 Hi, I'm Jean Bergman from the old north end of Burlington and for 20 years I was an assistant city attorney and senior assistant attorney for the city of Burlington, including being the attorney for the department of public works. And that's important because today we are here to talk trash solid waste collection and public ownership with Thomas Hannah, the research director of the democracy collaborative. And we're discussing this because Burlington is currently discussing moving away from our inefficient and costly fragmented system to a new consolidated system. And we're going to talk about the advantages of a public not for profit, democratically controlled system that also promotes the most union jobs with good wages and benefits, and also the largest reductions in fossil fuel emissions. So, welcome Thomas. Can you tell people a little bit about yourself in the democracy collaborative. Sure. And first of all, thank you so much Jean for having me it's a real pleasure to be speaking with you all today on a topic that's really really close to my heart. The democracy collaborative is an R&D lab for a more democratic and equitable economy. We've been around for about 20 years, although our roots go back much further really into the 1960s through a number of different institutions as well as the work of our co founder, Gar Alperovitz who some of your viewers may know about. This is Gus Spieth, also part of a he's a Vermonter right here. Yes, Gus is Gus is gussing Gar are the co chairs of our next system project which we might be able to talk about a little bit more but but yeah and Gus and Gar both have a lot of connections to Vermont so I'm sure a lot of people have have met or know about them. We're probably most well known I think for our community wealth building framework which is really about developing a new paradigm of local economic development that centers alternative models of ownership and control, rather than simply throwing billions of dollars in subsidies that like you know, large corporations like Amazon or Walmart and so on. And a good example of this is some of the work that we did in Cleveland Ohio where we helped develop a community controlled cooperative network called the evergreen cooperatives and evergreen has been really really successful over the years about 10 years old, and now has about five linked worker cooperatives with more than 300 worker owners and if anyone's interested in the work of the democracy collaborative in general or the evergreen cooperatives or so on, you can check out our website it's at democracy collaborative.org. And so as you mentioned I'm the research director here to the democracy collaborative and I've been research director for about the past five years or so. And I focus mostly on alternative models of ownership things like cooperatives publicly owned enterprises which we're going to talk a lot about today, social enterprises employee owned businesses and so on and so forth. And along with my colleagues from around the world I really tried to develop what a new model of public ownership something that we call democratic public ownership so rather than the sort of old top down democratic very managerial forms of public ownership that predominated in in the 20th century, the, you know, the state owned enterprise that many people are familiar with. We're really talking about different new 21st century models of public ownership that really combined some of the more democratic and participatory governance and management relationships, as you can find in cooperatives and common space enterprises, and combining those with the broad based ownership patterns that I think are really valuable parts of public ownership. So I mean, and I think you wrote a book called our Commonwealth the return of public ownership in the United States. So, yeah, a little bit. Thank you for plugging the book yeah that was a book I wrote a couple years ago and I think very relevant to the conversation today and so if people want to check that out it really covers the scope and scale of public ownership that many people don't really know about in the United States. So, I guess that leads to the first question why should anyone care if our trash is collected by the by the city and to say it in another way, why is it important that solid waste collection is run by the city and a not for profit democratic basis. Yeah, there are there are many reasons why I think that trash collection should be in public ownership but first and foremost is really about democratic control. So unlike a privately owned service, which has really only one overriding goal and that's to turn a profit. Unlike that publicly owned services can really be designed according to whatever a local population decides it wants to prioritize. For instance, many publicly owned enterprises around the world and around the United States prioritize lower costs for consumers. For example, I think a really good example of both of these, you know, the lower costs for consumers but also the revenue generation is the electricity sector, which I think people in Burlington are probably pretty familiar with, but in general publicly owned electric utilities have been proven by decades of research to have lower costs for electricity and return more of their revenues to cities than their counterparts the so called investor owned utilities. Beyond that some publicly owned services services really prioritize equitable access things like providing providing affordable internet access to disenfranchised or underserved populations or something that's particularly relevant today is not disconnecting people's water service, if they're having financial difficulties we've seen that a lot for the pandemic where it's been proven through research that publicly owned water utilities don't disconnect their customers at the same rate as privately owned utilities do. Some publicly owned utilities really prioritize environmental concerns things like establishing efforts to switch to renewable energy or to lower energy consumption so basically for me you know taking way services into public ownership would really give the people of Burlington a powerful social economic and environmental tool that they could then democratically decide how best to