how there are these incumbent powers that have a way of doing things that may not be good for our economy, and how to understand not only why that might be harmful to us, but how we can solve that at the local level. And there’s just not a lot of other organizations that take that perspective.

And you know, I think the one other thing I wanna say is that individual donations are really important. We are supported by foundation grants and those are incredible, but individual donations do make up a significant share of our funding. They’re the funding that gives us some flexibility to do some of the most important work that we do and those individual donations, they come in amounts of 50 dollars and 500 dollars and they really matter. So, really appreciate everyone who’s listening, if you can think about us as we head into the end of the year.

This is the year where there were huge increases in people installing solar behind the meter, which is to say they installed it with a solar array, they were using it to store energy at home. It’s also interestingly enough, a year in which a major US Midwest utility just announced that it’s going carbon free by 2050. And these things are happening at the same time and in some interesting ways and creating some interesting tensions.

It’s huge, but the bigger thing, even the amount of power that’s generated by all those installations, is the fact that all of these people made that decision, not because they want to be a little power plant operators, but because it made financial sense for them. And that’s really the crux of what’s happening all of a sudden in the energy business is, you have all of these individual actors are wanting to act together individually or collectively, they can make decisions that impact our energy system, but that aren’t done through this traditional top down planning method and that don’t rely on the incumbent utility.

And the real difference is that, because we don’t have to deploy that capital in billion dollar chunks to accomplish good things in the energy sector, those decisions can be made by anybody. So you’re absolutely right, people have this notion like, “We can only make decisions if they’re big.” And especially in the energy sector, where we’re facing this climate crisis. People are like, “Well the only thing we can do is big things because this problem is so big.” Missing the fact that all of these little decisions often add up to faster reactions and more substantial steps towards solving the problem. And the perfect example of this is, in Minnesota right now, this utility company, this big utility it serves half the customers in the state, it said, “We’re going carbon free by 2050. We don’t totally know how we’re gonna do it, but we’re gonna do it.”

And the thing is, it’s a great commitment, I’m excited about it because it sort of helps set a standard in the public consciousness for what can happen. And yet at the same time, we’ve just installed hundreds of megawatts of solar in community solar arrays that are owned by third parties, that are subscribed to by tens of thousands of Minnesota residences and businesses and the utility had nothing to do with it. And so, people sort of miss that fact and unfortunately what’s gonna happen is that when the big player decides to make this commitment, they also have some big asks. They’re gonna be at the legislature this year saying, “Hey, in order to meet that goal that we set, we have these two big nuclear power plants, they’re getting kind of expensive to run. We’re gonna need to fix them up and we would like you to take the risk of fixing them up for us. It’s probably gonna be billions of dollars.”

And the worry that I have is because they made a big commitment that people see as important and because they’re a big player, we’re gonna give them a big handout instead of thinking about, how could we spend … Best spend, for example, five billion dollars on clean energy? Is it really to give a handout to the big guy or would we be better off investing it into all of the ways that small individuals or cities could make investments in clean energy?

Thank you for tuning into this episode of, Building Local Power. You can find links to what we discussed today by going to our website, archive.ilsr.org. That’s archive.ilsr.org. While you’re there, please consider supporting our work with a donation. And if you enjoy this podcast, please consider sharing it with your friends. This show is produced by, Lisa Gonzalez, Zach Freed and Hibba Meraay. Our theme music is, Funk Interlude by, Dysfunctional. For the Institute for Local Self Reliance, I’m Stacy Mitchell, joined today by John Farrell and Chris Mitchell. I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks with the next episode of Building Local Power.

Correction: An earlier version of this podcast referenced maps of dollar stores in Tulsa that misrepresented the relative strength of the correlation between dollar stores and household income. These maps have been updated in our feature on dollar stores, and the podcast audio and transcript have been edited to correct this error.

Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

Photo Credit: arcticpenguin via flickr

Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.

Terry Craghead, Founder of Fertile Ground

In this episode, host Brenda Platt speaks with Terry Craghead. Terry founded Fertile Ground, a worker-owned cooperative collecting and composting food scraps on a small scale in Oklahoma City. They discuss the power of community composting to transform the monopolized waste system and build up the local economy by reducing food waste, creating jobs, and combatting climate change.

Terry got started in his own backyard by composting scraps from his garden and using the resulting soil to grow food with neighbors in a community garden. Today, Fertile Ground has nine worker-owners and is part of the growing community composter movement across the country.

Brenda and Terry also discuss worker-owned cooperatives and how setting up a business as a cooperative allows the workers to earn a livable wage, build wealth, and cycle money back into their local community.

Listen in to hear how community composters are playing a vital role in building up their local economies!

We ended up meeting up and we organized what became CommonWealth Urban Farms, which was this hybrid volunteer nonprofit community urban farm where volunteers would come every Saturday. We would compost together, learn how to grow food together, and it was really that experience that I saw the amount of waste that was produced. We had a partnership with one local grocery store and we had volunteers that would come three days a week and we would process food waste from this local grocery store. Just seeing that amount of waste was really the impetus for low ground I thought, “Wow, this is so much waste from one store. We should knock on doors of restaurants and see if we can organize something to divert more of this food waste from the landfill and create soil that we could grow good food in.”

