Opinion: The proposed Lafayette community bill of rights


A group of citizens called East Boulder County United has put what they are calling the Community Bill of Rights on the November ballot in Lafayette. Although this charter amendment focuses on limiting fracking in Lafayette, the implications are potentially game-changing in how we view the rights of people versus the rights of corporations.
As you might expect, this threat to corporate profits has not gone unnoticed, and the Colorado Oil and Gas Association is pulling out all the stops to prevent its passage. Their tactics will be familiar to many readers. For example, according to Cliff Willmeng, spokesperson for EBCU, apparently COGA had someone register to vote and then file a complaint against the amendment a day later. The complaint was quashed by the city clerk, so then came the inevitable innuendos. As noted in this week’s Daily Camera, COGA implied that existing gas supplies to Lafayette might be affected, presumably referencing the language in paragraph i-3 in the amendment. But the amendment language is clear that this section only prohibits the creation of new “facilities that support or facilitate industrial activities related to the extraction of natural gas…” And of course the Lafayette city charter only has power within Lafayette.
The notion of a Community Bill of Rights started in, of all places, southern Pennsylvania, where communities were being inundated with and by industrial hog farms. The notion then expanded to communities impacted by fracking, injection wells, sewage sludge spreading, etc. and is now going nationwide. There are even formal networks of communities pursuing this approach in a number of states. According to the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s website (worth checking out), groups fighting these impacts realized that they were never going to get very far working within the current system, because, for the most part, the laws and regulations were written by the industries. So these groups decided to go to the heart of the matter — the rights of corporations versus the rights of ordinary people — and created this notion of a community bill of rights to protect communities and the environment. The Lafayette amendment (available on the EBCU website) is an example.
To some extent, this parallels, in a subtle way, the path blazed by the original civil rights work. As it was put, the abolitionists did not seek to regulate the number of lashes a slave could receive; they wanted to fundamentally change the context for people’s basic rights. From this perspective, most regulations are like a leaky faucet that can only be turned up or down but not off. And permit standards, by their very nature, “permit” the activity.
For me, all this connects with former Boulder County Commissioner Paul Danish’s locally famous quotes (which I hope I get right), “Your rights stop where my nose begins” and “There’s freedom to, and then there’s freedom from.” And it also fits with the notion that the 5th Amendment’s protection — that property cannot be taken without just compensation — should include those community rights that help give property its value, including local control, clean water and air, ecosystem protection, and sustainable energy. This interpretation would force externalities to be included in companies’ costs, and would counterbalance the notion that mineral rights can always be exploited, no matter what.
The U.S. Supreme Court has in effect asserted that corporations are just collections of persons and so have the same rights. But people act fundamentally differently in different situations. Numerous psychology experiments have demonstrated that volunteers in a laboratory setting are quite willing to apply severely painful electric shocks to other persons, something they would likely never do on their own. And otherwise decent people will pursue and defend corporate profits above environmental protection or consumer benefit, even though they would be very conflicted if doing this just as an individual. Whatever the explanation — group loyalty, fear of job loss, organizational identification — the executives of for-profit corporations don’t always operate according to the Golden Rule.
The idea of a community bill of rights that protects citizens from environmental and other impacts has a natural extension to other issues where corporate profits impinge on citizens’ quality of life. Generally, city charters carefully define process issues but say nothing substantive about what quality of life values the government has an obligation to protect. I predict that this will become a hot topic in coming years.


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