deploy to address their concerns. There are other reasons I think for public ownership that are worth briefly mentioning and I think the first is this concept of natural monopoly and, and there are certain sectors and geographic areas where for various reasons technical capital, environmental reasons, a single provider of a service is really preferable and more effective and efficient. And this is often seen as I said in the electricity sector the water sector and waste sector among many others and, and I think it's one of the reasons I gather that Burlington is considering its, its waste service but the problem really is though that when you have a natural monopoly, and you place it into private for profit hands, these natural monopolies become really engines for inequality, unaccountability and wealth extraction from local communities and even the free marketeers understand this and, and the most famous of the free marketers of all Milton Friedman, he actually once wrote that in the case of these large technical monopolies of vital services, quote, private unregulated monopoly isn't preferable and that public ownership actually might be more preferable and these were Milton Friedman's words. Milton Friedman said that public ownership of these natural monopolies is more preferable. Public ownership or public regulation for him of natural monopolies was preferable to private monopoly. And so yeah so even the free marketeers got it and I think that the second important reason for me really critical reason it's, it's about inequality, you know public ownership can really reduce economic and social inequality in various ways and I already mentioned a couple with regards to lowering cost for consumers and, and ensuring that shareholders and wealthy owners don't just enrich themselves off of, off of basic public services but there, there's another way as well. And this is that in general jobs in publicly owned services are more equitable in terms of race and gender. They have union protections on a more stable, and they provide quality healthcare retirement benefits and all of these are really key ingredients of reducing inequality that we've seen really explode in our country. Over the past 30 or 40 years and so just to reiterate for me though, I think all these things are important, but for me, the absolute most important thing about public ownership is that it's a really inherently flexible ownership form. And as I mentioned it's not constrained in the same ways as private ownership and can be deployed for whatever reason a community sees fit and there's this really great EF Schumacher quote that's I think really just worth really briefly reading Schumacher was an economist about the book small as beautiful I think people might be aware of him up there in Vermont but he said that private ownership of the means of production is severely limited in its freedom of choice objectives, because it's compelled to be profit seeking, and tends to take a narrow and selfish view of things public ownership gives complete freedom and choice of objectives, and can therefore be used for purposes that may be chosen. I think darn good. So, you, you talked earlier about the this being a national movement so to speak. So, so I'd like you to put it in a little bit more detailed context in a national and international context, and talk about the movement for public ownership that this here in Burlington is a part so we can understand if we're alone or we're actually not alone and not an outlier in this. Can you give us that overview. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, first and foremost, you know, there's obviously been a lot of pressure for privatization over the past 40 years, the sort of neoliberal period of privatization and marketization and liberalization but despite this pressure and despite this 40 year period, public ownership around the world remains really quite popular and and also quite popular here in the United States as we mentioned before I wrote a whole book about how popular and prevalent and ubiquitous public ownership is in the US and, and for instance, I, you know, 25 to 30% of all electricity in the US is supplied by publicly owned enterprises or cooperative utilities. And 85% of people in the US get their water from a publicly owned provider and that's, that's actually substantially higher than many places in the world like you know the UK for instance where they, they privatized a lot of their water and have pretty disastrous results for their, their water service. So I guess in solid waste in the United States with the department of public works it said that a significant section about 5050 a little bit less of the municipalities are doing their own solid waste collection I mean I have a relatives in Montana who is, and that's a public system so you know it's fairly standard in the waste collection system as well but I interrupted you go on please. Yeah, no, no problem I might talk a little bit about my personal experience with with waste in my community and in a little bit you know just to keep going we have a, you know we have a publicly owned national railroad which again is something that a lot of countries privatized that they don't have we have a publicly owned poster postal service which I know is under a lot of pressure and we have a guy in there right now who's trying to dismantle it but but you know it's a, it's a gem it's a, it's a gem of public ownership that you know generally works very well and, and we need to preserve and enhance it rather than dismantle it and privatize it I mean, you know a third of all land in the United States is publicly owned, you know several states especially it's like Western Republican states have these giant sovereign publicly owned wealth funds like Alaska, you know that basically has this multi billion dollar fund that pays out of basic income, a basic dividend to do every resident of the state of Alaska in Texas they have a giant publicly owned sovereign wealth fund that owns stocks, bonds, real estate, other, you know land, and they take a billion dollars or so out of this fund every year and give it to every public school district in the state of Texas to subsidize or underwrite their public schools and ensure that they, you