Then it increases the organic matter of your soil, so over time composting, adding it to your soil, adding it to your yard helps sequester carbon from the atmosphere by feeding those microorganisms in the soil. It’s like one thing that’s so simple that we can do that has so many benefits includes water quality, air quality, soil quality, plant quality or human health. It’s just kind of a no-brainer that we’re not doing this at a bigger level than we are.

Often that compost has the vegetative seed in it, which then grows and becomes this kind of vegetative infrastructure. These products are so cool and I love that a lot of what fertile ground is doing is partnering with other groups. Can you talk a little bit about your many partnerships and collaborators? We found that, surprise, small-scale composters are rooted in their community and they have so many community relationships and partnerships.

There who we bring our commercial scale compost to, we drop that material off with them and then they use that screen, that compost and sell that in the community. We have partnerships with local peace and social justice groups, we do Zero Waste Events for those folks. There are so many partnerships and friendships and people that we support. The local businesses that we serve in our composting service. When we’re on our social media feed, we’re often sharing things that they’ve got going on, but when we’re buying gifts for our families, we’re stopping off at Black Scintilla and supporting local businesses. Buying local foods from Urban Agrarian, Oklahoma Food Cooperative, other local food producers here in Oklahoma City to try to grow this local economy.

Give it away to a food panty, to a homeless shelter. Find community partnerships. There are people who are hungry, who will eat good food if we can just think a little bit farther ahead. There are Good Samaritan laws in place that protect folks who want to do good, who want to make sure hungry people are eating. All of these things work together, this big circular system of reducing waste, protecting the environment, building community, feeding people, creating local jobs. They all work together, and I think it’s a much more resilient way of building our communities, and of doing life together.

There are no technology obstacles to doing this. It’s really getting your local community to agree that you want to move towards a zero waste economy, or you want to recover food scraps. You want to do it in a distributed way. There’s a hierarchy, a priority of the things you can do. I think you’re leading the way in Oklahoma on how this can happen, and I hope you can spur many other businesses to do the same throughout your area and city, and hopefully you’ll be able to get your city on board with supporting your efforts. We have to take a break now. To learn more about Fertile Ground, please check out its website at FertileGroundOK.coop. When we come back we’ll dive into why Fertile Ground’s business is structured as a worker owned cooperative, and the benefits of such coops.

Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Building Local Power. This is the part of a podcast where you usually hear an ad, but that’s not how it works on ISLR’s podcast. We are a national organization that supports local economies, which means we don’t accept national advertising. Please 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, like the one we’re discussing today. Please take a minute and go to ILSR.org/donate. Any amount is welcome, and sincerely appreciated. That’s ILSR.org/donate. Thank you so much, and now, back to our discussion with Terry Craghead of Fertile Ground.

So, Fertile Ground is organized as a worker owned cooperative. Explain to our listeners what a cooperative is, and specifically, what’s a worker owned cooperative?

We have a bigger network of supporters as a coop. When you just have one person who’s the business owner, they have their network of friends and family that support them, but being a group of nine people now we have a broader network of support when we’re trying to fundraise, build business. We have a lot of people supporting us, and then just the synergy of working in a group that’s building something bigger, that’s working towards a goal. The interstitial characteristics of people. When my motivation is done, I’ve got a teammate, a partner. They it’s like they are motivated, and it’s not all just about what’s going on in my personal life. I have the benefit of a team that can help build me and lift me up, and then likewise, I help build them up and get them going. That’s just a few of the benefits, but those are a few of the things that just come to my mind immediately.

We have a member fee of $2000 to join Fertile Ground, and we have a process for folks who join. You have to work with us for six months. You have to go through training of worker-ownership, what does it mean to be a worker-owner, and then set up some kind of payment plan for your membership share. Maybe you don’t have $2000 upfront, but you could set up a payment plan and pay that over a period of four years, and then you’re voted on by the members in the co-op, “Is this going to fit? Is this going to work?” Then, yeah, that’s kind of how folks become members of our co-op.

In other parts of the country, like in Flagstaff, Arizona, there’s Roots Composting, and that’s another whose philosophy is really rooted, pun intended maybe, not just making a profit but also providing an array of community benefits while making compost or soil amendments. It’s really been exciting to see the growth in this kind of business-entity structure, and the benefits that brings, not only to the scale of their community composting enterprise, but also the benefits it brings to the community in terms of community wealth. That’s one thing I want to ask you about is how does your work or cooperative differ in terms of the flow of money or building wealth in the community compared to a conventional business?

There are financing resources for worker co-ops. There is a National Cooperative Lending Organization that co-ops from around the country are members of, and they invest their money into Shared Capital Cooperative, and then Shared Capital then turns around and loans money to cooperatives that are maybe start ups or doing an expansion or doing a conversion, where employees are buying the business from their aging business owner who’s retiring. Then the workers can own and run the business. Shared Capital is an excellent resource. Check them out, sharedcapital.coop. There’s Local Enterprise Assistance Fund, the Cooperative Fund of New England, the Working World. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development, they do grants around the country for worker co-ops. They have local grants, and then they have big national grants. We’ve gotten a lot of support through the local Catholic campaign here in Oklahoma City through Catholic charities.

