Podcast: Resisting Austerity: Keeping Public Infrastructure Public

Transcript

Intro:
Hello and welcome to this special episode of Who Belongs, a podcast from the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. This episode is part of a series of talks and panel discussions recorded during the breakout sessions of our Othering and Belonging conference that took place in Oakland this past April. This session is titled Resisting Austerity, Keeping Public Infrastructure Public. It includes panelists, Donald Cohen, founder and executive director of In the Public Interest, and Joey Algier, who is the community Engagement and Communications Coordinator for the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. The panel looks at way some communities are responding to austerity by restructuring the private sector's relationship with public assets. It was moderated by Wendy Ake, director of Just Public Finance at OBI. Find more episodes from this series on our website at belonging.berkeley.edu/whobelongs.

Wendy Ake:
I'm Wendy Ake from Othering and Belonging Institute. I'm the director of Just Public Finance Program. So there we study public finance, strictly speaking, and revenue expenses, bonds, those kinds of things. And I also study finance systems more generally. So looking at economic, structures and systems. Today we are talking and doing three things, which I'll define and then introduce panelists. The title of the workshop suggests of course, austerity. So first we'll define that term as we'll, use it as a political project, kind of a different definition than we might've heard before. Next, we'll talk about how that's actually tied directly to a lot of the extremism, authoritarianism, it goes by different words. And then we'll talk, especially by my panelists, who've done really excellent work around those big ideas, abstracts, important things, but how do we operationalize this and have it on the ground and actually resist it really successfully? There's a lot of really great case studies they'll talk about.

Donald Cohen, who's on the far right, he as the director of In the Public Interest, really great research there. They have every week a newsletter around privatization. Encourage everyone to sign up for that at their website. They do research in our public policy organization, specifically around public goods and services. They service and work with community organizations, advocacy groups, public officials, really the network of people who really you need on board to operationalize this. Our other panelist, the beautiful pop of Orange is Joey Algier. He works with the water Collaborative. They work specifically in New Orleans, so very place-based work. And really targeted some of the structural components that lead to these moments of privatization, but early in the process in such a way that they've been able to provide their own services that would otherwise go to corporations. General ideas there, but they'll talk about what it really looks like and material reality.

So first I'll talk about the first two things, a definition of austerity and how it can be really seen as part of this authoritarianism trend that we know about, but have a harder time, I think sorting out how to resist it. So authoritarianism, oh I'm sorry, austerity, if you look it up in an economics textbook, will be depoliticized. It's usually about making your balance sheet work out from public services at revenue expenditures, just making it work, making it balance. It's really important I think, and I'm sure our panelists would agree to discuss it as a political project. It's a very politicized function. It's a lot of structures. Structures do work, they're not neutral. And a simple way we can think about an escalator at the someone in a wheelchair at the base of an escalator. That escalator's not neutral, it's doing work to actually prohibit access for that person.

So austerity in a politicized sense has three components. Fiscal, which is related to regressive taxation, which imposes thrift on a majority of people, makes people have to be super savers to avoid monthly costs that go over budget for example. The other piece is that, it's a cut to unproductive or expensive public expenditures. That includes how much cities and governments have to pay to be able to borrow money. And it also diverts resources usually from public services. It may not reduce the overall budget, but it changes where those services are. So most recently, there's been a lot of attention brought to the fact that there might be an increase in budget, but it's not going to public services, it might be going to police. So that's one example. The monetary piece. Second of three, is related to monetary revaluation. What does that mean? Okay, so that looks like increase in interest rates, reduction in money supply, those kinds of pieces. Those are also tools of austerity.

The last is industrial, so that's the third. Fiscal, monetary, industrial. The industrial piece looks like something we're also familiar with. Layoffs of public employees, reducing in wages, reducing capacity for union strikes. So again, we can see how austerity is very specifically politicized. It also creates an entire class of experts. So we can see lots of places where experts supposedly come into local governments, try to advise and play the role that really should be coming from public sector and has in the past. So austerity, now that we've defined it, how does it work into this new attention that comes to global north countries around authoritarianism, anti-democratic, and really what I would describe more clearly as counterrevolution. A lot of also what we're familiar with when we talk about authoritarianism is people who've been disenfranchised, people who are marginalized and are lacking in a way where they see the government has really served them, the public policies have helped them, and really that's a failure of liberal state success.

