News from the New England Organizers

The challenges that have faced communities in New England this year are varied. It has been great to have Chad on board with the New England organizing since August, 2010, collaborating with Gail on several events -  the Spring 2011 Community Rights Forums held in New Hampshire and Maine and our first booth at the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardners Association’s Common Ground Fair -  to name a couple. We’ve also had six Democracy Schools: in New Boston, Amherst, Sugar Hill and Wentworth, New Hampshire; Waterville, Maine; and Burlington, Vermont, with our illustrious colleague, Ben Price.

During the past year in New Hampshire, the Nottingham Water Alliance (NWA) has continued to enforce the Nottingham Water Rights and Local Self-Government Ordinance (2008) by corresponding with potential buyers of the bankrupt company, USA Springs, who originally applied for a New Source Bottled Water permit in 2001.

Members of NWA and Neighborhood Guardians have been the constant watchdogs for Nottingham’s bedrock aquifer, steadfast in their efforts to protect the people’s water as the company makes new attempts to secure permits to mine groundwater, despite the local law.

This summer, the city of Gloucester, Massachusetts represented by Who Decides? a local grassroots organization that formed after the first Democracy School in 2009, called upon their mayor and city council members to drive a Special Legislative Act to the state legislature and executive to amend their Home Rule City Charter. The residents wanted to place the public water systems under their control so that no future city council or mayor will be able to sell the systems, sources, infrastructure or reservoirs to a private entity without first obtaining the 2/3 majority vote of the people. To amend the charter, the city council petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by submitting their request for a Special Legislative Act to amend their Home Rule City Charter. They pressed unrelentingly, and the amendment language was approved by both houses and signed into law in record time by Governor Duval Patrick in September. The action was spurred by a “boil water order” in the summer of 2009 and an offer by the international corporation, Suez, to purchase Gloucester’s water systems. Mayor Carolyn Kirk twice refused the company’s offers. Who Decides? mobilized to educate the Cape Ann community about the dangers of water privatization.  Who Decides? celebrated the successful campaign at the recent city council meeting in September and is now preparing for next steps.  We are continuing to work with other communities in New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts to protect rights to water.

Work continues with Maine communities that are bearing the brunt of industrial wind production. Four hundred-foot tall wind turbines—which are financed by oil and gas corporations—continue to be forced into some of the most ecologically-sensitive areas in rural Maine at an ever-increasing rate.

After having watched an alphabet soup of proposed regulatory laws—dealing with issues like setbacks, turbine height, and turbine noise—be defeated at the state level, residents are reclaiming their right to local self-government as we work with them to draft local laws that ban industrial wind production…and which also create a framework for a Sustainable Energy Policy within the community. This policy recognizes that energy production will be community-controlled rather than corporate-controlled, and that the majority of energy produced within the community will stay within the community.

On the heels of this push for industrial wind development, a proposal has been brought forward in New Hampshire by the Canadian company, Hydro-Quebec, to erect monster towers that will cross New Hampshire’s border with Canada and carry electric DC energy through the delicate White Mountain National Forest, down through 180 miles of the center of the state, to a distribution center in Franklin, where it will be converted to AC and run east to Deerfield -the final link in the chain for transmitting this electric power to Massachusetts and Connecticut. The project has sparked solid opposition from all sectors – property owners, business owners, local electric providers, nature enthusiasts and those who depend on tourism to make their living. These folks are contacting us for assistance in asserting their right to say No! to the project through local self-governance.