There’re also crowdfunding platforms. There’s a lending platform that we’ve used in the past called Kiva U.S., and so you can borrow up to $10,000 in microloans at a 0% interest rate from people in your community and all around the world. Then there’s also a new crowdfunding equity platform, so folks from all over the world can invest in your business, and you can set up non-worker-owner class of shares in your company. One way of doing it, a preferred stock so that the workers retain control and ownership of the business, but folks could maybe pull their money out of the stock market, and instead of investing and hoping for a return of 10% on their investment, they can invest in this community-oriented enterprise, and they’re willing to accept maybe 3% return on their investment. They don’t get a say in the major decisions of the co-op, but they know that their money is going to something good. That equity crowdfunding platform is called Crowdfund Main Street, so check them out. Those are a few of the things I would point people to

Finally, you can help us out with a gift that helps produce this very broadcast, gets us great guests like Terry Craighead, and helps us provide original research and technical assistance. Once again, please help us out by rating this broadcast and sharing it with your friends on iTunes, or wherever you find your podcast. This show is produced by Lisa Gonzales and Hibba Meraay, our Communications Manager. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I am Brenda Platt, and I hope you join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

Photo Credit: Ben_Kerckx via Pixabay

Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.

In this episode, host Stacy Mitchell speaks with Kimber Lanning, founder of Local First Arizona. A seasoned entrepreneur and community development expert, Kimber has made it her life’s mission to cultivate self-reliant communities. Her work focuses on implementing systems and policies to ensure a level playing field for entrepreneurs.

Currently only 7% of Arizona’s total deposits are in Arizona-owned banks and credit unions, well below the national average. Kimber started the “Move Your Money” campaign to encourage cities, businesses and individuals in Arizona to bank with local banks. Stacy and Kimber discuss how crucial access to credit is for small businesses and how community banks play an important role in providing that credit.

Kimber’s record store.

They also discuss land use policies and Phoenix’s innovative approach to turning vacant buildings into great spaces for local businesses. Thanks to shifts in zoning policy, more than 125 new businesses have moved into and renovated formerly blighted and abandoned buildings in Phoenix. Local First Arizona built a strong case for preserving, rather than tearing down, older building stock, in part by showing how historic mixed use areas provide a better environment for local entrepreneurs than new development. Because of their efforts, Phoenix has the most effective adaptive reuse program in the country.

Kimber also explains how Phoenix’s government decided to spend no money with Amazon — in contrast to many cities that have turned over much of their procurement to the online giant. Instead, Local First has built a database of local business to help Arizona cities spend their money locally.

Listen in to hear more about how Arizona First is leveling the playing field for small businesses and how other states can follow suit!

Under Kimber’s leadership Local First Arizona has grown to a membership of more than 3,000 independent businesses across the state. Kimber herself is an entrepreneur and she’s also a community development specialist who works to cultivate strong, self-reliant communities and inspire a higher quality of life for people across Arizona.

Kimber, welcome to Building Local Power.

I think it’s important to understand that as we grew, the chain model, the model of chain store was actually also hitting its stride. They didn’t have to fight any brand loyalty that was already here. They could just come on, set up shop and people would support them, particularly if they were coming from another area that we had a lot of transplants from. You could take a company like Culver’s that was popular in Chicago, they’d set up shop here, and there’s a bazillion people from Illinois that would immediately flood their stores because the people that are living here that came from Illinois, they don’t put their roots here, they want to bring Illinois with them. And that shows in everything from their habits in terms of commerce to the landscaping choices that they have. They brought their grass and their pine trees with them or oak trees or other such things that are not native to the desert here.

I think that the first thing to contextualize in Arizona is that it’s taken us a minute to figure out who we are because everybody moved here and tried to convince us who we were, and there weren’t enough local Arizonans to say, “No, that’s not who we are. This is who we are.”

When we started Local First Arizona it really resonated with people. They went, “Yeah, wait a minute. You’re right. There are local businesses here and they don’t have a voice and they’re being overrun by chain stores. Let us link arms and do this.”

I think it catches people off guard how large we’ve grown, but really I think it was a matter of resonating with enough people that we really needed it. You don’t need to go to New York City per se and say support local businesses because people are already doing that by and large. Now they’re just facing an influx of change now, but we already went through all of that and now the local restaurant scene is striving over the chain … We’re seeing chain restaurants close left and right.

We’re also seeing banks cut off capital in rural areas at an alarmingly high rate. When the last bank pulls out of a small town, it’s hard for that small town to survive. This is an issue we’ve been drawing attention to, and I think that it’s one of those sleeping giant issues that everybody should be moving their money into local credit unions or community controlled banks, that it’s just sort of like keeping an eye on your money. You need to know where it is and where it’s invested. If you have it in one of those three big banks, then frankly you have no idea where it’s invested and somebody’s making money off of you that could be in a very non-values aligned manner.

Tell me a little bit about like as you’ve been delivering this message about local banking, have you gotten a response from that? Have you seen anything shift in that work?

We also convinced the city of Tucson to move about $30 million. Then I think we’ve tracked almost 100 businesses that have moved their money and then countless individuals. We’ve been very excited about the impact that we’re having.

One of the things that we found and I know that you found is that land use is really critical to the health of local businesses, like how your planning and zoning works, what kind of built environment you’re creating has everything to do with whether you’re creating opportunity for local entrepreneurs or room for chains to take over everything.

I guess just having visited Phoenix and other parts of Arizona, it seems like a place where there’s been not a lot of attention to having good zoning for a long time, and I think you’ve sort of alluded to this in the beginning when you were talking about this is a state that really has grown up around the car and not around having walkable places.

Tell me a little bit about working on the issue of land use and whether you’re seeing any shifts in movement in Arizona?

