Mayors Take on Preemption to Defend Local Solutions (Episode 17)

And so we pushed back on that lawsuit, sort of dug us deeper into this fight. So for two years we’ve been in the courts, beat these interest groups now twice, but still seeking some constitutional judgment here on whether or not Florida law is in fact constitutional, which we maintain it is not. But I will say at least in the courts, we’ve been able to push back on these groups from being able to push local governments around and bully us into doing their bidding. My hope is that through our fight we maybe stiffen the spines of some other local governments that they don’t have to roll over to these guys. They have a lot of money and they may have a lot of political will and power, but we have people on our side. That’s why they elect us at the local level to represent their interest and it’s my hope that we’ll see more of this kind of action by way of defending local governments take place in other cities around the state of Florida but also around the country.

And so we’ve been really fortunate to hear from elected officials really all across the country, from California to Arkansas to Arizona to cities all over the state of Florida, Charlotte, North Carolina, Ohio. We’ve also been fortunate to get groups across the range of issue interest to join this campaign to defend local solutions because like us, they believe that local government has a role and in fact, Tip O’Neil was the one who said all government is local. In fact, you can probably find more Republicans quoted on the issue of local being the best and most representative form of government and now all of a sudden, in state legislatures, they’ve abandoned that thought and are now doing their earnest best to take away local decision making.

That’s why we created the campaign to defend local solutions so that local citizens and local elected officials can have a stronger collective voice to say we have a role in this Democratic process as well.

I can’t imagine the decision that I make as a mayor and previously as a city councilman that couldn’t be argued that it impacts business. And so the vagueness of that and the wide and sweeping nature of that is a huge threat to local governments. We fear that it may impact our ability to protect our water quality to our air quality to our signage, to our non-discrimination and wage laws. I mean, you name it. Legislation like that it’s overwhelmingly broad and in fact I don’t think it would stand a legal test but it does exactly what these legislatures are intending for it to do, which is to chill activities and to chill the rule making at the local level of these locally elected officials.

I think people will be surprised if they learn the kinds of things that were being discussed as part of this debate and I get it. I mean I understand it. If you are special interest and you pay tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands a year for lobbyists to represent your agenda, I would also want to concentrate the number of people that I have to talk to about my interests by limiting it instead of talking to over 400 cities across the state of Florida, to talking only to 120 members of the Florida House and 40 members of the Florida Senate. Their interest is very clear and their motives for doing that are very clear but who loses in that setup are the voters. The everyday people who are impacted by these kinds of decisions and that’s why we believe it’s important to defend local rule making and local involvement and how our communities are governed.

Welcoming communities when if you are retiring, you choose what is it you want to retire. Or if you’re a young person coming off of one of our college campuses or looking for where it is you may want to start a family or even a business, you’re looking at what kind of progressive policies might exist in the communities that you might be seeking to relocate. And so the impact is probably off the charts. There’s some real quantifiable ways we can see this. I think North Carolina gives us a really good glimpse of when you have regressive policies how it is can impact a community but you also see at a very localized level how it is that when you don’t create a good and strong quality of life for people to choose to live, they can choose other places to go.

I don’t think the story is yet told completely on the financial impacts and the negative regressive financial impacts that these kind of super preemptive policies have on local communities.

I gotta be honest, I mean someone asked me what if the legislature were of your political persuasion and wanted to create laws that you felt were beneficial to your own ideology? And what I would say is preemption has a role largely to set the floor. A place by which regulations and standards should not go beneath. But in this case, the Florida legislature is conducting itself as a way to create a ceiling to regulation, create a ceiling to what could be done in that local communities are not allowed to do anything different or beyond what the state says because they carved out the territory again largely to feed a particular interest that doesn’t necessarily benefit the interest of the local government and the citizens who make up our cities and our counties. It’s really important that folks recognize, even if you’re not in the granular details of lawmaking and policy making, that all of us could I think reasonably agree, that we elect our local officials to represent the values and the interests of that local community.

There’s real value to that because I’ll tell ya, as a local elected, I don’t get to escape my decision making. I’m reminded when I’m on date night. I’m reminded when I’m standing in grocery store lines, when I’m at church, or taking my kids to the park. People are unrelenting about telling me what it is that they think based off what they read about an action that the local government took last week or yesterday or even a month ago. They don’t forget and they like having access to folks like me so that if they need to help change my mind or change my perspective about something, they can do that and I can’t underscore how critical it is for local government to be able to act rapidly to make certain changes in their community, which is very different than a legislature that meets three months out of a year. In some cases and in some states, take Texas for instance, where they don’t meet until every other year.

There’s a nimbleness to local governments that I think people have an appreciation for. I can literally take a vote on a Wednesday night and it have Thursday morning impact and I think that’s a little value for folks at the local level and people at the local level understand that and they appreciate it.

Picking up on where you were leaving off though, a little bit about that local regulation you feel from the fact that you live in the community and your decisions have real, immediate impact, one of the things that Florida does it’s one of about 19 or 20 states that limit the ability of local governments to build broadband networks. Which is something that I focus on for ILSR and I’m just curious. The reason that state legislators often give for this is because you could just go ahead and squander millions upon millions of dollars that’s unnecessary and you wouldn’t face a consequence for it. That local taxpayers need to be protected so I’m always curious when I ask a mayor, do you have a sense that if you just squandered millions of dollars in unnecessary investments that there would be no repercussions?