So there's a discouragement and failure in what the government provides them, and that's a lot of the work that we've seen on post-Trump election. And what's really important, is that there's a corporate agenda for these experts, these people who had come in, these corporations who come in and take advantage of public resources, but also that elite agenda is accomplished through a popular agenda to get support through this deeply racialized discourse, this deeply othering discourse. So we'll talk more about that, but that's one of the bases that we're familiar with in thinking about the ways that there's an effort to privatize schools. But it's riding the waves of talking about anti-DEI work at schools, bathroom bills quote unquote, all of this deep marginalization of successes that they're pushing back popular interest, but really is working towards an agenda of privatizing schools.

I really want to lay out those big ideas, but say, how on earth do we fight back against those things? The issues that we discussed in the last panel with Naomi Klein and her colleagues, these are big ideas. How do we do belonging work? How do we reverse authoritarianism? Well, it's about sewers, stormwater runoff, and that's what we'll turn to now, which is there's some successful case studies around how to realize that through public infrastructure. So we'll turn to Donald next who will talk about many different ways to do it that have been successful and really some also additional challenges.

Donald Cohen:
Thank you. So I have a weird question. So I go to a lot of concerts and I always wonder why people on stage wear hats. Now I understand because I can't see any of you. Anybody have a hat I could borrow? If you do, just throw it up on the stage. It's really weird. So I'm going to start with a story. I wrote a book. I have one copy called The Privatization of Everything. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how privatization connects with austerity and deregulation, a variety of things. But I'm going to start with a story. Is anybody from Chicago here? At least one person. So in 2008, you may remember, we had this horrible recession and cities were in, every government was in deep trouble. Cities in particular were in deep trouble.

So on a Friday, the mayor of Chicago, this is 2008, city bleeding red ink, having hard choices to make, announced a proposal from a consortium, a private consortium of Morgan Stanley, a Wall Street investment firm, what's called a sovereign wealth firm, which is basically a national investment firm from a country in the Middle East and a national parking company. And the proposal was, that consortium will give the city $1.16 billion up front in cash in exchange for control of the city's 36,000 parking meters for 75 years. Until 2083. Okay, vote on Tuesday. Okay, proposal Friday, vote on Tuesday. Now, city in desperate straits took the deal. And everyone in... I ask if anyone in Chicago is here? Everyone hates it. So here's what became, nobody could understand it before the fact. So here's what became true as it was analyzed after the fact, because it's a complicated long-term contract.

Two things, one, less important than the other. Incredibly stupid to borrow... Everybody borrows on future income. That's how we buy a house or buy a rental, take out a loan, it's on future income. Incredibly stupid to do that, a city to do that on 75 years of parking meter revenue when you don't even know if we're going to be parking in 2083 or driving in 2083. But even if it was the only choice of a million terrible choices, the city got hosed, they got taken, they could have got a billion dollars more had they negotiated with Wall Street because Wall Street came in and said, "Here's a good deal, take it." Which is very typical, we know what we're talking about, take the deal.

But the second and more important thing is that for the life of the contract, again until 2083, if the city wants to do its job on transit, on housing, on urban development, on environment, and they want to eliminate parking spots for bus rapid transit, transit lanes, bus lanes, pedestrian malls, they have to buy the spots back. So what does that mean? That means, remember we started with a huge, massive budget deficit, caused by the great recession. And they handed away their control over the things that's their job. And so if a city councilor, an alderman in Chicago wants to do a street fair for the weekend, they got to pay the extra bucks to buy the parking meters out. If they want to eliminate parking completely from a neighborhood for bus lanes or pedestrian malls, they got to buy them back and they may not have the money to do that, and that's already happened.

So we have given control over their city to a private venture. That's really the fundamentals of privatization. So I want to specifically then go, because you want to level up and say how I define privatization, because it relates to what we're talking about today deeply. I define privatization in the following ways, private control over public goods. And I want to make, well, I'll come back to the note about infrastructure and public goods in a moment. So, what do we mean by, what are the ways that we give private entities private interest control over our public goods? One is we outsource it, we sell off, we sell a water system, or we hire a private prison company, we do all those things that we know about. That's definitely one way. And in all of those contracts, there are features like the parking lead meter contract because it's a contract. The contractor figures out a way to keep themselves whole.

The second way is when we, under-resource regulation, the regulation and enforcement of basic health and safety and standards, we are giving control to private entities over things that matter to us. If there's a polluter next to a prison, next to us, excuse me, next to a school, and they're either under-regulated or there's lack of enforcement, then the health of those students, that private company has some level of control over the health of those students. But here's the third at the core of it really is austerity. Because if we don't have public resources to provide public goods, and I'm going to describe what I mean by public goods in a moment, then we are putting those things in the market. We are making public things into market things, and that's the ultimate private control over the things that matter to us.

I should have already done this, but let me define what I mean by when I say the word public goods, people have different definitions. I have a democratic conception of public goods. I noticed that that clock is not working, so-

Wendy Ake:
Yeah. I know.