The shifts that we made with the adaptive reuse program here in Phoenix has led to what is really today the most progressive adaptive reuse program in the country where it spans city, all 500 square miles of the city of Phoenix, any building up to 100,000 square feet, so that’s going to be a big box size building, and anything that was built before 1990. It is an extensive program, anybody can apply to go through it, and it’s just slightly different process that allows more tolerance for older components to a building that may be safe for humans … I mean, we’re not talking about endangering life safety. Things in regular building code, maybe more rigidly interpreted and therefore more cumbersome to get a certificate of occupancy. It’s been a wild ride. It’s been hugely successful. I would credit those shifts in policy, to why we now have 100, 125 new, small businesses, have opened in our city center, that we’re formally in a blighted or abandoned buildings.

Rather than tear those buildings down and build large new develops, we’ve been able to make the case that protecting the older building stock is a better economic development strategy. I do wanna just shout out, Preservation Green Lab did a fantastic study that can be useful for your listeners called, Older, Smaller, Better. If you just Google Older, Smaller, Better, you can read the report. It measures a wide variety, jobs per block are higher in places that protected their older building stock.

Small business owned by people of colors, there’s a bunch of measureables there that make an economic case for protecting older building stock and zoning that doesn’t allow enormous footprints, to come in, abandoning alleys and dominating entire blocks, because that’s not how to create the most jobs.

We’ll also link to some materials about Phoenix as adaptive reuse program, which has been just hugely successful. I mean, that’s just terrific to hear that 125 businesses have been able to start up in buildings that were previously derelict, because the city has stepped in and made that easier to do. I mean, that’s … It seems like a very … It’s kind of, a low hanging fruit, and yet the results of it have been really terrific.

Hey everyone. As you know, we don’t have ads on this show, but we do depend on your for financial support. We hope as the year winds up, you’ll consider making a donation to the Institute For Local Self Reliance. We’re a national non-profit organization. Our research, our advocacy, our work with communities really depends on support from people like you. Please go to ILSR.org/donate. That’s ILSR.org/donate. Thanks.

We’ve been talking some about policy areas that are really abut leveling the playing field, like making sure that local businesses have access to capital the same way that big businesses do, making sure that land use policies are actually creating the kind of build environment that works for local entrepreneurs. I wanna turn a little bit to this question of, okay, in addition to leveling the playing field, how do cities do further? How do they actually use their policy tools to grow local businesses, to really actively promote and develop a different kind of economy?

One of the places I wanna talk about is procurement. It’s really interesting. As some of our listeners know, back in July, we released a report about this national contract that Amazon has secured to supply cities and school districts across the country with things like office supplies and classroom supplies. Our report details a lot of the problems in that contract. We learned that about 1500 local governments have already signed on to that deal, and are shifting their purchasing increasingly to Amazon.

What was interesting is that we pulled data on a bunch of different cities as we were doing that report, looking at how much are different cities spending with Amazon. We found that Phoenix basically spends no money with Amazon. That really stood out in the list of cities. How is it that Phoenix has managed to avoid purchasing on Amazon. Tell us a little bit about how the city approaches its procurement.

They’re not technically preferencing the Arizona companies, they’re just using a process where only the Arizona businesses get to bid on those particular contracts. The only way it will go to a national full bid is if they don’t get at least three competitive bids on any particular item they’re sourcing. I think having those relationships with city staff, has been one key thing that has helped us stay on track.

Also, reminding the elected officials who come and go. City staff might there 30 years, whereas the elected official is gonna come and go every eight years, or four years, depending. It’s important to engage them both. It’s important to give credit to city staff, when they make smart decisions like this. I was mentioning to you earlier, we sent thank you cards to all of, the decision makers after your study came out, because they really made us shine. They made us the smart city that we are, which is that no, we aren’t going to put our money into a company that extracts wealth from our community. We are going to invest in the companies that are here investing in our future together, with a shared vision. We’re very proud of that.

I think that the procurement process in its first year, was significantly smaller than it is today. I think in year one, we did an additional 22 million dollars worth of business locally. I don’t have the latest statistics, but it’s significantly higher than that. We host doing business with the city, study sessions, two times a year. We had 170 businesses come out to the last one. They can ask questions. We had about six or eight city staff there, to answer questions and to walk people through the process of getting registered and helping them understand how to watch for and reply on bids. It’s been a great experience. We think that … We’re very proud of the city and the decisions that they’re making.

As part of that, we created a business accelerator program called, Fuerza Local. That’s F-U-E-R-Z-E-A, Fuerza Local. That is a Spanish Business Accelerator program, that it’s a six months to get through the program. They have to come to class one night a week. They learn not only about how to run stronger, more efficient businesses, and they’re all small business owners already when they start the program. In addition to getting the business curriculum, they need to build better businesses.

They also have a financial literacy component, that help them gain access to fair market capital. Like many states, we have a crisis of having a huge number of predatory lenders here, like check cashing places, and title loan places, that are feasting and victimizing our Latino population through Spanish language advertising and promotion. The average interest rate our small businesses, that come through this program are paying at the start of the program is 48%.

So our program takes a … It’s called a money pool, or in certain parts of the world it might be called a tanda or a cundina. It is a model that families have used for centuries to save money together without paying interest. We had digitized that in partnership with a local company called eMoneyPool, and we put our students in pods of 12 people. They each make payments into the money pool each month with a goal of saving a $1000 over six months. So they make those payments together and all of them get their money back out of it. At the end of the six months, they’ve all saved $1000. We, through our foundation, we match them at $1000, so now they have $2000 and an updated business plan. Many of them have a business plan for the first time of how they’re going to invest that money.

