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HOSTED DOCUMENTS
Who Decides What Should Happen in a Community?
from THE MONTPELIER BRIDGE
by MIRIAM HANSEN
What is the fairest, most democratic way for citizens to protect their communities from unwelcome corporate activities? Who should be making those decisions? These questions lay at the heart of The Vermont Alliance for Locally Initiated Democracy’s (VALID) presentation to the small group who attended an August 15th meeting at the Kellogg Hubbard Library.
VALID’s co-founders, Rick Scharf, an eighth grade Science and Language Arts teacher in Stowe, and Abigail Doolittle, an attorney in the Waterbury area, outlined their three key convictions. The first was that communities need to be concerned about water bottling projects such as the one proposed by The Montpelier Spring Water Company in East Montpelier. Doolittle and Scharf believe that water must be viewed as a public resource, not as a private commodity. Their second belief is that the current strategy of relying on permits and regulations does not offer communities real democratic protection. And their third key point is that there is a huge potential for citizens of East Montpelier to make a statement about democracy in action, by embracing the approach of the town of Barnstead in New Hampshire.
According to Scharf, Barnstead, a town of about 1600 people, watched their neighbors Barrington and Nottingham struggle to prevent the multinational corporation USA Springs from withdrawing water. After years of working through the state permitting and regulating bodies, and incurring expenses of well over six hundred thousand dollars in court costs, residents of both towns were unable to effectively stop the corporate withdrawal of water.
Barnstead residents decided to take a different approach to safeguard their water. With help from lawyer Thomas Linzey, founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) they crafted and passed an ordinance that states, “No corporation or syndicate shall engage in water withdrawals in the Town of Barnstead.” The term “engage” includes but is not limited to the physical extraction of water, as well as the buying and/or selling of water extracted within the Town of Barnstead.
“Instead of the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by Barrington and Nottingham, Barnstead’s expenses,” Scharf said, “were closer to a few hundred dollars in photocopy costs to make copies of the ordinance for neighbors.”
Scharf emphasized the huge drain on time, money and energy that working through regulatory bodies and the courts represents for citizens in these communities.
“What else could the residents of that community have done with that energy, time and money?” he asked.
Scharf said that Barnstead residents also added into the ordinance a section denying corporations the rights of personhood. This emphasis on corporate versus individual rights arose because of a decision delivered by The Supreme Court in 1886, that gave corporations protection under the Constitution. Over time, this resulted in corporations being granted virtually all the constitutional rights guaranteed to human beings.
Another presenter at the meeting, Steve Kowal, an organizer with Advocates for Community Empowerment (ACE), added that members of the community should not be required to “play with the bats and balls and umpires” of the corporate experts but should be asking the question, “Who has the fundamental right in a community to make decisions?”
Kowal’s went on to say that the corporations want ownership of the water supply. “Nestle owns 146 water bottling companies. Corporations feel they can own the water, and under current law they can own it.”
“We’re in the habit of being timid about democracy,” he said and spoke about the communities in Pennsylvania who have passed ordinances preventing corporations from spreading sewer sludge. Kowal’s central point was that the discussion is not finally about water, Walmart, quarries, dumps or sewer sludge. It is about democracy.
“Constitutions are written for property and commerce,” he said. “Barnstead has passed laws for nature.”
In response to the observation that Montpelier Spring Water Company is owned by Mr. Antonovich, a part-time resident of East Montpelier, Kowal said that more and more frequently corporations begin as ‘ma and pa’ operations and are later bought out by larger multinational corporations. There is nothing to prevent a company owner, he pointed out, from selling to a multinational corporation.
Something along those lines occurred in Randolph, where the water bottling company began as a local venture and was later sold to ClearSource, a larger corporation who expanded the water withdrawal from its original permits. Scharf mentioned that there have been many instances of permit violations in Randolph and Doolittle questioned the legality of ClearSource’s President refusing to answer The Bridge’s question in a former issue, regarding the number of gallons of water his company withdraws daily.
“This is a permitted number,” Doolittle pointed out. “They can’t claim, as was printed in the paper, that it is a private matter.”
She said that people think they can rely on the permitting bodies to protect their interests but in fact, permitting bodies are in the business of issuing permits. According to she and Scharf as well as employees at The Agency of Natural Resources, 98-99% of the permit applications ANR receives, are approved. .
All three organizers of the meeting, Scharf, Doolittle and Kowal, spoke of the work being done by Thomas Linzey, who has taken the position that something is fundamentally wrong with our system and that the community’s citizens need to be the ones who make the decisions, not the corporations and not even the permitting and regulating bodies.
Kowal said he hopes that the residents in East Montpelier will come to a point where they will say, “This is outrageous and what can we do about it.”
Of the seven people who attended the August 15th meeting, five, including this reporter, are residents of East Montpelier. Voiced concerns ranged from the particular to the political to the historical.
Questions such as, how much water is the Montpelier Spring Water Company planning to remove? What role are members of the East Montpelier Select Board playing in assisting Mr. Antonovich to obtain permits? Why is the former Commissioner of Agriculture the project manager for this company? Why did The Vermont Land Trust sell the acreage surrounding the spring to Mr. Antonovich, knowing that he planned to use the water for private gain?
It was clear in the course of the meeting that people have as many questions about The Montpelier Spring Water Company now, as they did when the spring’s owner Antonovich and project manager Kerr approached Montpelier’s city council in May. As yet, according to ANR officials, no permits have been applied for, nor have there been any preliminary conversations with the permitting officials. A call from The Bridge to one of the East Montpelier selectmen was never returned.
A request for an open public meeting has been circulating in East Montpelier for the past few weeks. To date, approximately sixty signatures have been affixed to the request for a meeting, with the sole purpose of learning more about the project and giving residents an opportunity to ask and receive answers to whatever questions they would like to pose.