Donald Cohen:
You're on it.

Wendy Ake:
We have plenty of time though, we have 90 minutes total-

Donald Cohen:
So we're good. Okay, so here's what I have a three test definition of public goods. One is, it doesn't help. The things that we all need to survive and thrive. All of us health, education and knowledge, sustainable lives, clean air, a climate, affordable housing, access to the internet now is clearly a necessary. We all need it. So that's the first thing things that we all need. The second is, there are things that we need everyone to have. So, we need every child to be educated, even if you don't have kids. In COVID, it became very clear to me, and I think to all of us that the health of all of us depended on the health of each of us. So I need every one of you to be educated and healthy, and everyone in the country, in the globe could be that it's in my interest to have that. It's not just a value.

And then the third thing is if we decide that all means all, everyone needs healthcare, everyone needs education, everyone needs broadband, then the only way we can accomplish that, if we can do it together. Now I'm at 66 minutes, boy, that really. There's a clock up here. And that's the instrument of government in one way or the other, whether it's through regulation or provision, but we can only get everyone healthcare if the government sets the rules, does Medicare for all, or sets the rules in a different way. It's the only way to make it happen. It's the only way to make broadband happen for everybody equally. So that's my definition, and it's important to remember when we say public goods that we mean all means all. Now, let me go through a couple other things. So once we decide all means all and everybody should have those things, then the only question is how do we pay for it?

Because you got to pay for it, you got to pay for water, you got to pay for air, you got to pay for all the things. So the only question there is, who pays how much we pay and when we pay? Those are the only questions and implied in that is how we share the payment. But everyone's got to pay because everyone's got to get, so I'm going to go into water a little bit to kind of set the stage Joey. So when we pay right now what austerity means, we've been paying for our water systems in America before the current infrastructure bill and all that. There's a massive investment happening now, but before this, we've been paying for our water systems fundamentally by not fixing them. It costs money to fix them. And we've been able to cull down rates or whatever by not fixing them.

And that's kind of created the disaster in many, many places in Flint, in Jackson, in places that I've been to around the country. Now, just the parenthetically, the problem with water is in terms of how we pay for it now, is we fundamentally consider water a commodity. Our water is primarily paid for by how much we buy gallons of water in your water bill. So we're already starting at a place where we are sort of treating it as a market good as opposed to treating it as a public good. Now, it may make sense to have pricing of water to prevent overconsumption, all that, but set that aside, that's something different. If we think Flint cannot solve its water crisis and nor Jackson, Mississippi and nor other places cannot solve their water crisis if they depend on the rates of the weight payers, it just can't happen.

So we're already starting from that place. So let me go through, let me just make sure I'm on track here. So here's how privatization happens. Here's the forces that drive privatization. And it's kind of understandable, if you're a mayor or a governor, you're running a water system. First, I say they don't have the money and the private sector does. So we should go to the private sector. We should do what's called a public-private partnership. And by the way, the private sector is more efficient and they can do things better and cheaper anyway. And the private sector advocates, they always say, "Oh, well this is a great deal for you. It'll take this problem off your desk, mayor X. And in fact, there'll be no new taxes." All right? That's what they say. We do this all over the country. They say the same thing all the time.

We're more efficient, we're better. No new taxes. But let's go back to the question of how you pay for it. It turns out that the easy part, let's say you have to upgrade your system and you need a billion dollars, it turns out the easy part is borrowing the money. It turns out that you have to pay it back. It's funny about that, right? And there's only one source to pay it back. Only one source to pay for all of our infrastructure, us. Through taxes, tolls, and fees. Now, I meant to do this earlier, so I'm going to do it now, because I said the word infrastructure. We're talking about physical infrastructure here, but when I gave the definition of public goods, I was including social infrastructure. Healthcare is part of our social infrastructure system, education, we need all of those things to make it all work.

So [inaudible 00:20:16] keep that in mind? So when you give it to the, so the government's, the mayor says, "Okay, we'll just give it to you. Take it." The first thing, a couple of things that's important to remember, private capital is really expensive. They want 10%, 12% greater return on this money that they're investing, borrow. Public capital is really cheap. The second thing you have to remember is when they say, we'll do it cheaper, because we hear this in everything we do, whether it's water or schools or everything, private sector will do it cheaper. We ask people to do one thing, just ask one question, okay, you're going to be more efficient, means you're going to spend less money on it. Tell us exactly what you're going to spend less money on. When they privatized healthcare Medicaid in Iowa and said they would save money, there's only one thing they could save money on.

