Support Raleigh's Sanitation Workers

When Raleigh expanded its curbside recycling program in July, environmentally minded citizens cheered the decision. By collecting seven new items -- from milk cartons to cardboard to aluminum foil -- the city would help divert material from landfills while conserving natural resources.

But the change has brought to a boil simmering conflicts over the city's misuse of human resources: its hard-working sanitation employees. Last week, those employees staged two work stoppages in an effort to draw attention to abusive working conditions.

After launching the expanded recycling program, the city reduced its sanitation workforce by 10 percent under the mistaken notion that the new system would save time. Since then, the sanitation workers say, they have been expected to work 14-hour shifts -- and aren't being paid the time-and-a-half rate that federal law requires for employees who work more than 40 hours in a given week.

The workers complained to their supervisors and management about the illegal conditions, but the city took no action to address their grievances. Consequently, the workers took action on Sept. 13 and 14 by staging temporary work stoppages.

The workers have formed a chapter of N.C. Public Service Workers Union-UE 150 to help unite them in calling on the city to fix the flawed system. But according to a statement on the union's Web site, city management is taking a "divide and conquer" approach by holding meetings with select workers and separating drivers from loaders in an effort to weaken the collective voice.

The sanitation workers are fighting back, however. They have given the city until this Friday, Sept. 22 to meet the following demands: an immediate end to forced overtime; overtime pay after 40 hours worked and no comp time unless requested by workers; make temporary employees permanent and hire more workers to reduce workloads; no harassment or retaliation against workers for speaking out against these problems; and city to meet and confer with elected UE150 representatives employed in sanitation.

They are asking we the residents of Raleigh to support them by taking the following actions:

* Put out yard signs supporting the workers' demands;

* Contact the mayor and our city council representatives and ask them to initiate and support concrete changes;

* Ask our religious leaders to speak publicly in support of the workers' demands;

* Get civic and community organizations to issue statements to the media and city council supporting their demands; and

* Come to the City Council meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 19 at 1 p.m. and speak in support of their demands.

For a yard sign or to have a worker speak at a meeting, call 919-637-6949 or e-mail organize@us150.org.

The union is also seeking volunteers to travel the city in a truck with a public address system, passing out information about the sanitation workers' fight for justice and asking for the community's support. If you're interested in taking a shift (mornings from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m., early evenings from 4 to 6 p.m. and late evenings from 6 to 8 p.m.), call Peter at 919-264-0201 or e-mail vandura@riseup.net and include your availability and contact information. Volunteers will receive an orientation to effectively represent the workers' interests and use the sound equipment.

WakeUP Wake County to Hold First Meeting

A citizen's group calling for better growth planning in the Raleigh area will hold its first general membership meeting on Saturday, Sept. 16. WakeUP Wake County was formed earlier this year by local taxpayers concerned about how area communities are paying for and managing growth.

The meeting will take place from 10 a.m. to noon at the West Raleigh Presbyterian Church on the corner of Horne and Vanderbilt streets, one block north of Hillsborough. To enter the church's fellowship hall, look for a side entrance in the alley off Horne.

For more information, contact Chairperson Karen Rindge at 828-3833 or 637-4271 (mobile), or visit the group's Web site.

Nominations Due for N.C. Sustainability Awards

Sustainable North Carolina -- a Raleigh-based organization founded to unite business and environmentalism -- will be accepting nominations for its fifth annual N.C. Sustainability Awards through Sept. 15. Past winners range from large corporations such as Weyerhaeuser and Wyeth Vaccines to nonprofits including Habitat for Humanity ReUse Center and Piedmont Biofuels Cooperative.

This year's winners will be honored at the N.C. Sustainability Awards and Conference on Oct. 30 at Raleigh's Marriott Crabtree Valley. The event's keynote speaker will be Sally Jewell, CEO of recreational-gear giant REI. For more details on the awards, click here.

'Big Voice' Joining Dix Debate Belongs to the Real-Estate Development Industry

The News & Observer did readers a disservice today in a story titled "Big voice will join Dix land debate". The story reports on a legislative task force's decision to hire the Urban Land Institute to study the future of the 315-acre Dix Hill property, which has sparked tension between Friends of Dorothea Dix Park and others who want to preserve the property as a public park versus land developers who see profits in its beautiful downtown vistas. Unfortunately, the paper fails to tell us who exactly ULI is.

The group is "prestigious," the N&O reports. It was called on to offer advice on the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks, the paper says.

But what the N&O does not tell us is that the ULI is a nonprofit think-tank that's an arm of the for-profit real-estate industry. The organization was founded in 1936 when Cincinnati real-estate mogul Walter Schmidt and other developers petitioned the National Association of Real Estate Boards -- now the National Association of Realtors -- to establish a research institute within the organization.

