The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has long made
headlines as a conservative policy-sharing network that has pushed an
agenda of voter suppression and dismantling of public education at the
state level. Now the group, backed by conservative billionaires Charles
and David Koch, is
going local with its new initiative, the
American City County Exchange
(ACCE). Soon, city government or county commission policies could be
generated at the same right-wing think tank that has attacked
environmental protections, attempted to undermine the rights of workers
and made it harder for people to vote.
At a time of congressional gridlock and partisan rancor, local
policies are easier to come by at the local level, with business and
citizen groups coming together to generate solutions to problems such as
affordable housing, public transit, open space and good-paying jobs. At
the heart of these efforts is the spirit of regional collaboration
among people who will have to live with the consequences of policy.
ALEC, with its new project, plans to interrupt that collaborative
policymaking process by coming in from the outside with model bills
based on an ideological obsession with privatization rather than on
local knowledge about what works.
Progress grows local
Some of the most successful, life-improving policies in metro regions
involve partnerships among elected officials, private corporations and
grass-roots activists. What has made collaboration successful is the
fact that stakeholders come together. I saw this firsthand during more
than a decade of work in Silicon Valley. There the
Silicon Valley Leadership Group
(a business consortium) worked with organized labor and community
groups to ask for funding for quality public transit and the development
of affordable housing. One result of this collaboration was a
sales-tax-funded
public transit system that is being built to serve all residents of Santa Clara County.
The business community in Silicon Valley also partnered with
organized labor around the issue of children’s health care. In 2001 the
Santa Clara County government, at the behest of the South Bay Labor
Council and local business leaders, set up a combination of property
taxes, tobacco taxes and outside grants to fund a
universal health care program
for all children in the county. Though its funding was shaky at times,
the program managed to cover 97 percent of the county’s children, until
it became part of California’s Medicaid program in 2013.
ALEC
wants to take the same sort of highly ideological agenda that has
stunted progress in Washington and state capitals and impose it at the
metro level.
Instead of trying to contribute to locally relevant solutions, ALEC’s
new project hopes to take local stakeholders out of the equation. It
plans to take cookie-cutter bills thought up by corporate lobbyists and
try to push them through local government. From its state-level work,
ALEC is known for its
attacks on environmental protections, its opposition to employees’ rights such as
paid sick days and for promoting “stand your ground”
gun laws that have been used as legal cover for violence against young unarmed African-American men and women.
Privatization agenda
For city and local governments, ALEC’s primary focus is on
privatization. Its new local push through the ACCE wants to “ease the
way for corporations to take over local services,” as Jay Riestenberg,
an analyst at Common Cause, recently
told Bloomberg News.
Conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato
Institute have long pushed a smaller-government agenda of privatizing
government services such as
mass transit
and utilities. They argue that instead of being run by elected public
officials using tax dollars, these vital services should be funded and
operated by private corporations in a competitive marketplace.
The problem with this is that privatization locks local government
into contracts that remove democratic oversight. While city and county
politicians face repercussions at the ballot box if they do not deliver
services for their constituents, corporations can take the money and run
— often leaving voters with few means to reverse bad decisions when
services are compromised.
We have already seen at the state level that the negative
consequences of ideologically driven privatization can be profound. For
example, in Rhode Island, ALEC was successful in persuading state
government to hand over its public employee pension fund to private
hedge fund managers. As Matt Taibbi
documented in
Rolling Stone, the regret now runs deep among state lawmakers, who have
seen their state pay out millions in servicing fees to these private
hedge funds, while the pension fund — and city services — continue to
suffer. “They pretty much took the COLA [cost of living pay raises for
public workers] and gave it to a bunch of billionaires,” Providence’s
retired firefighter union chief told Taibbi.
At the city level, perhaps the most prominent
cautionary tale
about privatization is Chicago’s move to sign a 75-year contract with
finance company Morgan Stanley for the management of its parking meters.
A city audit showed that the deal rested on an undervaluing of the
meters and lost the city $1 billion as a result. In addition, Morgan
Stanley recently sued the city over lost profit because of the periodic
shutting down or moving of meters for street cleaning and city events.
Chicago lost that lawsuit, to the tune of another $61 million. This
means the city incurs additional cost when it wants to add protected
bike lanes and bus routes and enact other interventions that could help
reduce carbon emissions. And because the deal with Morgan Stanley is
locked in for another 69 years, voters have little recourse. Future
generations will suffer from this decision, which was made before they
were born. They won’t be able to use their votes to reverse the parking
meter fiasco.
“Local politics in America is the purest form of democracy,” Pittsburgh city council member Natalia Rudiak said to
The Guardian
about the ACCE. “There is no buffer between me and the public. So why
would I want the involvement of a third party acting on behalf of a few
corporate interests?”
Rudiak’s comment cuts to the core of the matter: ALEC wants to take
the same sort of highly ideological agenda that has stunted progress in
Washington and state capitals and impose it at the metro level. If
Americans let them succeed, we will lose the most promising frontier in
democratic policymaking today — local government — along with our
communities.