They gave out less healthcare. They could pay workers less. They could do all sorts of stuff like that. But there are real things that we may not want them to spend less money on that affect us all. So in Chicago, and I'm just going to close up here, in Chicago, the same thing happened. When we privatized, what do, we give up our democratic rights? They get control. For a private water company, if you look at their SEC filings, if they're a public company, every public company traded on the stock market creates a document called a 10K, in which every year for their investors that they include what they're called risk factors, thing that could affect their bottom line. Guess what's in a water company's risk factors to their bottom line? Water conservation. Guess what's in the risk factors of a private prison company? Lower crime. Reduce sentencing legalization of marijuana. They say it out loud.

So the point of, again, I'll sort of go back to the once, the real problem at the end core of this is when we structurally embed private interests in the delivery of our public goods, we're giving them skin in the game. We're putting, now every private prison company has to be involved in their state legislature, if there's going to be a sentencing change, they have an obligation to their stockholders, not to us. So their interests conflict with our interest. So I think I should stop. So let me just say real quickly then, because maybe during the questions we can get to what to do about it and how people are doing that.

Wendy Ake:
Sure.

Donald Cohen:
I could talk for an hour about the privatization of education right now. It is the most serious threat to our democracy that we are facing. School voucher bills are passing in every red state right now, universal vouchers. The attacks on CRT and LGTBQ rights and all that stuff is a sideshow. It's a way to roil up their forces to dismantle public education and that's what's happening. I want to mention it here. The last thing I'll say about is, the core of the privatization of education is the same as what I've been talking about. They want to turn education into a market good. And markets only serve those with the money. The people who have them, the markets segregate, they stratify, they exclude. That's what markets do, that's how markets succeed. So let's go to New Orleans and talk more specifically about folks that are actually doing the work.

Wendy Ake:
Yeah, let me just put one quick note on there, is it's not at all obvious to corporations even that there is a process to price something in the first place, and there's a very long route to that. So the moment is not necessarily to intervene right at the moment of a corporation outright buying, but in the whole stream of bond ratings, of an audit, of a water system, of supposed ostensible community engagement to put a stamp on those things. And that's the area that you all intervene in of being able to have control and meaningful public influence over those processes.

Joey Algier:
Yeah, I think that's great. Again, everyone, Joey Algier, pleasure to be here. I'm very excited, Wendy, things for having me. I will say that both these people are much smarter than I am when it comes to these topics. And so I've enjoyed just in the few conversations getting to learn more even right now about what this looks like. And it is when Wendy first, her and I first met, it was very much like a first time you're told you're pretty and you're like, what? We are doing that? And I was like, I need to call on reinforcements. I have no idea what to say right now about the good that we're doing because it's innate to New Orleans. And so before I jump into a lot of that, I think it's important for me to kind of give you a lens of partially myself, but partially kind of how I view the world.

So the roadmap will be kind of that. It'll be some intersectionality maybe is a word I can use. And then I'll talk specifically about New Orleans. But I think it's essential to start with what it means to belong and co-create and how we find that in opposition to othering. And that's something that you all already know. I mean that's been in every facet of this week. And the lens that I'm offering begins with a historical example of othering in religion. That's where, if you are familiar, what I've seen, and maybe empirics, maybe the stance is a little different from what they say, but it is a behave, believe, belong.

A common saying is if it walks like a and it talks like a, then it must be a. Exactly. And so if we are to behave in a certain way, it means that we start to believe what is around us and then we earn our belonging. And I think that that's often represented in religion, which we could also contest as a very beautiful, inclusive, traditional belonging rather than othering instance, which is not a common story. So we start in the outermost of what is influencing a zeitgeist of ethos, if you will, in our society of hyper-connectivity and access. And so if we were to reframe that and say, first we belong, then we become, and then we believe. Or we belong, and then we behave and then we believe. And so believing comes last because we've practiced our way into it in some sense. But we've belonged first.

And when I say zeitgeist of ethos, that's a similar thing. If you surround yourself with people that act in a certain way, you'll start to look like them. And contextually in our society of hyper-connectivity and hyper-access to each other, there's this pressure on us to do a certain thing a certain way or to be a certain person. A few people that have really influenced me, first of all is Shoshana Zuboff, if you've heard of Surveillance Capitalism is a beautiful text that talks about the commodification of the consumer. We are no longer being pitched and won over and buying the brand. We are being consumed by the market, and that's leaving us ground up to fuel the market instead of the ones being pitched the idea of what we should buy, we are now the ones being consumed.

