Is the Eastman Governance Game Rigged?

When Elizabeth Warren worked to get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau up and running after the financial crash she looked for ways to prevent banks from “cheating families seeking mortgages and credit cards”. She said, “the banks spent more than a million a day for more than a year lobbying against financial reforms.” “Wall Street put hundreds of millions of dollars into defeating Warren”, (Forbes 11/7/12)

"They cheated American families, crashed the economy, got bailed out, and now the biggest banks are even bigger than they were when they got too big to fail in 2008!" she exclaimed, according to the LA Times. "A kid gets caught with a few ounces of pot and goes to jail, but a big bank launders drug money and no one gets arrested. The game is rigged!"

"The game is rigged. And the rich and the powerful have lobbyists and lawyers and plenty of friends in Congress. Everybody else, not so much. So the way I see this is we can whine about it, we can whimper about it or we can fight back. I'm fighting back! We won because you got in the fight, you got out there, you wrote opinion pieces, you organized petitions, you built coalitions you kept that idea alive. You called out sleazy lobbyists and cowardly politicians. You said, we the people will have this agency and you are the ones who won.”

Here at Eastman,

we don’t have “big banks” but we have “moneyed interests”. We don’t have “lobbyists” but we have “volunteers” who are working against Eastman residents having the Right to Know. As Mr. Goldman announced in the Happenings Newsletter of June 2014, “ECA has spent $35,000 and countless volunteer hours ….” trying to defeat our efforts to allow you the Right to Know. (You’ve got to love those volunteers). Going in, we had no idea that the so-called “Public” Utilities Commission was a “captured” commission. By that I mean they have “really close” ties to Utilities and it doesn’t concern them that Public Water Commissioners broke the Right to Know law repeatedly. The PUC told us that “breaking the Right to Know law is not our jurisdiction, that is the jurisdiction of Superior Court.” So we filed in Superior Court where we won our case. The VDE spent $11,000 of your money, defending their Superior Court guilty plea.

Judge Brian Tucker ruled that “RSA 91-A:8.1 permits the court to award costs against the public body, “provided that the court finds that such lawsuit was necessary in order to enforce compliance with the provisions of this chapter or to address a purposeful violation of this chapter….the posture of the case is such that the complaint was necessary to bring the District to that point. Accordingly, the Logans are awarded their reasonable costs.”

·      Does ECA have to abide by the Right to Know Law? No, so they don’t. They decide what you should know and what you should not know and they frame or spin the message they transmit.

·      Does the VDE have to abide by the Right to Know Law? Yes, they do, but they did not. The Commissioners played fast and loose with your rights.

It costs Eastman members money and knowledge when officials choose to collaborate in private sessions illegally. For governance not to be open and transparent rigs the outcome, but we can fight back!