Background about how this relates to North Plainfield is here, including information about a Democracy School in Chambersburg Oct. 10-12, which I’ll be attending.
Press Release forwarded by Ben Price, Projects Director at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
PA Commonwealth Court Denies Attorney General’s First Effort to Overturn Sludge Ordinance in Schuylkill County, but Declares: “There is No Right to Community Self-Government”
Three Judge Panel: “Municipalities are Creatures of the State and the Authority of the Legislature Over Their Powers is Supreme”
On Tuesday, September 23rd, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania handed down a ruling on the state Attorney General’s demand that the Court overturn East Brunswick Township’s Sewage Sludge Ordinance.
That Ordinance, adopted in 2007 by the Township Board of Supervisors in Schuylkill County, PA, banned corporate sludge hauling within the Township, and removed the authority of sludge corporations to override the ban.
The Attorney General had asked the Court to rule immediately on the suit, without waiting for the normal course of litigation to proceed. The Court denied the Attorney General’s request, holding that the Attorney General had not proven that the land application of sludge was a “normal agricultural operation” – a prerequisite to the Attorney General’s intervention into the dispute between the Township and a local corporation.
The Court , however, proceeded to rule that the Township did not possess a right to self-government, and that the State legislature acted constitutionally when it empowered the Attorney General to represent sludge and factory farm corporations in lawsuits against municipal governments.
The Court’s ruling echoed arguments made previously by Attorney General Thomas Corbett, in which he declared that “there is no inalienable right to local self-government.”
The Legal Defense Fund, as legal counsel for the Township, argued that the community retains an inalienable right to govern itself – and that when the State has shown its refusal to protect the health, safety, and welfare of a community, that the Township’s lawmaking must override that of the State.
The Township cited, among other provisions, Article 1, Section 2 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, which states: “All power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and…they have at all times an inalienable and indefeasible right to alter, reform, or abolish their government in such manner as they may think proper.”
In rejecting that argument, the Court declared that, “First and foremost, we are not prepared to reject one of the most basic precepts of governmental structure in this Commonwealth, i.e., that local governments are creatures of the legislature from which they get their existence.”
Ben Price, Projects Director for the Legal Defense Fund, characterized the Court’s ruling as “merely another reiteration that our communities cannot govern themselves under the current system of law. This decision should send another shockwave into communities that they will need to make some very difficult decisions about whether they will continue to surrender their abil ity to govern themselves to corporations and a legislature that have melded themselves together. It’s also a reason to support a growing understanding that a new State Constitution is necessary – one that codifies the right to local self-government, and which protects the rights of citizens against those rights claimed by corporations.”
4 responses so far ↓
GimmeABreak // September 29, 2008 at 11:26 am |
Remind me, I forgot — isn’t Pennsylvania run by one of those “for the little guy” democrat Governors, Ed Rendell? You know, the ones who always spout crap about the rights of the common man? Like New Jersey and Teflon Jon Corzine? Funny how they get to be governor, and then all the courts say that THE STATE is the final authority. The Soviet Union used to refer to “the state” that way too.
KW // September 29, 2008 at 11:54 am |
Now I’m REALLY pissed off.
The corporate trumping of local self-governing rights is written into virtually every god-damn state constitution in the country – Republican and Democratic governors be damned.
That’s the whole point of the corporatist analysis of the governing scheme we all live under, and the entire thrust of the local self-governace movement.
If you think PA is bad, under Rendell (and a whole series of Republican and Democratic governors going back 150 years) check out North Plainfield, New Jersey, where local democracy was throttled within a few weeks by Somerset County Superior Court Judge Yolanda Ciccone,.without any explanation, because it’s SO UNDERSTOOD that corporations trump people. We didn’t even make it to the NJ Supreme Court, to hear the court say that we have no local right to self-government. Bernstein’s firm’s assertion of that same legal theory was enough for Ciccone.
Or haven’t you been following ALL the self-governance updates on this blog for the last year?
Too lazy to read? Check out this 16 minute video.
KW // September 29, 2008 at 12:10 pm |
Here.
Let me be clearer.
Rendell is scum. Corzine is scum. Palin is scum. All Democratic governing officials are scum. And so are all Democratic candidates. All Republican governing officials are scum, and so are all Republican candidates.
Bush is scum. McCain is scum. Specter and Lautenberg and Menendez and Casey are scum. My Republican Congressman Peterson and your Republican Congressman Ferguson are scum. Democrat Linda Stender is scum. Democrat Jerry Green is scum.
The whole damn system is completely rigged against the people who comprise the country – and it has been so rigged for at least 150 years, if not back to the Magna Cart. All of those people are simply the current political class more or less actively complicit in perpetuating and enforcing that system.
And it’s all going to either collapse of its own weight, requiring us to rebuild everything from the ground up, or it’s going to solidify – because the people sit by and refuse to fight back – or it’s going to change – because the people stand up and start to fight back.
I don’t see any other possible scenarios at the moment.
And if you do feel like reading, check out Plaintiff’s brief on the North Plainfield self-governance ordinance, modelled after Thomas Linzey’s brief in one of the PA cases.
GimmeABreak // September 29, 2008 at 1:07 pm |
And I give you tremendous ‘props’ for being willing to take a clear, concise stand. My only intention was to point out that democrats continue to run on the ‘for the people’ platform, and pound the “republicans-for-big-business” chant into people’s heads (Obama is still trying to fly on that). Even if we agree that ALL of these people are scum, and we should, it would be nice, just once to hear someone with some ‘heat’ trash that “party of the people” garbage once and for all. That’s all I intended. YOU are one of the few NON-shit talkers around here.