[ Click here for Part 1 ]
NOTE: This piece originally appeared in last year’s environment issue of Our Town (the Columbia County quarterly), under the title The Bullet We Dodged: How the Cement War was Won.* I’m offering it here in several installments over the next week, in a somewhat expanded form, and with added visuals and links, both for those who lived through the tumultuous years of 1998-2005, and for others who moved to the area more recently—who may wonder what all the fuss was about...
Whenever big projects like the St. Lawrence Cement complex get proposed, citizens are told that the project is inevitable—a “done deal.”
Invariably, the company behind the project is said to be vastly wealthy and influential—politically wired in. Accommodationists starting making lists of tepid compromises, empty concessions which benefit only themselves or their immediate circle. Defeatists sigh that there’s no point fighting, since you can’t fight City Hall.
But in every one of these controversies, the supposed minority eventually can become a majority, and the people prevailed.
The pattern in each of the fights listed in Part 1 of this series was nearly identical, and went something like this: At first, the press only reported the company line, with Town, County and State officials dutifully toeing it. Jobs, jobs, jobs was the mantra, plus some token assurances that all environmental rules and standards would be “met or exceeded.” The few who dared ask even basic questions were automatically branded as a “strident” or “vocal” minority.
Those who merely expected their politicians and regulators to do a little due diligence before going all in on these projects were given derisive labels. They were CAVE People (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) with BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) outlooks and NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) attitudes.
But as Hudson River bard Pete Seeger likes to say: NIMBY should be spelled with a second “I”, standing for Now I Must Be Involved.
And that’s the answer when people ask how we stopped the cement plant—despite the fact that SLC’s parent was the largest cement manufacturer in the world, despite the initial widespread support of political officials and the County establishment, despite the company’s $60 million expenditure on lawyers, consultants, experts, flacks, ads, mass mailings, campaign contributions, charitable donations, and more— because everyone got involved.
We won because ordinary residents decided to stand up like woodchucks on their hind legs, scent the air, and then burrow in to our own home turf for a long trench war.
If there is another giant controversy in the next decade, the people surely will prevail again; but only because people power is not a passive cliché. It works. There’s no such thing as a done deal when local energies are properly organized and channeled into a focused, comprehensive campaign.
But how does this people power work in practice, rather than theory? The labor leader Cesar Chavez was often asked the secret to his success at organizing farm workers. “First I talk to one person; then I talk to another person,” was his standard reply.
Confused, the questioner would repeat the question. But Chavez would simply repeat: “First I talk to one person; then I talk to another person.”
Eventually the questioner would get that the “secret” of organizing relies not on any trick or scheme, but on the combined talents of many individuals working together as a community—complementing and amplifying each other’s skills, contacts and perspectives.
Naturally, any long campaign has to be constantly guided, shaped, strategized, narrowed, expanded, recast, reinvigorated, and re-imagined along the way. Early on, grassroots groups often will stumble over simple mechanical obstacles, such as group structure, personalities, fatalism, expertise, exhaustion, funding. But once a group gets its feet planted, and begins defending that home turf by beating the bushes for more like minds, anything’s possible.
What follows is a partial chronicle of those who emerged from the Valley underbrush and made striking contributions to the Stop the Plant cause. Their stories not only deserve to be recorded, but may also inspire the next generation of accidental activists who find themselves fighting the next life-or-death battle for the soul of our region. Naturally, a full portrait of all who gave their time, energy, courage and imagination (not to mention dollars) to stop the plant would be impossible. The victory achieved was an amalgam of countless individual contributors, which transcended any single contribution.
THE LONGTIMERS • Divide and conquer was SLC’s key strategy from the get-go. The company blanketed the region’s airwaves with inflammatory advertising, and filled mailboxes across five counties with what retired Hudson advertising maven Tom Mabley called “commercialized hate mail,” intended to ignite a culture war.
“Don’t let a group of millionaires from New York City deny Columbia County good-paying jobs,” blared one glossy postcard. Meanwhile, the Register-Star churned out vicious, willfully ignorant editorials in favor of their biggest advertiser on a nearly weekly basis—caricaturing plant opponents as elitists attending “wine and brie” parties, while denying that the company’s tens of thousands in annual ads had nothing to do with the paper’s position.