But what’s most important about this is we take their payments and report them to the credit bureau Experian, so when they graduate they have a credit history. We have a relationship with two credit unions that will accept that certificate of completion and six months of credit history in lieu of any other background at all. That’s all they need to access a $2500 line of credit to get them started.

We really believe strongly in this program. We had over 400 graduates who have gone on to create over 500 jobs in a community. We just have some amazing success stories where people just needed a fair deal and an opportunity to learn so that they can be more competitive in their business. So it’s a wonderful program and it’s really changing the face of some of our more diverse communities of color here in this area.

In a three year period, she went from having one failing home-based business to having six full-time employees. It’s quite remarkable when you see somebody that would just needed to be able to learn in their primary language. She speaks English, but she learned better in Spanish. And be given an opportunity to access capital at a fair market rate, and it just transformed her entire life.

But also, Stacy, the honest to God truth is that I bought my building 15 years ago, and that has enabled me to keep my cost down. I’ve been able to fight the gentrification that’s occurred around me by simply owning my own property. So I want to help other small businesses figure out how they can buy their buildings as well. So while the rents of all my neighbors have gone up two and three times, I’m still there with my mortgage and my tiny little building. I mean, my building is 1000 square feet, and it’s sort of like a little engine that could. But that’s a very real reason for why we’ve been able to stay this long. We’re trying to figure out how to get more small independent businesses to be able to buy their buildings.

As we’re wrapping up today, I think one of the last things I want to ask you about is you went from being an entrepreneur to being a community organizer and a policy advocate. You’ve grown Local First Arizona into this large, vibrant organization with a lot that’s going on, and you’ve changed a lot of policies in the state and within Phoenix and other communities. I’m curious what kinds of advice you would have for people who want to do this in their state. What is it that you’ve learned along the way that you wish you knew when you started?

People, you lose them if you’re gonna constantly talk about big, huge systems change things because it seems overwhelming. What we need to do is show them individual people who are succeeding, how they’re succeeding, and then tie it back to an action that we’re asking them to do. The reason this guy could meet with this bank president is because the community bank is only chartered locally, so we need to get more money to that guy so he can lend to more people just like Jim, or whatever.

That is really the secret sauce. It’s giving it to people in a way that they can relate to it.

If anybody is pretending to do good in a community while they’re doing harm in the community at the same time, we need to hold them accountable for that. We can’t just rush to support the companies that offer free yoga on Tuesdays for all their employees while their money is invested in coal, and oil, and other extracted economies somewhere else. So he’s really encouraging big picture thinking and accountability, and I just love the book. Highly recommend it.

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Photo Credit: Local First Arizona

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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Since 2011, the number of chain dollar stores has grown from 20,000 to a staggering 30,000 locations nationwide, as these stores profit off of continued economic distress and insecurity across the country. In this same period, the number of full-service grocery stores supplying communities with healthier food options has been in decline.

The city of Tulsa, Okla., is no stranger to this phenomenon. There are 50 dollar stores within the city limits, many concentrated on the city’s north side, where residents are left with few if any other options to buy their groceries.

Tulsa City Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper

In this episode, co-hosts Stacy Mitchell and Marie Donahue speak with Tulsa City Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper. Earlier this year, Vanessa led a successful effort to convince the City Council to pass an ordinance restricting dollar stores from building new locations in the community of North Tulsa, a historically and predominantly African-American area of the city. The ordinance was part of community members’ and Vanessa’s efforts to address the lack of healthy food options in their neighborhood.

Drawing some inspiration from ILSR’s policy tools, Vanessa was able to amend the city’s zoning code to stop the proliferation of chain dollar stores that have crowded out full-service grocery stores in North Tulsa. She overcame opposition from developers, chambers of commerce, and even some city agencies that were hesitant to exercise Tulsa’s local authority in this unique way. Stacy, Marie, and Vanessa discuss the two-year journey to pass the ordinance. They cover both the challenges and successes Vanessa had along the way, concluding with a discussion of Vanessa’s more recent efforts to bring a full-service grocery store to North Tulsa.

Tune in to learn more about Tulsa’s innovative example of building local power!

Interested in learning more about the rapid proliferation and impacts of dollar stores? Our team has released an in-depth feature “Dollar Stores Are Targeting Struggling Urban Neighborhoods and Small Towns. One Community Is Showing How to Fight Back.” We have also compiled a shorter 2-page fact sheet The Impact of Dollar Stores and How Communities Can Fight Back, with facts and strategies to take action. Sign up for our Hometown Advantage Bulletin newsletter to get updates and related resources straight to your inbox.

It might surprise you to learn that dollar stores, most of which sell only a limited selection of processed foods, and offer no fresh produce at all, are now feeding more Americans than Whole Foods is. These stores are not nearly a by-product of economic distress. It’s becoming increasingly clear that they’re also a cause of it. In small towns and urban neighborhoods alike, dollar stores are leading full-service grocery stores to close, and their strategy is saturating urban neighborhoods with multiple outlets, is making it impossible for new grocers to take root and grow.