And so I think commodification is an important piece as we talk about austerity and we talk about the different realms of co-creating and how so much othering is essential to the issues that we are seeing. When I said intersectionality earlier, our intersections specifically I believe from the 1985, I believe 1985, '89 Kimberlé Crenshaw, she refers to the layers of inequality, especially for black women and especially black trans women. Here's the crossover. Here's the next level of a systemic lens. If we're starting in these giant rings of influence, the outermost ring is something like capitalism. It's something like surveillance capitalism or to where we are being consumed. The next ring of that will be our intersectionality. Our intersectionality, the layers of oppression.

And also what does this have to do with austerity? This is kind of where my background in order chronological order, at least, theology and contextualization, electoral politics, clinical mental health, and now public health. And so when I say intersections, I think that there's something for Kimberlé Crenshaw, the essential of that is our layers of identity that allow us to be acted against. But I think there is something beautiful that we can talk about in co-creating against austerity that has to do with our intersections in a space for all of us to belong, but not to lose those intersections, not just the layers of inequality that we're experiencing.

And so at the core of that, the connection of this where I come in, why I make sense here is equity. I work for the water collaborative. If you can pull the slides up on the screen now. Of the water collaborative, we're an urban water management nonprofit born out of the 2013 Dutch Water Plan. Our goal is to envision a future and create pathways for living and thriving with water, not just dealing with it or fighting against it. One of the main projects that I was brought on, I'm currently the campaign manager and community engagement coordinator for Water Justice New Orleans, which is a project born out of years of research, endless hours of community engagement and a lot of collaborating. I think the important part here to give you a frame. If you had nothing to know about New Orleans, you should know that we are a resilient people.

We are a grounded people in our culture and our traditions. It's one of the most charming places in the world, but we're often making the list for most dangerous, dirtiest. There's an inequity in there that stems from that. And so the prose, if you were to dream something, the prose that I give you to think about is what about when the ground from being grounded, the infrastructure if you will, the base of understanding isn't secure? What if the resiliency we are, what if the resilience is actually keeping us apart? What if necessary or resilience is a form of othering. We want to be strong, we want to be as strong people. New Orleans is an example of that, but if you try to change something, they will eat you alive, baby. Why is that? Because they've been threatened so much, because there's been so much division.

You have highways where there used to be black corridors of shopping and existing. You have white flight following the black majority to beaches, to shopping areas and taking over. New Orleans as a people, culture in the culture is in juxtaposition to those who have taken power through politics and other marginalizing practices over two to 300 years. And the second slide, you'll see what the base of our organization is, what the base of water justice is. It's a very wide sweeping term to say water justice. I've presented this seven times, but can I memorize it? No. Oh, I can just, oh, I can walk around. I have freedom now. The water justice fund is a community built campaign and policy recommendations focused on the reparative work of fixing water inequities and climate change affecting New Orleans.

The under noting to that all though is that we value transparency, accountability, community voice and financial equity to create a thriving New Orleans. There is a 55-page policy recommendation document that follows this page. And I can tell you that every page that follows that is most certainly underwritten by transparency, accountability, and equity. And so for me and what I believe, and I think what I'm practicing and what I'm really been allied here this week has been that equity is reclamation, justice is reallocation, co-creating begins with rewriting those narratives. Yes. Equity is reclamation, justice is reallocation, co-creating in opposition to austerity begins with rewriting the narratives. And I think that's why I give you this whole idea of who I am. I'm finishing in a week my master's in mental health counseling. And I can tell you [inaudible 00:33:32], thank you thank you. Like Donald was talking about though I work, I was at getting my hours. I was at a state owned run arts high school in Louisiana. Arts High School, inherently queer kids.

Most of my clients, black seventeen-year-old females. The amount of conversations that I have of forms of austerity in their lives that they don't even recognize. Soothing the system to say, you can do this but then having to be like, but remember the systems that we live in, which they already know. But even that, this does impede every part of the work that we do, especially in red states. And so the next slide, democratizing drainage. Democratizing drainage is what we came up with to be our, when we rise up, we keep the water down, all communal focused.

We didn't do this alone. The next few slides will just be an example to you of what we created. I won't go to in depth about this, but I'm happy to talk about it. But we have community voice at every level. Seven people on a steering committee that provide direct feedback about the policy. Water now is actually in San Francisco and the develop a strategy for passing legislation with major stakeholders. 70 people on a public advisory group creates an open forum of transparency and education. City and industry professionals, those who are directly opposed to us, we were able to bring some of them in and say, "Here's this. What do you think?" Because at the end of the day, the ideas that we have don't usually differ, it usually is the process, the money, who pays, how often, etc. So this supported complementary policies and procedures and then 15 people from a community engagement committee.

