EDA News MAY 2022

Placing Our Trust in Earth

EDA’s Spring Campaign is from May 5 - 19. The kickoff event is a presentation by Managing Director James Quilligan on:

Thursday May 5th, 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET

His talk, Placing Our Trust in Earth, will examine two different civilizations which faced climatic and economic conditions similar to our own.

Back in the 16th to 17th centuries BCE, Joseph of Egypt planned to store food during ‘seven fat years’ to provide for ‘seven lean years’ for the people of the Nile watershed. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal organized conservation basins in different regions of the United States to relocate farmers, develop agricultural subsidies and establish self-sufficiency in each area.

Why weren’t these plans sustainable? What do these case studies teach us about policies that could better serve us today? What kind of changes will be necessary in the future?

Join us for this engaging presentation.

Good things come to those who wait

We’re happy to announce that Economic Democracy Advocates received a Determination Letter from the Internal Revenue Service in April 2022. This exempts EDA from paying federal income tax in our charitable organization.

Economic Democracy Advocates applied for this 501(c)(4) charitable status in 2016. For reasons we don’t fully understand, this has taken nearly six years to complete.

Our 501(c)3 educational arm, Economic Democracy Advocates Foundation, was easier to secure. In 2019, repurposed an existing 501(c)(3) from an earlier organization, which the IRS approved in 2004. That initial organization was administered by EDA members Wayne Wilson and James Quilligan.

Block-level planning

In April’s EDA News, we included information about Prout’s concept of economic regionalization, which it calls block-level planning.

We received such a warm response to that article that we’ve decided to include another excerpt from Prout in a Nutshell (PR Sarkar, 1987). It describes how people can become more self-sufficient in their ecological regions through block-level planning, which measures the resources available in a bioregion to meet the needs of its population.

It's time to develop regional water cooperation!

EDA supports resource cooperation to make our regional areas more self-sufficient. Yet with the higher costs and increasing competition for scarce goods, some US states may soon be taking steps to curtail the public management of vital resources such as water. Here’s an example that the EDA State Legislation team discovered during our recent search of state bills.

In January 2022, identical bills were introduced in the legislatures of Tennessee and Mississippi to create the RegionSmart Development Agency of the Greater Memphis region. Arkansas, which is out of session this year, will probably consider the same legislation next year.

Click here to read the full text of the RegionSmart legislation and

TN HB1989 or TN SB1915, then select BILL TEXT.

During the past two hundred years of modern development, the Memphis Sand Aquifer has suffered countless breaches from chemical, heavy metal and wastewater spills and dumping, as well as industrial over-pumping. There is every likelihood that a regional commerce and transit development agency, approved into law without adequate groundwater protections, will degrade and deplete these water sources even further.

What does RegionSmart gain?

RegionSmart would be operated by an unelected Board of Commissioners, appointed by the mayors of the various counties in the Tri-State area. The proposed legislation would give RegionSmart the power to control and coordinate:

Water supply and sewage and disposal works, streets, highways, parkways, parking areas, terminals, recreational and conservation facilities and projects, and land use patterns

Physical improvements, changes in method, rate of transportation, systems of handling freight, warehousing, docking, lighting, or transfer of freight to improve the handling of commerce in and through the district, or to improve terminal and transportation facilities

Planning, constructing, operating and maintaining roads, airports, ports, wharves, docks, harbors, industrial parks, bridges, tunnels, warehouses, grain elevators, sewage disposal plants, passenger transportation facilities and air, water, rail, motor vehicle and parking facilities

Eminent domain and/or condemnation of property of any kind or character

What happened to the public right to water?

In short, RegionSmart would have sweeping political and financial control over the commerce and transit infrastructure — including the water system — in portions of three states that share the same aquifer.

Yet there is nothing in this legislation about people’s access to clean and affordable drinking water, the rights to public health and safety, the role of public water utilities, or citizen participation in decisions made for the protection and conservation of their streams, groundwater and wells. This means that the people of the Memphis Sand Aquifer region would have no input in how their valuable water is managed, distributed or used.

RegionSmart is not so smart

The RegionSmart legislation may not pass in 2022, but its sponsors say they will reintroduce the bill in future legislative sessions.