Today on the show, our guest is someone who has been on the front lines of battling this trend. Vanessa Hall-Harper was recently re-elected to her second term on the Tulsa, Oklahoma City Council. There are more than 50 dollar stores within the city limits of Tulsa, and many are located in Vanessa’s neighborhood, a neighborhood that does not have a single full-service grocery store. Thanks in part to Vanessa’s work though, that’s about to change.

Earlier this year she passed an ordinance that puts limits on dollar stores, and now, there is a new grocery store coming to her neighborhood. So, we’re really looking forward to having Vanessa on the show, and hearing how she’s done this. Vanessa, welcome to Building Local Power.

I believe this was a calling for me in my life, and I decided after several years of trying to put it off, to go ahead and throw my hat in the ring, and I ran for the first time in 2014 for city council for District One, here in my community, the community that I was born and raised in. I lost my first election, and then when I ran again in 2016, I won. So, that’s kind of how it happened.

Other things, as far as just not having a real voice, not having the, I guess, liberty, or the permission if you will, to come down to City Hall, and to say, “Look, we have a problem with this.” Our parks in our community are something that’s a dying breed. Several of the community centers have been closed, one even demolished, and so, that was a great concern to families in our community, and again, decisions being made for the community, but without the community. That is not how our American government is set up to work. Our government is set up in a Democratic way, in which, people can have a voice, and input on the very decisions that are changing, or could possibly change their lives.

In a nutshell, I wanted to run so that I can not only improve the quality of life for my district, but to give the people a voice so they would feel like they’ve been heard, and if they have a say on how they live day-to-day.

They are built in such a way, that they are literally on top of each other. So, there is no spacing. Before the Healthy Neighborhoods Overlay, there was no spacing requirements, and so Family Dollars, and Dollar Generals, would literally build across the street from each other, or next door to one another, and I believe, and after studying, and doing some research, that when these stores proliferate communities, particularly low-income communities, it makes it more difficult for full-service grocery stores to survive, and if they’re aren’t any to begin with, it makes it more difficult for them to come in, and set up shop and be successful.

Knowing a little bit about government, and how things work, I knew that as a city government, we have the authority to address these types of issues and concerns, that ultimately affect the community, both economically, as well as, the health, the overall health of a community. I sought to do something about it, and that’s when I started some research, and came upon your website, and found a lot of good information. I’m so thankful for that. I was really kind of getting discouraged for a while there, until I came across your website, and it just really gave me some good direction in which to go, so that I can use that information, and share it with our zoning department, and our econ department. So, that’s kind of how it got started.

I’m curious about, do you have insights on why that is? I mean, is that your experience in the city, is that dollars stores are much more closely correlated with African American neighborhoods, and particularly with North Tulsa, and do you have a sense of why it is that they’ve targeted those communities so much?

Of course, there is also Hispanic, Native American, and white in the community, but overwhelmingly, it is the African American community, and I would have to say that, that is the case because of just how this city came in to being, before statehood and since. When you came to Tulsa, as a light person, you went to North Tulsa to live. You could not live anywhere else. That still holds true today, as far as locating, but you know, with integration you can live other places, but for the most part, North Tulsa’s do the African American side of town.

So, it grew to be a very successful, very bustling business district, which became known, I think Booker T. Washington, is the gentleman that named it Black Wall Street. There were over 600 successful businesses, homes, home to several millionaires back then, which was very rare, and so, at the end of May of 1921, D. Rowland, who was a bellhop at a hotel downtown, was said to have to tried to attack a white woman, who actually rode the elevator. We know now that, that was not true. In fact, they were involved in a relationship, and was later married in Chicago, we found out just from history, but I believe it looks like they were caught maybe kissing or holding hands, or something to that affect, and at that point, someone, we don’t know who that is, but said, that he had raped her, or at least attempted, to rape her, which was obviously not true, but that is all that was needed to start what we know now to be The Race Massacre of 1921.

This is something that happened all over really, the Southern United States, and our Eastern border. It was not new. In fact, The Red Summer of 1919, it happened in Rosewood, Florida. It happened in Arkansas, in Chicago, in cities, in black cities, black communities throughout the country, where normally that was what was said. A black person, a black man, touched, winked, spoke to, anything to a white woman, and then that gave the city the justification in their minds at least, to go in and to destroy.

Tulsa is known because it was certainly by far, the largest black business community in the country, that was destroyed, and it was the first time, that aerial bombs were flown from an airplane. There was an airplane out in Southwest Tulsa, where when the rioters, the white mob, was not able to come in and take over the community, because there were people fighting back. They then got in airplanes, and dropped bombs, and that’s really how they were able to win and to destroy, because who could fight against aerial bombs. That’s a really short history of what happened, and to a very large degree, that division still exists today, unfortunately.

Certainly working on it, to change through our government, the government, the city, and the state was very complicit in the massacre, as well as the KKK. Very complicit in the massacre that took place in 1921, and we are approaching the 100 year centennial of the 1921 Race Massacre, so we’re working to acknowledge, and to hopefully find some reconciliation with the truth, as we try to improve our city and our state.

You have passed the first ordinance, as far as we know, in the country, that limits the proliferation of dollar stores, and so, your work is very much about bringing political power back to your community, back to this neighborhood. Tell us a little bit about what you first proposed, as you came in to city council, and what kind of reception you got.

When I first learned that there was another proposal for a discount dollar store right after I came in to office, I went to the Authority and spoke and said, “With all due respect, this is not something we need, another dollar store in the community.” In fact, that same project had been proposed three times prior to the moratorium, and it was put down by the community, because the location where that store was initially trying to move to was zoned residential, which was literally a stone’s throw away, from a Family Dollar store, that was already in existence.

