From a dangerous intersection to a failing sewer system, problems close to home can turn even the most politically disengaged people into unlikely activists.
“At the state and local level, this is where you can touch your government much more easily right now,” says journalist Miranda Spivack.
In her book “Backroom Deals in Our Backyards,” she spotlights five citizens who fought for transparency, including one who dug deep after her husband’s cancer diagnosis, raising larger questions about firefighting gear.
“You find something locally, and then also try to build a national coalition. It’s a way to combat some of what we may be seeing emanating from Washington,” Spivack says.
This interview has been edited and condensed. For the full conversation, listen to the latest episode of the “Equal Time” podcast.
Q: What does it mean to be an “accidental activist”?
A: When they go to their state and local governments looking for solutions, they hit an information blockade and a lot of obstruction. So they turn into very persistent activists, even though none of them was an activist before this. But it’s not an easy role. Nobody signs up for this. It takes tenacity, it takes persistence — and mostly it takes being angry at the idea that their government wasn’t there to help them.
Q: Who are some of the activists you feature in the book?
A: One particularly tenacious resident wanted to fix an intersection near a high school. But every time he asked the state of Maryland, they would turn him down and say the incidence of danger was not high on that road. When he asked for documents to support that claim, he learned there’s a loophole in federal law that allows states to keep these kinds of documents secret all over the country.
A community in Alabama’s Black Belt has had a dreadfully failing sewer system for years, and they finally get some federal and state money to fix it. But it’s still not fixed, and residents want to know why.
Another case in the book is Diane Cotter, a woman from Worcester, Massachusetts. Her husband is a firefighter, and he gets cancer. The incidence of cancer in the fire service is way higher than the general population, and there are many reasons for that. But she finds out the protective gear that firefighters use is basically coated with forever chemicals. She learns to read scientific papers, she learns to lobby, she learns to network, and she learns to talk all the politicians into paying attention to her after they blew her off for years.
Q: Were they surprised to run into those transparency problems?
A: When you need information from the government, your expectation is, “My tax dollars paid for this.” They’ve paid for the agenda for the city council. They’ve paid for the agenda for the local water board. They’ve paid for contracts that go to private companies that are doing work for the government. So people logically think this information should be public.
And in fact, every state has an open records law, and generally those laws are pretty good. The problem, of course, is in the enforcement. If you ask for one of these documents and you can’t get it, why is that happening? And whose job is it to try to enforce the law?
Often that falls to members of the public. A few states do have intermediate agencies that will review some of these records disputes, but most do not. And if the government turns you down, which they may do for a variety of reasons — some of them legitimate, many not — you have to go to court. And so that ends it right there. I mean, who could afford to do that? Almost nobody.
Q: Is transparency going in the wrong direction?
A: The reality is, state and local governments are routinely underfunded. State legislatures, if they’re picking between funding transparency or perhaps paying for police, fire, education or whatever, they’re going to vote for those things which are more politically popular and obvious.
With the federal government in a tailspin now and getting rid of so many subject matter experts and also people who handle records requests, it’s filtering down to the states. If money is being cut overall, that’s going to put more pressure on state and local governments to just fund basic services. And transparency is not thought of as a basic service. It should be, in my opinion, but it’s not.
Q: After doing this reporting, what gives you hope?
A: I think younger people right now are trying to be active, so that gives me hope. And there are many, many good people in government, and we need to support them. I mean, they’re being laid off at the federal level, but at the state and local level, this is where you can touch your government much more easily right now than you can the federal government.
Q: What are the consequences if these activists remain silent?
A: If these people don’t speak up, these issues would just fester. In the case of Hoosick Falls, which is a small community outside of Albany, a guy named Michael Hickey was trying to figure out what was going on with the water system. He thinks maybe there’s something wrong, because his father wasn’t the only one who had cancer. So he goes out on his own and gets the water tested.
He really has to push very, very hard to get anybody to respond, whether it was the corporations that may have been responsible for the pollution, or the community government, or even members of his own community. Everybody’s scared, worried and doesn’t really want to know what’s going on.
Forever chemicals in the drinking water, that’s not unique to Hoosick Falls. That’s a problem all over the country, especially near military bases, near where firefighting foam is used. And it’s not clear that the federal Environmental Protection Agency is going to step up to the plate. They did start to in the Biden administration, but it looks like the Trump administration is backing off a lot of that. So it’s going to be up to us to figure out if our drinking water is drinkable.
Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call “Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis” podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.
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