If multi-state legislation like RegionSmart is adopted, we may see more bills for commerce and transit ‘compacts’ across state boundaries that ignore the need for maintaining and sustaining their region’s water reserves and wells. This could become a model in other places of the country that seek to privatize their water systems.

Without the capacity to recharge sufficiently, an aquifer is ultimately a non-renewable resource. This water has been stored underground for millions of years and once we’ve used it up, it will never be replaced. With climate warming, population growth and human demand shrinking our groundwater reserves rapidly across the US, the issue has never been more important.

We need a compact between states that does what RegionSmart’s proposal does not do: treat regional water supplies as a public good. There is still time to get organized and develop legislation to get this right, but like the water, our time is running out.

Archer organized a group of citizen advocates and created a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to ensure that people have clean, plentiful and sustainable sources of water. Last summer, POA hired Sarah Houston as its first, full time Executive Director and approved a 5-year strategic plan.

POA has become a leading voice in the science-based protection of the aquifer and the people who depend on it. The agency has brought together diverse stakeholders for water management from all over Memphis. It has also supported legislation to stop new pipelines and safeguard the development of industrial sites near the endangered wells and groundwater sources of Greater Memphis.

Being a cooperative organization requires that we all listen to each other in making EDA decisions, which is why we call our members the Governing Circle. Each month in this column, we highlight some of the ways in which our members have had a direct influence on the direction of this organization.

Suggestion for a Public Affairs Officer

A year ago, while working on our new website, an EDA member proposed that we develop a public affairs department. The idea was that EDA already has communications and marketing departments, but we also need a press office to handle formal interactions with the press and public.

We didn’t have the bandwidth to act on this in 2021. But the concept was relevant and has recently reemerged. As we get more and more engaged with groups across the country, we recognize that the function of a press office is not only a great idea, it’s also a necessity!

So we’re developing a job description for a Public Affairs Officer and will be asking the Governing Circle to approve this new position through an upcoming ratification, since it was not part of our original Charter.

First, we would like to see if anyone in our membership has the passion and background to take on this role. Your input could help define the position from the beginning!

If you’re interested in the role of Public Affairs Officer, please contact janice.bobbie@sustaineda.org or james.quilligan@sustaineda.org

Coming soon...time to renew your membership

A majority of our members will be renewing in June and July. We'll be sending notices out soon. For those who renew at other times of the year, we understand that some emails were not received, or may have ended up in your Spam. We'll be contacting those individuals to remind them of their renewal date.

If you had trouble updating your membership on the EDA website, we would like to know the details. When we transitioned to our new website, some people experienced issues with donating or renewing and and we’ve been working to identify and address these issues.

If you were one of these people, please contact us at: communications@sustaineda.org. with a cc to: membership@sustaineda.org

Membership fees support our work

Membership dues are an important part of our operating revenue. Please renew as an Active Member. We value your membership and your participation. As an Active Member you can get involved in the decisions of the organization. The more voices we have, the greater the strength of our message.

When you receive your membership notification, please renew at your earliest possible convenience and tell us if you have difficulty doing so. Renew online at: Be a Member, then click on Join as an Active Member.

Let us know that you're committed to helping us continue our work.

New Budget Committee

The EDA Board approved a proposal to restore the original language of 7.4.1 in the Cooperative Charter: ‘EDA’s Budget Committee will consist of five Active Members appointed by the Director of Finance." This amendment to the Charter will be submitted to EDA members for ratification this summer.

Effective April 29, the Board dissolved the seven-member Finance Team, which has served in the absence of a Director of Finance.

The Board also appointed a new five-member Budget Committee, which includes Terry Blatt, Patti Ellis, Greg Pace, James Quilligan and Eva Simonsen, as a temporary committee until the amendment to the Charter is approved by EDA members. The primary focus of this group will be the development of an EDA budget to support a Director of Finance.

A global monetary revolution?

Ellen Brown describes an unintended consequence of the sanctions that the Western bloc has imposed on Russia: the development of an Eastern bloc monetary system. Russia, China and India, along with 40 nations, are discussing the creation of a monetary regime beyond the Western bloc, which would end the monopoly of the US dollar as the world’s dominant currency. The Eastern bloc would use Russia’s bountiful energy reserves to guarantee the value of this new currency system through petroroubles, similar to the petrodollar regime that has been used by the US for many decades. (Please read to the end of this fascinating story. And see the comments that follow. They're just as interesting as the article.)