know they can do new school facilities and they can get lower cost bonds and so on and so you know when you have people from Texas come to you and tell you that the Texas miracle is based on, on cutting taxes and, and, and you know not having income tax and all those things they don't also tell you that it's also based on socialism in Texas. Interesting. And what about reminip municipalization it's a long kind of complicated word to say, or re public ownership. Is there a movement on that as well. Exactly yeah yeah so reminicipalization as you said a very hard term to say but it's the process of really taking a service that has been privatized, or has always been you know considered in the purview of the private sector and bringing public hands, usually at the local level and, and recently the Transnational Institute which is a nonprofit organization based in Amsterdam that I have a lot of close connections with. They've identified around 1400 successful reminicipalization cases involving 2400 cities and 58 countries around the world and, and this is really just the tip of the iceberg there are large swaths of the world that this data has not yet been collected so you know we're talking probably, you know, tens of thousands of reminicipalization cases over the last 1015 years has really been this reversal we have this privatization era of the 80s and 90s. And there's really been a pushback, especially since the turn of the century, where lots of communities are have experienced the downside to privatization they've experienced the detriments, and they started to bring back public services into public hands and as of yesterday we've looked at the database, there are 85 cases in that database of reminicipalization in the waste sector alone. And a lot of these cases have been in Canada, actually, and in places like Winnipeg, Quebec City, Sherbrooke, St. John. So I think as Burlington moves forward on this process of reminicipalizing its waste services, there's some really great experiences to draw from around the world but also just over the border in Canada there's probably a lot of people there who have experienced with this process of that can assist Burlington and provide best practices and case studies and so on and so forth. And the US is really definitely very much a part of this global reminicipalization movement. You know, there have been around 560 or so municipal broadband internet networks that have been developed over the past, you know, probably 10 to 12 years. It's the fastest growing sector of public ownership in the United States and many communities, the ones that are not served by the private for-profit telecoms giants, they've been essentially establishing super fast broadband networks in some places like Georgia, Tennessee, they were the first community in the United States to have a one, I think it's a big connection, and then they've moved it up progressively they have some of the fastest internet in the country in this municipal network in in Chattanooga and because of this companies are trying to relocate there people are trying to relocate there it's a giant economic development engine. There's been around 70 water reminicipalizations in the United States in the past couple of decades and I mentioned that, you know, the majority of people in the United States get their water from a publicly owned provider but there has been some privatization there's been a lot of reversals of that recently as well. There have been new campaigns all over the country in the electricity sector to reminicipalize in conjunction with the climate change crisis and also the green energy transition crisis, you know, Chicago, there's a big effort in PG with PG&E in California because, you know, PG&E doesn't take care of their transmission lines and they start giant forest fires and there's some really great publicly owned utilities in California that are really good examples of how you can do electricity and water and other utilities in much more interesting ways so there's a big effort with PG&E as well. Public banks as well as a huge campaign. California has had a lot of success with public banking legislation there's now state level legislation in California that authorizes up to 10 local public banks to be created. And then there's activist campaigns in LA and San Francisco and other places to set up publicly owned banks and it's actually one of the most vibrant public banking movements in the world I go overseas and I talk in in Europe and places and people who work in public banking like how do you get people interested in public banks why is there such a vibrant activist movement about public banks in the United States and a lot of it has to do with climate change divestment standing rock was a big motivation of people, you know, really who are the funders of these pipelines who are the funders of climate changes the big banks that's the JP Morgan is the Wells Fargo's and and cruise funding that well you know all of our city deposits are in Wells Fargo and JP Morgan and so on so there's a very vibrant public banking movement here in the United States. So we've you've raised, you've raised a lot of things and we'll probably have to have you back because we've we had experience with a public cable company, and that an internet provider that didn't go so well but there are still people that are struggling for a cooperative program and so and and we have definitely looked at places like Montreal for the way they have been transforming their transportation system in relationship to protected bike lanes and have sent people up there so the idea that Quebec and other places in in Canada have been re municipalizing their solid waste is something that we'll have to to look at a little bit more closely so you know that'll that'll be good. Let's talk about the, the hot button items we would need to address in bringing a municipal solid waste system here cost and service and innovation because I know that Berlin Tony and want to know how will the city do it, you know, we are fairly idealistic but we're also pretty critical. We want to make sure that it's going to work we're going to make sure that we can afford it. And so, in looking at, if you can do some solid waste examples but if not other ways, how the