Those 15 were of the, I believe, of the 130 that attended a 10 week workshop series that provided feedback through the process of saying, we are going to create a stormwater fee, how do you want it to look? We knew that we shouldn't call it a tax well, so it's not physically a tax, but we knew not even to talk about it like that because people don't want to pay anymore. So even that, the community voice is embedded in us from the very beginning. On the next slide, you'll see some more of the community voice, the different levels in which we address this. Next slide.

It's from every angle. Our community engagement and education strategy. We have billboards, we have TV ads, we have radio ads, we have community canvassing, workshops, town halls, data collection through surveys, petitions, mapping, interviews, talking to business owners, having small gatherings. The next slide, we can go pretty quick through the next two. The policy workshop series, we started at the trunk, we started at the roots. The workshop discussed trauma-informed policymaking. All of these things seem like things that we already know, but I think when we're talking about co-creating the large piece is making sure that the story is full. Again, that justice, the reclamation, the reallocation starts with shifting the narrative. The trunk we looked at who's already doing it. We're not recreating the wheel. Yeah, I saw the pump and they did. People liked it. That's what they liked best in the workshop series. The branches, based on what we've seen, we'll review every aspect of the fee in separate workshops.

The leaves, creating a community-informed water justice fund and policy toolkit that makes it one of the best from around the nation and makes it where this is replicable. The reason that we have water justice New Orleans is because we want people to have Water Justice Baton Rouge, Water Justice Jackson, Water Justice can look a lot of different ways. And the next slide you'll see another arm of what we did, which is where they brought me in. I flipped it on and said that's my favorite thing to do. Community canvassing the trunk is amplifying affected voices. The communities of New Orleans deserve a voice in how their city is managed. Often and especially in New Orleans, especially in the black South, especially in a place that is so unAmerican, so still in a red state. The things that affect people the most, they should have the largest say in how that is run and how that is developed.

And that is inherently not real in New Orleans in most of our communities. But in New Orleans we have people who look like those affected, but they are so far away from so far removed. There's a few families of influential power over the course of multiple decades. The branches, representing. And so my canvassing team talked to at least two people in every voting precinct in New Orleans, which is about 3,300 residents. I couldn't tell you actually how many there are, but we have five districts. And so through those districts we talked to, we knocked on over 10,000 doors. And then the leaves keeping in touch. We're constantly reminding people, constantly reaching back out, we're constantly talking about what's going on. 10,000 doors, 600 yard signs and that's over the course of seven months, the hottest summer on record in New Orleans.

All while a new governor is being elected. Now there's a whole conversation about the privatization of our sewage and water board, which is actually already technically owned by the state so that gets us into a whole other conversation. And the next slide is just some actual representation of what it was. The main thing, so to tell you a little bit, I know I am going so much over time here. To give you a little bit of an idea of what is actually happening in New Orleans, there is about 5.6% of properties that are tax-exempt. So out of all the tax and properties, there's 5.6% of those that make up over 50% of the possible income for storm water management that New Orleans could get. They're not getting that because the taxes obviously are not being paid because they're tax-exempt businesses, non-profit, state owned, et cetera. But that's where the millage lies. The millage of money that goes into a storm water fee.

It's the same one that goes to many other things, the school board, et cetera. But they're not paying in the storm water yet. You think of the Superdome, the Smoothie King center where they have the Pelicans. You think of the World War II Museum, which is one of the largest, you think of the Convention Center. None of those pay into drainage in New Orleans. Over 50% of possible funding over $123.9 million is possible. But those people do not pay anything into drainage. So you see the dam of water that is being held back, whether that is anger or the actual money. And so with that, we went to the neighbors and said, "Of these three things, what would you want the storm water fee to focus on first?" So here's just a representation.

Overall people want people to pay their fair share, they want people to be accountable and they want to be able to hold their government accountable and they also want to feel safe in their neighborhoods. And then the next couple of slides will just be examples. And so I think this is when we really get into transitioning back into how we do this. I believe the first slide is some pictures of about seven to eight months of stuff that we did. We've had, well let me say this too. There's two things that I entered into this process and everything that I do with. One, I am not the expert. I do not pretend to be, I do not want to be the expert on other people's communities. I want to be able to be in-between. When Evie was out here earlier and she said, "Where do you feel your belonging?"

And before she got to actual parts of the body, which I kind of feel in my hips because they're very stiff. I feel myself, I feel my belonging in the in-between, which is very weird and I think I felt this for a long time and consistently is bridge. There's something about that of connecting and making you be like, those two things do not belong together. I'm sorry, but cinnamon sugar and caramelized onions does not make sense. But for some reason I can put it on top of a hummus, do little shakshuka, it's perfect. And two is that, I want to be irrelevant. I don't know if you've seen there's a meme or an old media radio script that was, "Darling, what's your dream job?" And she responds, "Honey, I do not dream of labor. I do not. We are tired, we are resilient, but we are tired."