The neighbor’s in that direct community went to planning, ’cause whenever there’s a zoning change, they have to notify the community, by law. The community showed up at these meetings, and said, “We don’t want another dollar store.” So, again, there were three times, when that store was denied. The first time, they waited two years, and did it again. Waited another couple years. I guess they were just hoping that the community would forget about it, but again, when your zoning is changing, by law, the community has to be notified, and so, after those three failures, they decided to move to another piece of land, that was already still in the very close proximity, but was already zoned retail or zoned commercial.

They started that process, and one of the problems that I had with that, is that the Tulsa Development Authority, which is an authority of the city, did not adequately publish what type of store, or what type of business that would be. They left out that it was going to be a dollar store. They left out that it was a Dollar General, even though they knew what kind of store it would be, and I believe that was intentional.

Currently, as we sit here today, there is a pending lawsuit against the Tulsa Development Authority. I, and four other citizens that live in the area, filed the lawsuit claiming violation of the Oklahoma Open Meetings Act, against the Tulsa Development Authority. I would venture to say, I’m the first elected official in our city’s history to sue an authority of the city, but I think these types of things are necessary for, just as you were saying earlier, that the community’s voice is heard, that we understand the political power that we have, and to use that political power. We protest it. We have said from day one, this is not what we want.

In fact, I reached out to the headquarters, the corporate offices of Dollar General early on, and said, “Look, if this is something you’re going to do, why not make it your market concept?” So, I’m not sure if you’re all aware, but Dollar General has a market concept store, where it is a full, I won’t say very full, but it offers fresh fruits, meats, and vegetables. There’s two in the state of Oklahoma, but out in very rural communities, and I had not seen it myself. I’ve had other people in the community saying, “I was in Okemah …” or whatever the little town it was, and saw that Dollar General had a full-service store, or what they considered a full-service store, and so, I requested that. If you’re going to do this, why don’t you make it one of those stores, so that you would at least offer some fresh fruits and vegetables, and some fresh meats, and they basically said no. They said, “We don’t have to.” And they know that they don’t, because they know in communities that are a disenfranchised in communities that do not have options, which I believe is their market strategy.

They go in to communities, where they know that there aren’t many options. That ensures their success, and again, makes it in my opinion, more difficult for fuller service quality stores to come in later, and survive, and provide those much needed fruits and vegetables. That’s kind of how that came about. The store had not broken ground or anything. It was still in the process of transferring the property, when I started working on the moratorium, and yes, there was a lot of push-back, particularly from the business community. There were calls made, not so much to me, but there was definitely more calls made to some of my fellow counselors.

In fact, there were two other city counselors, that were on-board with me initially, because they have some low socioeconomic communities as well, like brown and poor, and they were facing, and are facing, the same proliferation issues, but after some calls were made by some very powerful people, they said they’re not gonna do it. They backed down, and I didn’t. So, I continued the fight.

Education … letting them know. I can’t tell you how many things I’ve printed off of the Institute For Local Self-Reliance. Sharing this information about formula based businesses, and restrictions, and so forth, to say, there are examples. There is information out there, that we can take, and implement in our own communities, to demand better, and unless the people demand better, we can’t expect better. Transparency is my greatest tool. I would have to say, and that empowers people to speak up, and say, no.

Most people probably don’t understand proliferation. When I’ve had my town hall meetings, and I’ll ask, “The problem’s proliferation. Does everyone know what that means?” Most did not. A lot did, but a lot didn’t either, and unbalanced development. So, we talk about those things, and we’re raising awareness around these issues, so that you can open the eyes of those that don’t see what’s taking place around them, and for a lot of people, they said, “You know what? I never thought about it that way, but you’re right. You’re right.”

We have these stores, and that’s all that we are receiving. You have this one particular company or developer, who was building this Dollar General in North Tulsa, but you go a half a mile to downtown, south, and they’re building this huge beautiful development of flats or apartments, which are housing in retail on the bottom, on the first floor of the buildings, and my question is, why can’t we receive some of those same types of developments? If we continue to just accept Family Dollars and Dollar Generals, that’s all we receive, then we’re not going to get anything better. We have to make our voices heard, and we have to demand better. That was a lot, to a large degree, a part of this process in saying, no to this, and this is what we want.

As I said, there were people very powerful, when I say powerful people, you’re talking about developers. You’re talking about chambers of commerce. You know, all of the same key players, that I’m sure that are making development decisions, in any other city who were against this. I got some pretty nasty emails and comments, but you know, I stood the course, and I stood the course with my community in saying, “No, and we’re not going to accept anything less.”

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So, you passed the six month moratorium, and then went on to devise an ordinance, that’s a kind of a dispersal ordinance. It limits the ability of dollar stores, as I understand it, to locate within a mile of an existing dollar store. So, it basically says, “We’re not gonna accept this kind of saturation, because that saturation is what’s preventing grocery stores from being able to come in. They can’t find any room in a market, that’s got so many dollar stores, kind of squeezing out room for other options.

One of the things, as I understand it, that the opposition was, as you noted from developers and the Chamber of Commerce, and sort of this sense of like business ought to be able to just do what it wants, but it also is coming from within City Hall, right? I mean, there were city councilors, but also just a reluctance on the part maybe of city agencies, to exercise owning authority in this way. Is that right?