Four years later, ULI became an independent organization -- but one that has always represented big real estate. For example, ULI's current president is Richard M. Rosan, former senior vice president of Park Tower Realty Corp. and Silverstein Properties of New York and former president and CEO of the Real Estate Board of New York. ULI's sustaining members include AIG Global Real Estate Investment Corp., Bank of America, Citigroup Property Investors, Goldman Sachs & Co., JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch & Co. and other titans of real-estate capital.

The N&O also neglected to inform its readers of how controversial some of ULI's initiatives have been. For example, its recommendations on post-Katrina New Orleans -- formulated by a panel chaired by former Raleigh mayor and real-estate developer Smedes York -- were condemned by many because they called for the abandonment of wide swathes of the city without the input of affected residents.

This is how urban theorist Mike Davis described the ULI's role in New Orleans in an article for The Nation:

In a nutshell, the ULI's recommendations reframed the historic elite desire to shrink the city's socioeconomic footprint of black poverty (and black political power) as a crusade to reduce its physical footprint to contours commensurate with public safety and a fiscally viable urban infrastructure.

Upon these suspect premises, the outside "experts" (including representatives of some of the country's largest property firms and corporate architects) proposed an unprecedented triage of an American city, in which low-lying neighborhoods would be targeted for mass buyouts and future conversion into a greenbelt to protect New Orleans from flooding. As a visiting developer told [the city's Bring New Orleans Back commission]: "Your housing is now a public resource. You can't think of it as private property anymore."

Keenly aware of inevitable popular resistance, the ULI also proposed a Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation, armed with eminent domain, that would bypass the City Council, as well as an oversight board with power over the city's finances. With control of New Orleans schools already usurped by the state, the ULI's proposed dictatorship of experts and elite appointees would effectively overthrow representative democracy and annul the right of local people to make decisions about their lives. For veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement, especially, it reeked of disenfranchisement pure and simple, a return to the paternalism of plantation days.

The City Council, supported by a surprising number of white homeowners and their representatives, angrily rejected the ULI plan. Mayor Nagin -- truly a cat on a hot tin roof -- danced anxiously back and forth between the two camps, disavowing abandonment of any area while at the same time warning that the city could not afford to service every neighborhood. But state and national officials, including HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, applauded the ULI scheme, as did the editorial page of the Times-Picayune and the influential Bureau of Government Research.

The BNOB recommendations presented by [New Orleans real-estate developer and former ULI President Joseph] Canizaro in January faithfully hewed to the ULI framework: They included an appointed redevelopment corporation, outside the control of the City Council, that would act as a land bank to buy out heavily damaged homes and neighborhoods with federal funds, wielding eminent domain as needed to retire low-lying areas to greenbelt ("black people's neighborhoods into white people's parks," someone commented) or to assemble "in-fill" tracts for mixed-income development a la River Garden. Other committees recommended a radical diminution of the power of elected government.

On the crucial question of how to decide which neighborhoods would be allowed to rebuild and which would be bulldozed, BNOB endorsed the concept of forced buyouts but equivocated over process. Instead of the ruthless map that the Bureau of Government Research wanted, Canizaro and colleagues proposed a Rube Goldberg-like temporary building moratorium in tandem with neighborhood planning meetings that would poll homeowners about their intentions. Only those neighborhoods where at least half of the pre-Katrina residents had made a committment to return would be considered serious candidates for Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) and other financial aid.

Canizaro presented the report to Nagin in front of a public audience on January 11. The mayor said, "I like the plan," and he complimented the commissioners for "a job well done." But most locals found little charm in the Canizaro report. "I will sit in my front door with my shotgun," one resident warned at a jammed meeting in the Council chambers on January 14, while another demanded, "Are we going to allow some developers, some hustlers, some land thieves to grab our land, grab our homes, to make this a Disney World version of our homes, our lives?"

In ULI's latest annual report, Chairman Marilyn Jordan Taylor acknowledged that the group's plan for New Orleans was not well-received. "Our work required making some tough calls," she wrote. "We said it would be irresponsible to immediately rebuild every section of the city based on its pre-Katrina layout. This was controversial, and reactions were mixed. But we did not come to New Orleans to tell people what they wanted to hear. We came to care, to tell the truth, and to offer realistic solutions to help residents rebuild in a way to make the city stronger and more equitable."

How exactly one finds equity in excluding citizens from making decisions about their homes and communities Taylor does not explain.

Could there be a useful role for a group like ULI in the ongoing effort to decide the future of the Dix property? Of course. After all, who better to turn to for property development expertise than property developers? But at the same time, it's important that we the people of Raleigh know who ULI is and the interests it represents so we can put its recommendations into the proper context. It's a shame we didn't get that information from our daily newspaper.