And so with those two things in mind, I want to make my community look like itself. And so when I talk about all the things that we've done, we have turned the community back to itself as a mirror. The top left is the workshop series, the bottom left is we have an internship program running year-round, but we interview interns, they went out and knocked doors, and that's just a training that we had. Again, I'm not the expert, these are young kids who go to college here. They have a different perspective and we teach them how to do gathering that intel from the community. The top right is our kickoff. I wanted that to look like New Orleans. We had a crawfish boil. It was at of place that also had some green infrastructure they were building. We also did all these different things that allowed us to make it look like New Orleans should be not just a governmental town hall, here's our plan.

And then this is a billboard that we had. And then on the next slide you'll see kind of our policy recommendations like presentation or press release that we did. And they were just good pictures so I wanted to put those there. But that's how it culminated. It culminated in a 55-page document of what we think should happen. I then went and did a town hall in every single district. Was I even alive in a couple of them after? Yes, absolutely. And that's okay. I want to be that sounding board. I want to be where people direct that and then we gather that together and then redirect it where it's supposed to go. And so I think that's where we get to how do we address this? What does this look like? And I think that it is in storytelling, it is in public health, it is in community education.

And so it's really weird to dismantle these very large things. But especially when I think of Zuboff and Crenshaw, those two, especially in my therapeutic practice root, everything that I do, like it is understanding intersections and then dismantling things that really can grapple you. And so I'd love to see some more. I think the privatization, that's one thing specifically about New Orleans that we're facing right now, is that with this task force, like you said, meet on Friday, vote on Tuesday. One of the people we met was like, "Yeah, I got a call. And he was like, you're on this." And they're like, "When's it meeting tomorrow." For a task force for trying to figure out what to do with Sewage and Water Board, which is our water utility in New Orleans, because that's the one water utility that we have that is sewerage, drainage, water quality. There's no drainage utility. So that's one of our propositions in our recommendation is to create a office of drainage.

Donald Cohen:
Can I ask you a question?

Joey Algier:
Please.

Donald Cohen:
Who has the authority to increase the fee? Could that be done by the voters or does it have to be done by the city council?

Joey Algier:
So, a few things. Currently there is no fee. So-

Donald Cohen:
To create a fee.

Joey Algier:
To create a fee. So currently they're millages. So there's a relationship with creating the fee and technically, so there needs to be a vote for the city charter to change-

Donald Cohen:
By the people.

Joey Algier:
By the people. But it is from an ordinance of the city council. It just changed too, two bills were passed in the Louisiana Senate that allowed for municipalities to create a stormwater fee and then made it so that the people had to vote on the amount. So there's a few steps in between. So the city council could say tomorrow, there is a new office of stormwater with this existing or whatever. It changes the city charter so it's a permanent office. They could put it forward. It would then be voted upon to be pushed through to change the charter, and then it would be voted upon for amount.

Donald Cohen:
Can I ask a hard question?

Joey Algier:
I'm not going to answer it.

Donald Cohen:
So the organizing is amazing. Sorry, Wendy. It's amazing. And I've known the work of your organization for a while. Do you have the power to do it? And if not, what will it take to do?

Joey Algier:
Oh, that is my favorite question because absolutely the hell yes, we can do it. There's something about it that is like, I don't know, for example, so I'm a Queer Punjabi man from Kansas. No, thank you. Thank you. Yes. Hence the Ascot. But I was never organized. New Orleans has a giant voting block of queer people. But we're spread across the city, because it's such a queer city. Men wear glitter on Tuesdays in New Orleans, you don't need an excuse. No one organizes that. And so I think there's something to be said about those identities and those stories being the connecting parts. We found, and I know this personally, we found ourselves as individuals in what we are not or where we do not belong against dominant cultural narratives for so long that the power structures that we do have are hard to be honed because we're so separate from each other because that's where safe is.

And so yes, we have the power if we organize, and I think there's something about, as we're talking, I didn't even, I'm so sorry. How are we doing that? The things that we have done, we have created the water collaborative, and my boss is to blame and give all the credit to both go hand in hand. Jessica Dandridge is a New Orleanian through and through. She's actually at Jazz Fest cooking at her family's booth, which I get to be in front of you and not her.

