Ever Want to Be a Small Town Hero?
Once again, I’m out to show that the Lone Hero does not typically save the community from peril. When problems arise, it is the coming together of people - the community itself - that is the real hero. Take the small town of Felton, CA as an exemplar of this phenomenon. In 2002, community members came together to discuss the fate of their local water delivery system. It had been bought by a foreign company, RWE Aktiengesellschaft (through the U.S. subsidiary, American Water Works), resulting in an immediate 74% increase in water rates.
Town folks came together and formed a group called Felton FLOW (Friends of Locally Owned Water) to discuss what they should do. As of today, they are in control of their local water supply.
How did this happen? Learn about the power of people below the fold.
First, a brief comment about framing. The concepts underlying our reasoning shape what we perceive to be possible. The people of Felton recognized this intuitively when they realized that the central issue of concern was the locus of control: Should their water be controlled by investors on the other side of the world or should it be controlled locally by the people impacted directly by its management? The answer was probably obvious to them from the get-go… they wanted “locally owned water.” This is how they framed themselves when they chose the name Friends of Locally Owned Water. It was not the name itself that has the power to shift people’s thinking, but rather the way of thinking behind it that resonated so influentially with other community members.
So what did the members of FLOW do to successfully defeat a multinational corporation (and the 3rd largest private water utility in the world)? They applied collective decision-making through their local government. The first step was to create a local water management organization, which they named the San Lorenzo Valley Water District. This management team was comprised of local land managers who had a clear stake in the long-term viability of the local water supply. Then, the community members sought to purchase the water. A detailed description of their struggles can be found here. Their argument, as presented on their website, clearly promotes the benefits of locally owned water:
Under local control, if you have a problem, the people who answer the phone will not be in some distant office in Illinois or Indiana, they will be here in San Lorenzo Valley. And the person doing the repair will not be based in Monterey County, they will live and work full time in our valley and report to a local board of directors. If we don’t like how the system is operating, we won’t have to petition the Public Utilities Commission for relief through a bureaucratic maze. The SLV water district board is accountable to us the voters in regularly scheduled, democratic elections. We will control our water and watershed, not a foreign company with distant investors and directors whose primary motivation is maximizing their company’s profits.
We believe that affordable water is a right, not a commodity. Local ownership with local accountability will keep it that way for everyone in the San Lorenzo Valley.
What I find so inspiring is their ingenuity. They sought direct negotiations with RWE. When that didn’t work, they took matters into their own hands and pushed for the city government to use the right of eminent domain to claim the water for public use. The people voted for a property tax on water utility users to pay for the $10.5 million municipal bond that would be delivered to RWE for the land and water rights. And they won.
This is a clear case of community solving its own problems through local organizing and innovation. Think Global, Act Local is more than a clever slogan. It is a strategy for success.
This time the hero is the Small Town itself.
RWE’s acquistion didn’t result in a 74% rate increase. A regulated water company must prove its rates are benefiting the ratepayers and no public utitlities commission, much less the California PUC, would raise rates as a result of an acquisition, particularly by a foreign buyer.
The residents just raised their rates by $10MM by agreeing to a property tax increase to pay for the system. That $10MM gives them control but does not add any improvement to the system. It will be interesting to watch how well the community works together when it’s up to the voters/ratepayers to pass rate increases to pay for needed system improvements. One reason the US water infrastructure is by and large in bad straits is the lack of political will to spend money on needed improvements. As SLV will find out, continual rate increases are necessary to pay for adequate water service no matter who owns the system.