So, I went to the mayor, and I said, “Look, I need your help.” Our mayor actually came in to office with me. He had previously been a city councilor about eight years, and he ran for office, so we actually won our elections at the same time, and he ran on a platform of health, and improving community, and putting down the racial barriers that are so strong in Tulsa. I went to him and told him, “I need your help. This is yet another opportunity that the city, our community, the poor community, and black community has gone to the city for help, and so many times, in the past, we’ve had the door closed in our face.” And so, I appealed to him at that level, and he said, “Okay.” He made calls to the people again, that answer to him, the legal department, and the planning department, and said, “You all need to work on this.”

So, some more work started to be done, with that directive, and at the first meeting didn’t go as well as I had hoped, because on of the assignments were to go out and find other examples of policies, where the city has been able to address these issues, proliferation, unbalanced development, et cetera, you know, address the issue, and improve quality of life. We’ve had those here in the city, where when it comes to moratoriums, and zoning code changes, but it always related more so to retail. We don’t want anymore parking here downtown, on other affluent communities in the city, but when it came to North Tulsa, that wasn’t a priority.

It took us a while, but we started making some progress. Again, I shared a lot of information from The Institute For Local Self-Reliance with our legal department, our planning department, and the mayor said, “Figure it out. Do something. If it’s unique to Tulsa, if it’s unique to this country, figure something out, that’s going to work for us.” And they did.

So, I started working with Susan Miller, who’s actually in INCOG, and she did some research and came up with what’s called a Healthy Neighborhood’s Overlay, and working with some area sector plans, that already existed, and using those sector plan boundaries to incorporate The Healthy Neighborhoods Overlay, to address some of the issues, that we had raised as a community.

The funds that we received from this CDBG, will be used to build a store. That’s not gonna cover it all, but it’s gonna cover a huge chunk of it, so that we can have a full-service, quality store directly in the community. I’m hoping that that’s the first of more. Easily, my community can accommodate two, maybe even three, grocery stores, but I think if we start with one, that will give us some hope. Hopefully, that will make other operators notice that, hey, you can survive here, and there’s a need for full-service, quality groceries, and it would be a good bet to come here as a grocer, and open up a grocery store, and survive.

That’s kind of where we are. I actually need to talk to some to get an update on that process, but we have a architect that has been selected, that’s going to do the architecture for the building, and I think the next step is to meet with the architect and work with the community, and the development and the design of the store. I’m excited about that, because one thing I did want is the community to be involved as much as possible, in every aspect of us addressing our food security issue in our community. I think that empowers people, and it lets the community citizens know, that I have a say. I have a voice, and I have power, and if there’s something that we need to improve the quality in our communities, that will improve the quality of life, then I can participate in that, and I can demand that these things happen. I’m excited about that. I’m waiting for the call to say, “Look, we can start community meetings on what we want our grocery store to look like.” That’s when I’ll probably turn some back flips.

Well, a previous city councilor asked for that name. That street’s one of our main streets to be named Martin Luther King Boulevard. There was a lot of drawback to that in the community, ’cause the street runs from north to the other side of town, and it’s South Tulsa, and obviously, a lot of people in South Tulsa did not want that name change. So, the city agreed to go ahead and change it, but it stops at the railroad tracks. It stops at the dividing line, of the black community and the white community. Things like that, that are still happening today, is a reminder of just how much work we need to do. This work, I believe, as you said, it is at least a step. It is a step, and I’m just committed, and I want to keep my community engaged and committed to improving it, because without the work, and without the dedication of citizens, and of elected officials who’s willing to put their head out there, with the possibility of it getting chopped off, we’re not going to have reconciliation. We’re not going to be the community we all want to be.

There’s a saying here, our regional chamber constantly calls this one Tulsa. Well, we’re one Tulsa, and I’ve said publicly in interviews, and in public places, that, “No, we’re not. We’re not one Tulsa yet, but there are things that we can do to become one Tulsa, and this fight for putting this moratorium in to place, is just one step or one way, in which we are fighting and making progress. That was some very discouraging times, during this process, because it just did not make sense for some of the reasons of why people were saying, No, we don’t want this for you.” Because the people that were saying no don’t live in the community, but yet the city wanted to take the position of the powerful, and say, “No, this is not something we need. It’s not good business, free market.”

You know, I’m sure you’ve heard all of the excuses, and it was discouraging to get it for a while, but we were able to overcome that, and a lot of the reason for that, is because we were speaking truth to power, and we were saying that, “You all are putting profits over people, and that’s not right.” And we hollered it, and we screamed it from the rooftops, and we were not quiet with it. We protested, and a lot of people are turned off by those tactics, but they work. We’ve had some success, and got a lot more work to do. This is one success we can say we were able to overcome, and hopefully, we can use this as an example for future work, that we must do.

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of, Building Local Power. You can find links to what we discussed today, by going to our website archive.ilsr.org, and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s archive.ilsr.org. We’ll be sure to include a link on that page to Marie’s new article about dollar stores, where you can find out more about what Tulsa has done, and more about how dollar stores are impacting local economies across the country.

This show is produced by Lisa Gonzales, Zach Freed, and Hibba Meraay. Our theme music is Funk Interlude, by Dysfunction Al. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Stacy Mitchell. I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks, for the next episode of Building Local Power.

Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

Photo Credit: Vice News

Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.