By: Tom Hoffman
Sometimes local actions have national impact. Read on to learn how Pittsburgh Sierra activists got national results when they lobbied for safe, affordable and publicly controlled water.
In March, fifteen Sierra Club members participated in the Our Water Our Rivers Lobby Week activities. The week kicked off with a training downtown on a Saturday morning. 30 people including 8 Sierra Club members learned how to talk to elected about how important water is to our region, our health and our families. During the next week they put those skills to work and took their case for water on the road.
By the end of the week, teams of OWOR lobbyists had visited an impressive 22 elected leaders from State Representatives and Senators to Pittsburgh City Council members to County Council Representatives. The total attendance in those meetings was an awesome 90 people.
In all the meetings activists asked the electeds to sign a pledge that required them to:
1. Oppose any efforts to privatize the City’s water authority - PWSA
2. Encourage our regional sewer authority ALCOSAN to make major investments in the
region’s planned large scale green projects such as Four Mile Run and Negley Run
Watershed
3. Require that jobs created in infrastructure investments in the region be good family
sustaining union jobs
Ultimately 11 of the representatives we visited signed the pledge. Several of those who wouldn’t sign had a blanket policy not to sign pledges but pledged their support for our principles. One even took a picture with the team of him holding the pledge!
Mayor Peduto holds the signed pledge stating he promises to keep Pittsburgh's water publicly controlled
The most exciting and newsworthy visit was to Mayor Bill Peduto of Pittsburgh. The group outlined our positions and then the Mayor grabbed a blue marker and signed his name to the bottom of the pledge. After much applause and hand shaking (and the obligatory selfies) we filed out of the office and headed home. Less than a week later we got an email from Neil Gupta of our partner organization Corporate Accountability with some very exciting news.
He monitors the activities of the national industry trade journal Global Water Intelligence (GWI). They maintain a tracker that ranks the likelihood that a public water authority will be privatized. As a direct result of our lobbying Mayor Peduto about keeping PWSA public, GWI updated their
tracker to say that privatization of PWSA is “now looking unlikely”. In the notes they credited the change in status to our pledge that the Mayor had signed.
There is no substitute for good organizing and SOMETIMES you get to hit a home run.
This blog was included as part of the 2019 Spring Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!