public is performing their these functions in terms that are as good if not better than the public sector, in terms of cost and service and innovation and ecological stewardship that'd be really helpful. And I think I'll just start with a with a personal anecdote and I mentioned before that I that I live in a place I live in, I live in Virginia, and for many years in Virginia I lived in the county so I live just outside of the city limits of the local small city. And in the county our trash collection was privatized and there was a lot of restrictions on, on what you could pick up, or they would pick up and what you couldn't and anytime you'd have to be home renovations you'd have to load up your personal vehicle drive several miles away to the solid waste transfer station, you know pay a fee to dispose of the waste and, and all of that and then a few years ago I moved into the actual city limits where we have a publicly owned waste collection system a very integrated efficient. You know, very, very good system and they'll literally pick up anything that you put put on the curve you can demolish an entire bathroom in your house and put it on the curve and, and they'll come by and, and take that away and a lot of us in this community. We really joke that you know, one of the major perks of living in the city is our municipal trash collection it's a it's just a funny city city joke and it's a really effective system and I've seen the contrast between the privatized system and the new supply system firsthand but what city is that what what city is that. I live in the city of Fairfax, and I used to live in Fairfax County so I only moved I think like two miles but I moved over the city line and so it was a different system and it's a very, very much more effective and efficient system from a from a lay person's perspective for sure. More generally, a couple years ago. An organization called public services research unit reviewed all of the academic studies and other evidence around waste management, and they found that public waste management performed as well or better than private waste management this is you know, 27 or 28 academic you know cross country studies different different geographies and so on and, and then the report went on to provide a number of case studies from around the world from very specific places which show how some of these public, you know, publicly owned services have lower costs than privately owned competitors, some had better service quality than their privately owned competitors, some had significantly reduced waste generation in their community. I think the example there was wasn't maybe Sicily or sorry no sardinia, where they had transferred to municipal publicly owned system, and the community had decided to prioritize reducing the amount of waste that a community was producing, and they had decided to do that through this publicly owned system because if you think about it, you know, a privately owned company has no incentive to reduce the amount of waste that you're providing they actually probably have incentive to for you to produce more waste one would one would think. You know, some of the other examples in this from Germany and Austria were that publicly owned waste companies have much better working conditions better pay better benefits better union protections and so on and so forth and you know this report was about the waste sector in general and I'm happy to provide that and you can send that around to to your to your friends and people in the community but more generally than that, there's ample evidence that public ownership in general is as effective or efficient as private ownership, if not more so there's an entire entire chapter in my book that that you held up earlier which really tries to to demolish this myth of the supposed superiority of the private sector and some of the things that the neoliberals did very well for for 40 years, they really propagated this myth that the public doesn't do things well and that the private sector is better and that the public sector is inherently more inefficient. When you actually dive into the academic literature the empirical and the theoretical literature, there's no consensus amongst that. It's really about design. You know, there can be. I'm not going to deny that there are publicly owned enterprises that can be inefficient and there are publicly owned enterprises that can be bad I mean, you know you look at state owned oil companies and extraction of course, they are definitely publicly owned enterprises that are doing things and they're not good and that are corrupt and so on and so forth but they're definitely privately owned enterprises that are extremely corrupt, you know, talking about Enron or you know, talk about any of the massive scandals that we've had, you know, the entire financial crisis that almost brought down the world economy I mean the massive corruption and inefficiencies and effectiveness and in the private banking sector so it's really not about public or private it's about design. It's about intentionality. I mean, and of course they don't have the democratic process those private companies to hold them to account. Let me move to, I think, the last basic question, which is that we really shouldn't minimize the effort to stand up a new public enterprise in Burlington. And we would have to do it in a way that expands on the good work of the existing recycling program, but we'll need voter approval for borrowing authority and a buy in from an administration that so far is is reluctant. The bureaucracy and more conservative politicians have looked at the steps that we're going to need to stand up a municipal system as negatives, but I'm the question I've got is aren't they things like going to the voters are going and getting surveys and really speaking to people aren't they really things that we should embrace in the spirit of building a Democrat democratic control and ownership over an essential public service service and you know our effort to fight climate change. Yeah, definitely. Well, as I mentioned before, you know, there are thousands of examples of remunicipalizations from around the world and here in the US so Burlington. Let me just say this 100% definitely Burlington can do