MEGA-WATCH

Williams County Alliance

January 2007 Newsletter Number 2

The Williams County Alliance is dedicated to preserving the quality and rural character of life in Williams County and promoting a sustainable future through education and citizen action.

The Alliance encourages citizens to interact with

 local, state, and Federal governments to create policy that will

improve the quality of life in Williams County.

REGIONAL GROUND WATER PROTECTION EFFORTS MOVE FORWARD

At the end of 2006, the Bryan Board of Public Affairs awarded a contract to Tritium, Inc., of Osceola, IN to prepare and submit a petition to the U.S. EPA to designate our aquifer a Sole Source Aquifer as defined in the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974.

A Sole Source Aquifer is one that supplies at least 50 percent of the drinking water consumed in the area overlying the aquifer. The petitioners must prove to the EPA that the area has no alternative drinking water sources that could physically, legally and economically supply all those who depend on the aquifer for drinking water.

The MICHINDOH Glacial Outwash Aquifer is the source of drinking water for cities, villages and private wells in portions of Branch, Hillsdale, and Lenawee counties in Michigan, portions of Steuben, and Dekalb Counties in Indiana and most of Williams, and portions of Fulton, and Defiance counties in Ohio.

The MICHINDOH Sole Source Aquifer Group was formed to educate the public on the importance of our aquifer and the preservation of local ground water resources. The group is open to all who share its mission. Contact Lou Pendleton, 419-633-6113, if you would like to get involved.

wca NOTES

The Williams County Alliance’s first annual membership meeting will be held on Monday, Jan. 22, at 5 pm in the Bryan Community Center on Buffalo Rd. Officers and board members will be elected. Refreshments will be provided, with free-range eggs and other products from local producers given as door prizes. Join with other WCA members in helping to plan for the upcoming year.

Last year, over 200 people joined the Williams County Alliance. We hope you will continue to support and become involved in the WCA to help make Williams County a better place to live. Please renew your membership today and encourage others to join.

Look for information about meetings and upcoming events on our Website: www.williamscountyalliance.com.

Upcoming meetings will be listed in the Bryan Time’s Community Calendar. All WCA members are welcome.

The Alliance would like to thank Ann Longsworth-Orr for her dedication and hard work in helping found the WCA. We will miss her experience and organizing skills, as well as her wonderful wit! We wish her and her husband, Daniel, their children, Lewis and Molly, the very best on their move to Sandusky County.

THE COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENTAL LEGAL DEFENSE FUND

The following is an article by the Ohio Community Organizers for the Community Legal Environmental Defense Fund.

In the last year you have learned that corporate factory farms destroy communities, small family farms, wildlife, infrastructure and natural resources, the health of the people, and the use of public tax dollars. This societal, environmental, and economic damage would likely not exist if the people were truly the source of governing authority as stated in the U.S. and Ohio Constitutions. After all, who is better able to decide what’s best for a community than the people who live there?

Like you, many Ohioans are trying to understand why agribusiness corporations seem to have greater rights than the citizens of Ohio. In asking that question, they're joining citizens across the United States who have watched as their own rights to self-government are routinely trumped by corporations using their own state legislatures against them.

A new organizing strategy involves refocusing campaigns toward exposing and changing the fundamental problem enabling factory farm corporations to build in the first place: Agribusiness corporations, energy corporations, development sprawl corporations, and innumerable other corporations, ALL have more legal “rights” than ordinary citizens under the U.S. and state constitutions.

Sound crazy? The history of corporations gaining “rights” over people through the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution extends back 150 years. These “rights” allow agribusiness factories to pollute the environment, destroy communities, small farms, and people’s health legally. And state legislatures enable all of this through the Ohio Constitution and laws.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (www.celdf.org) assists Ohio citizens and local government officials to pass local, binding laws that prohibit corporate agribusiness factory farms. Over the last decade, the Defense Fund has assisted hundreds of communities and local governments in Pennsylvania to pass local laws. More recently, Pennsylvania communities have passed laws that ban corporate factory farms and the spreading of municipal sludge. To date, not one factory farm has been built nor one drop of municipal sludge has been spread in those communities.

These laws strip corporations of their constitutional rights, such as the “right” of “personhood” under the Fourteenth Amendment—corporations have cleverly won the rights of “due process” and “equal protection” originally guaranteed freed slaves.

The Defense Fund holds Democracy Schools for citizens and government officials who are tired of being told they have to accept agribusiness factories, and who want to refocus their strategies away from pressuring state legislators and regulatory agencies to make factory farms pollute a little less. About 15 Williams County Alliance members have attended our Schools already, and local government officials and additional Alliance members have shown interest in a weekend School in Williams County in early 2007.

The Defense Fund hopes to work with the Alliance and local government officials in Williams County to pass anti-corporate farming laws that ban corporate factory farms and strip them of their constitutional rights. Imagine a Williams County with such laws in place. Think what you could do for your children and your children’s children by establishing real self-government—with people as the source of governing authority.

Kat Walter and Eme Lybarger

Ohio Community Organizers

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

www.celdf.org

(937) 223-1577 Dayton

(740) 548-9678 Columbus

Interested in learning about the Democracy School strategies

A public forum on the Democracy School strategies, hosted by the Montpelier Village Council, will feature a presentation by Kat Walter and Eme Lybarger. The forum will take place on Saturday, Feb. 2, at 10 a.m., in the Montpelier Fire Station, 107 S. Monroe St.