In our case, and we are looking at every dime, every nickel, everything that we spend as a government. In fact, if you go to our website, you’ll see there’s a checkbook on there and as you go through that checkbook you can see down to the cent what we spent on a vendor, on procuring a certain service, on buying a certain item, an investment that we made. That is available visa vi our public checkbook because our public demands that level of transparency and accountability on our behalf. That argument with regard to broadband is a false argument. It’s a straw man. It’s a nice sound byte but it doesn’t actually show up in any everyday life in our communities.

Take Chattanooga, for instance. Not only have they found a really powerful public use for the expansion of broadband and now they’re the one gig city, but they’ve also found an economic sort of edge that puts them and sets them apart from other communities because of the kind of rapidness of internet speeds that you can get as a business or a consumer or an everyday citizen. Like Chattanooga, we own and operate our own electric utility system. There are tons of efficiencies that we could gain through a smart grid system that gives our customers real time data, real information, assuming we were able to have a ubiquitous presence with regards to internet and high speed internet access.

But Florida law precludes us from doing that. Now to whose interest is that? I mean who does it benefit to keep local governments from being able to respond to the needs of their citizens as expressed through the will of their democratic vote but also through what we get to hear from them on a pretty everyday, robust feedback system at our city halls and in our email inboxes and on the telephone. Folks are on a best about telling us how they feel and I’ll tell ya, I consistently get comments from businesses and from individuals and from college students predominantly, saying man why don’t we have this? Why can’t we get that? Can you get Google fiber here? Can you do this? Can you expand this?

And at one point, we were able to be responsive to that and now that legislature has done a carve out excluding us from being able to make any investments in that space to the greater good. And so I think it’s very harmful and I think it also impedes the competitive advantages of local government that are increasingly trying to find ways to distinguish themselves, not only from the competitiveness of growing new business and industry, but also for our ability to attract and retain the kind of talent that we need to fill the pipe line for jobs that we want to create. The impacts are pretty significant for us and the legislature was clear about what it wanted to accomplish and I would maintain that what they were accomplishing was not in the interest of the everyday citizen but in the special interest of folks who pay lots of money to have sway over the process.

Take for instance if we were voting on a seatbelt law, and I had decided that I was going to vote against mandating seat belts and someone got in an accident and were hurt because they didn’t wear a seatbelt. You couldn’t come back and then sue me for voting against the seatbelt law simply because there was an accident and someone got hurt in. For me making a decision at my capacity as an elected official, I have immunity over that. Could you imagine if the new terrain became based on how you vote on a particular issue and its impact on a community you can be personally sued for those decisions. I mean it would have a complete chilling effect on elected officials and frankly our democracy as we know it.

So this is an important line that’s been moved by these lawmakers. Frankly we have not seen yet a strong enough constitutional challenge to force judges to answer this question as to whether or not that is legally acceptable. So the super form takes aim directly at electives but I would include in that another very punitive aspect is where you hear the president and others talking about penalizing cities that have declared themselves sanctuaries of taking federal money and withholding federal money for housing programs and homelessness programs and food safety and security programs because of a political difference. That’s unreasonable and it is extremely punitive to citizens.

But what we’re trying to do is we’re not just trying to be an aggregator of information, but we’re trying to help local elected officials find their voice so that they can be stronger advocates for what local governments and local communities need to build a strong enough and robust enough fight back mechanism so that our folks know that they’re not dealing with this thing in isolation. But that this seems to be a real plan coming together in cities and states all across the country that are stripping power from local governments.

We’re also hoping that through our work we’ll be able to find stronger legal ground to fight this fight. In Ohio, we found that off of the merit of the local charter that was grounds enough to push back on the state legislator’s overreach into decision making that belonged squarely with the local government and not in the hands of the state. That’s an important legal argument that maybe it can be asserted in other counties and cities that also have strong charters that carve out space for local governments to have a real ground to fight on.

I would say we’re trying to increase the level of communications and discussion and conversation about this really important public topic. That this is not just about local governments and state governments fighting for more control. That to the extent that we’re fighting at the local level is to increase the ability and maintain the ability for local governments to choose and decide for themselves what’s in the best interest of their own communities. That’s not part of an issue, I think it’s simply a question of division of power and our ability to make sure that our communities can be treated when distinct and unique that we’re able to have laws and rules and governments that reflect the uniqueness of our communities. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be floors, there absolutely should be floors.

But preventing us from looking our for the best interests of citizens to do the bidding of powerful money well healed and local interest, is not going to serve the public well and that’s why we need the voices of local governments, local officials, local citizens, speaking up and speaking out.

We also encourage you to subscribe to this podcast and all of our other podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever else gets your podcasts. You can also sign up for our monthly newsletter at ILSR.org. Thanks to dysfunction Al for the music license to creative comments. The song is “Funk Interlude.”

I’m Lisa Gonzalez from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Thanks again for listening to Episode 17 of the Building Local Power podcast.