this if it decides that it wants to do this and we sometimes characterize remunicipalizations as being either pragmatic or political and this really kind of academic jargon but pragmatic remunicipalizations are those that are driven mostly by considerations around cost or service quality. They're sort of led by city officials and they can be relatively quick and uncontroversial and remunicipalizations can happen very quickly, you know a contract comes up or, or, you know, city council decides they want to do something it can happen very quickly. So pragmatic remunicipalizations probably make up the bulk of their remunicipalizations around the world, but there's another group these political remunicipalizations and these are the ones that are driven by community groups by activists, they're concerned both with quality and cost issues but also with questions about challenging corporate power and, and challenging the sort of supremacy of private ownership of public goods and, and these, these political remunicipalizations that can be more controversial. They can take a little bit longer. But whether or not remunicipalization is pragmatic or political it really has to do with the commitment of the community the commitment of the elected officials and also the sort of resistance or lack there are private enterprises that are that are being displaced and, and one of the recent big political remunicipalizations was in Boulder, Colorado. And there the community and the city council really engaged in this long term remunicipalization fight with regards to their electric utility and, and despite the voters approving multiple referendums on remunicipalization in order to really advance the city's clean energy goals. The, the giant energy corporation Excel they they fought it tooth and nail it at really every turn and it took 10 years and after about 10 years voters eventually agreed to a deal with Excel that kind of pause the remunicipalization effort. And, and, you know, it paused the effort but it also won really significant victories and concessions from the companies with regards to clean energy commitments and so on but the lesson for me from Boulder is that even if a remunicipalization effort isn't ultimately successful. It can, and it is a really empowering social process that brings the community together to really start to discuss these really incredibly important economics social and environment environmental issues really begin to chart a path forward in a, in a democratic way in a collective way and, and it really is the antithesis to the remus a politicized remunicipalization campaign is really the antithesis I think to the sort of disempowerment of the neoliberal era the atomization of neoliberal era. I mean Margaret Thatcher that British Prime Minister when the sort of architects and new levels and once I had this phrase, she said there's no such thing as a society. And by this she she meant that like we really should be acting as individuals and looking at ourselves and no one else and this really individualization was really a fundamental underpinning of the neoliberal area era this this sort of idea that public forms of ownership and control were inherently bad or flawed and that economic and political power should really be wielded by like a small group of elites in society and we've seen the devastating effects of this ideology over 40 years on our society. You know, inequality has exploded in our country we've been unable to get rid of poverty, you know, racial inequality and economic inequality has been stagnant since the 1960s it's, it's really incredible, how little progress we've made over the past 40 years, economically and I think COVID also proves it as well right like COVID has proved to us the sort of detriment of this go it alone ideology whether or not it's each community in the United States is going to go it alone, or each individual family is going to go it alone, or the United States as a country is going to go it alone you just can't go it alone in a global pandemic, and the crisis that are facing us in the future. Global economic crisis climate change these are global in nature and they're really going to require a collective democratic response. And this is what public ownership is it flexes that those muscles it flexes those democratic muscles, a community is going to need, and our society is going to deal with the challenges I had. Wow. We're definitely going to have to have you to come back and and expand on these the whole question of its relationship to empowerment of black and brown communities here is is also important. You know, the idea that public ownership of this solid waste district will be good for those communities and is really important, as well as that study, but it looks like we are running out of time Thomas. This has been great, helpful and interesting. I understand that our city council will be deciding on consolidation in September, and we'll need to get a lot of people to weigh in on that. To prove then the question will be whether a public system or private system, and the specifics of that system will come into to the four, and it's likely that there will be a vote that may not bifurcate those but you know that that's the democratic system that will be playing and so I hope that we can have a chance to chat again and that those resources that you talked about can be brought to bear on this like that solid waste study. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anything else that you'd like to add and you get a chance to plug your book again and the democracy collaborative to because you know after all why not. Well, no I thank you so much for for having me and I wish you and the people of Burlington, all success in this effort and just I just want everyone to know that you're definitely not alone in this there are communities across the world who are who are being municipalizing or thinking about public ownership or thinking about taking on corporate power and there's a whole network and a movement and organizations and people standing by ready to help so just let us know how we can be most helpful and and we'll be there. I will do that. Thanks very much, and have a great rest of the of the day. Thanks for being here with us. Thank you.