Sometimes it’s a quarry, sometimes it’s a pipeline, sometimes it’s a gargantuan industrial warehouse complex — the narrative, says Ben Price, often plays out the same way.
“Our hands are tied, we can’t stop it,” local elected officials tell community members who perceive a threat to their collective health, safety and welfare.
Price, national organizing director with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, argues that the “unalienable rights” of citizens are being trampled upon by federal and state regulations that establish a framework for corporations and powerful property owners to bypass local ordinances.
At Renew Lehigh Valley’s Summit for Smart Growth and Sustainable Communities Friday, Price explained how he has helped communities fight legal battles that elected officials might normally avoid because of the financial toll the legal costs can take on a local government.
To truly effectuate change, Price said, you have to take a cue from the American revolutionaries and challenge the very nature of the game.
The first grievance listed against the King of Great Britain in the Declaration of Independence, Price pointed out, is that he had rejected local laws “wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Once more today, citizens most directly affected by land-use decisions have the least amount of say over them, Price said.
“The unalienable rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence are above and beyond and free of regulation or limitation by the state,” Price said. “Yet we have laws that regulate how much clean air and pure water we can have.
“That’s not how they put it — they say you just can’t pass laws that protect your right to clean air and pure water in certain ways when it interferes with an industry that has interest in profit-making in your community.”
Local officials and attorneys challenged Price on the practicality of upending the system and argued that many communities could bring about incremental change by simply doing a better job following the rules.
Jim Preston, a Bethlehem attorney who has represented both developers and municipalities, said the land development process needs a set of rules so that property owners can understand and act upon their rights. Essentially putting every land development plan up for referendum would be economically and legally impractical, he said.
The real problem is that community members don’t usually understand their local land-use laws, and they don’t usually speak up until it’s too late, Preston said. More informed engagement, he argued, does have an impact.
“If you get people out to meetings, the [elected officials] do pay attention,” Preston said. “The people do have a voice. It’s not that the corporations can completely run roughshod over them.”
Before taking on Big Bureaucracy, make sure your own local zoning ordinance isn’t the source of your problems, advised state Rep. Robert Freeman, 136th district.
“A lot of communities years ago enacted boilerplate zoning ordinances that were very superficial and perpetuated suburban sprawl,” he said. “It was a very popular technique, and it’s reaped some very horrible results.”
Lower Milford Township has been able to fight a proposed quarry for more than a dozen years because of its strong zoning and subdivision and land development ordinances, supervisor Donna Wright said. The most recent iteration of the plan, she noted, calls for a much smaller quarry than the initial one.
Still, the fate of that quarry plan ultimately lies in the hands of the Department of Environmental Protection and state courts that have already pre-empted parts of the township’s zoning ordinance.
If the most a community can do is effectively regulate its land use, Price argued, more incremental damage to the environment — and deterioration of citizens’ unalienable rights — still accumulates over time.
“At some point it gets completely destroyed,” he said. “You can’t continue to regulate a march toward more harm and say that’s a good way to govern.”
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