Posted on 02/29/2004 4:36:50 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
You've got to hand it to Oscar Goodman. Most mayors go to the U.S. Conference of Mayors annual meeting and get lobbied by companies. Oscar, ever the clever one, used the meeting to let his kid's company lobby the mayors.
What's more, face time with a national collection of muckety-mucks who control purse strings usually doesn't come as cheap as the price of a rented room and a few drinks.
In fact, it's not Las Vegans who should be upset with Oscar. It's the multitude of corporate citizenry who get in the same room with all those mayors the old-fashioned way -- dishing oodles of money to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. They probably think Oscar and his kid are poachers.
See, the conference has what it calls a "Business" Council, but which should be called a corporate council, in that nearly every one of the 84 members is a large, publicly traded corporation. Each of them pays $12,000 a year to belong to the council, and some of them fork over more than that to sponsor and support periodic shindigs like the one Oscar and his kid were attending in Washington.
And perhaps nobody has hooked up tighter with the conference than the European conglomerates on a mission to -- drum roll please -- privatize water.
The three big ones are Suez, RWE and Veolia. They belong to the conference Business Council under the names of their U.S. subsidiaries, United Water, American Water Works, and USFilter, respectively (though USFilter changed its name to Veolia Water a few days ago). They've tried to control water and charge too much for it in nations around the globe, but it hasn't worked out like the companies hoped -- it's been a big fiasco, mostly. So in the past few years the companies have focused on the United States, because ... you know, that's where the money is.
But 85 percent of the water that pours from a tap in the United States is delivered by a publicly owned and operated system, and polling shows overwhelming support for publicly funded water systems. How's a corporation going to convince a city to hand over control of its water?
By schmoozing mayors. For instance, at January's conference meeting in Washington, Veolia footed the bill for mayors to film video presentations to be available at the U.S. Mayors Web site. The program was an extension of the "Meet the Mayors" database long-sponsored by Veolia and prominently featured in the upper right corner of the usmayors.org homepage.
And the schmoozing, apparently, works. Atlanta entered into a private water contract during the administration of then-mayor Bill Campbell, a former conference committee chair and key voice on behalf of the organization's congressional lobbying efforts. New Orleans began spending money on a privatization process under the administration of then-mayor Marc Morial, a former conference president. Stockton, Calif., privatized its water system under Mayor Gary Podesto, a prominent member of the conference's industry-sponsored "Urban Water Council" who credits the conference for turning him on to the wonders of water privatization.
But while schmooze works, privatization hasn't. Atlanta got out of its contract four years into a 20-year pact when it became clear that the private company could deliver brown water but not the promised financial savings. New Orleans has dropped $6 million in six years, only to learn that it's still impossible to tell if privatization will save any money, and the privatization process has stalled. Stockton officials sidestepped a public referendum and rammed privatization down the throats of an unwilling citizenry, only to have it thrown out in court for failing to account for environmental impacts of the deal.
Coming up empty in big cities and larger towns, the water privateers are now heading for smaller communities, like the Village of Hempstead, N.Y. If cities such as New Orleans and Atlanta have trouble obtaining credible, timely information from these companies and holding them accountable, it's frightening to think about how corporations might run roughshod over small towns. Oh, the mayor of Hempstead Village, by the way, is the current president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
The conference does some decent work -- a couple years ago, at the height of the congressional fight over White House designation of Yucca Mountain as the planet's one and only nuke dump, it adopted a resolution opposing nuclear waste transportation.
But the conference has also been infiltrated by corporations who actually work against the interests of the nation's cities: the big water corporations want Congress to make it harder for cities to get federal water infrastructure assistance, in an effort to put even more financial pressure on cash-strapped cities so they'll be forced to scramble for wild-eyed solutions like privatization.
So perhaps Las Vegans have a beef with Oscar after all. The next time he attends a conference meeting, instead of shilling for his kid he should make himself useful and ask his colleagues from around the country what the hell they think they're doing sucking up to companies that want to control people's water and turn it into a profit stream. Oscar's a persuasive guy. Maybe he can help stop the corporate water privatization push before it comes to a town near you.
Henderson resident Hugh Jackson is a researcher and policy analyst for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
To turn our water over to a non-regulated for-profit company that faces no competition is just asinine stupid.
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