But plenty of local people remembered the bad old days of Hudson’s cement era, when brown snow fell in winter, and widows grieved the early deaths of their breadwinning husbands.
Hudson resident Al Cook, a silver-haired and gravelly-voiced former union chief who led the longest strike in the history of Atlas Cement, was among the first to express skepticism.
Though neutral on the project at first, “Cookie” took a show-me stance, warning that “You can’t trust these cement company bosses farther than you can throw ’em. Their promises don’t mean nothing unless it’s written down.” Others who had lived here all their lives stepped forward. Deb Novack, a realtor and popular local bartender, joined opponents’ steering group after getting tired of hearing too much misinformation bandied about at Melino’s Pub. Hudson matriarch Mary Lou Groll wore “Stop the Plant” buttons on her lapel to counteract some of her own family members’ “Support the Plan(e)t” banners.
Opponents were invited to speak everywhere from the Hudson Rotary Club to the Germantown Lions Club to the Ladies Auxiliary of the Elizaville Fire Department to the basement of St. James Church in Chatham, and no brie was in evidence.
We were graciously hosted by Dave Staats and other members of the Federation of Polish Sportsmen, where our big annual picnic was held each summer. We were likewise welltreated by the ladies managing the former St. Mary’s Academy gymnasium, the site of our yearly winter get-together, drawing over 500 attendees from all walks of life.
So while the company and its allies sought to distort the facts of the project and demean those who would have to live in its shadow, longtime residents stood alongside those who had lived here “only” ten, twenty, or thirty years, proving SLC’s divisive rhetoric just as false as the rest of their far-fetched claims.
THE RESEARCHERS • Whenever I’d spot Elizabeth Nyland opening the door to my office—in her usual long skirt, her hair in a bun, toting an armful of file folders bursting with Post-It notes—I knew that our knowledge of the economic side of the plant argument was about to take another quantum leap forward.
A retired analyst for companies like American Express, living on Route 23B, a couple miles from the proposed stack, Elizabeth focused her forensic skills on the economic claims buried within SLC’s 800-page application. Through the careful work of Elizabeth and others, it became clear that the project wasn’t going to be an employment boon.
The company already had 154 employees in the area, and with the new plant, the total would go up to 155, a net gain of only one new job.
Bit by bit, volunteers like Elizabeth teased these facts out of the depths of SLC’s own documents, turning the company’s own words against it, revealing the contradictions within its claims.
Claverack’s Ian Nitschke, whose deliberate Australian drawl and patroon-like gold eyeglasses were familiar fixtures at our meetings, used expertise developed at the State Public Service Commission to locate more ammunition. Ian dug up 1970s testimony about the failed nuclear project, which spoke to the immense cultural importance of the Hudson Valley, noting how pertinent it was to this new fight. He had also worked closely on challenges to the Athens Generating plant with Laura Skutch, a Sleepy Hollow Lake resident who stumbled across a then-little-known set of regulations: the State’s 44 policies for managing lands within New York’s Coastal Zone. Since the proposed plant would affect designated zones north and south of Hudson, these policies also applied to SLC. In the end, this was the legal handle we turned to stop the plant.
Sign created by Bob Blechman
Taghkanic’s Moisha Blechman, though diminutive and outwardly delicate, brought a fierce and seasoned activist will to the battle. She proposed an idea which no one at first believed would ever come to fruition: writing a comprehensive manual covering every essential detail of the cement project and industry. The idea was to have a single reference source for all the questions that were constantly cropping up. Not only did Moisha complete the project, she obtained a grant to finance printing of 20,000 copies, handsomely packaged with graphics by her son, Nicholas. Though some old Sierra Club rivalries briefly threatened to derail the project, and some allies almost balked at distributing it, in the end SLC: Understanding the Impact proved an indispensable tool for organizing both thought and action, conferring the authority of a book upon the opposition’s research. Knowledge is power, and for citizens faced with a wellfunded and politically-connected adversary, it’s one of the few affordable weapons available—fighting the company’s PR fire with blazing facts.
NEXT UP: Historians, Go-Getters, Creatives, Marketeers, and Converts turn the tide. [ Click for Part 3 ]
* Readers who want to read the full, original OT article as edited by Enid Futterman and designed by John Isaacs can download it as a PDF right away by clicking here. A full, week-by-week chronology of the fight can be found at Stop the Plant.com.