She created something. She became the executive director in 2019. She created something that has become and is becoming a clearinghouse of resources. Here's what we want to do. "Oh, you said no. Okay, but we're going to try it with this person and then we'll get back to you later. We're going to do it ourselves then." Which is a very New Orleans thing. So again, that resilience that is so ingrained is both helpful and hurtful. And so there has been, so the question of can we do it? Yes. I think that we're working on right now getting the public sentiment up. Because when it comes to paying for drainage, the floods are increasing when it comes to all these things, the answer is no. Just flat out no. But the more and more we know from these kinds of studies that the more you ask, the more you questions people answer yes to, simple ones, the more they'll say yes, in the long run. And so it's giving them platform to tell their stories.

And so the process, if it was not politically motivated or affected, this could have happened last month, it could have started. But because there's a new governor, because there's elections, because there's people running for mayor, I think is what we're talking about, when it comes to the point of these things that are so innately supposed to exist, once they become convoluted with money and privatization and success. And I think one of the things from the first session was democracy itself is kind of rooted in othering. And so even in that sense, but yes, that was actually a very easy question.

Wendy Ake:
Yeah, I remember stories where you've all worked with Jacobs, this massive global engineering firm that does advising on pricing of water. And they said to you at some point in the project that it's not a science community. Engagement is not a science to kind of say, we're working with you, but calm down a little bit. And your response was, "Yeah, I mean, it is a science and we're doing it and we'll tell you how to do it and change the way that you're working on our project." Could you also talk about the fact that you all have become and asked by the EPA to do this work in the regional level, region six and do technical assistance and work in that region?

Joey Algier:
Yeah. Again, I have no idea how to do any of that, but we have... So it's really funny. We were an organization when I came on a year and a half, almost two years ago now of two people. Now, it is 10. So we actually have an EPA court. So we have a policy, a legislative manager, director, and our executive director. And then under that we have eight different people. And so that was something I think Rebecca, Rebecca Malpass is her name again, another phenomenal human being who I have no idea how she has the capacity to be on state, national, and local meetings about conservation. Everything from Gulf South for a green new deal all the way up to like EPA stuff. And so I think it's again, that consistency, creating opportunities. I think that honestly, that has to be how we got there is just continually showing up and becoming the experts. We are consultants with the hearts of disruptors.

Wendy Ake:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's such a beautiful thing to see. And it's often we'll be talking, they sound like community activists, talking about austerity, water justice, like the radical encoding that needs to happen in there. And we're telling EPA where the SRF fund should be going.

Joey Algier:
Exactly.

Wendy Ake:
We'll be doing technical assistance. It's really powerful the way you've organized with leadership in your organization.

Joey Algier:
Yeah, thank you. And I think it is, I get to reflect on that too, because I came out of the process of just doing the campaign manager. I was just the manager. We even had a political, or not a political, we had a policy manager for the campaign. And then I was just the people. And for about a year I was like, I'm just people, I have no idea, I have no idea. And now it's like the world is opening, we're getting the EPA, like we have a director for that. We have more people in communications. We went from a conversation, social media video about rain barrels, and now we're at 12,000 followers, I think we're at two. And so even that kind of stuff, it is weird to be in the middle of that. But I think you made me think about this in terms of how do you become experts? How do you become your own consultants?

And what I had written down was you obtain. Whatever that is, whether that's information or a relationship you exchange, something is given back and forth. There's a relationship developed, you implement and then you distribute. And so that's the process that we have to get inside of for a lot of that. We're compiling, we're engaging, we're facilitating, we're building, we're not at the center. I think that's a big part of it when you're talking about, oh, these giant agencies who are like, this is not this. You cannot do this. This is not a science. That's because they only have to do, obtain and distribute. There's so many things in between that we're losing ourselves to privatization.

Donald Cohen:
One thing that we had to become an expert, because everyone can be an expert. And even the experts really aren't, they know how to dress right and. The thing that we teach, the most important thing that we teach is how people can ask the hard questions. You were alluding to this before. How are you going to raise the money for this? What does it mean to bond it? What does it, I mean really at that level of details, what do you mean you can do it more efficiently as I said earlier? How is this going to happen? Who has the power to do it? It's the most important thing that we teach when we're helping people learn how to both organize better, because it's complicated stuff. I mean, I've never built a water system, I probably never will. But when they create a wall and say, "Well, it's too complicated for you, then just we learn how to ask the hard questions that pierces through the veil of, it's too complicated for you." It works everywhere in the country.

Joey Algier:
Yeah. I mean, that's something that's beautiful about New Orleans, I think, and why it's so special and how you find these things for your place, is that New Orleans is so deregulated in a sense. It was started as like degenerates from France that burnt it down multiple times. And then enslaved people were sent there. And enslaved people became the hub of New Orleans. They became the reason, the free people of color became the reason New Orleans is New Orleans. It's a reason that survived. And so there's something about that. There's an anti-regulation, there's an anti-establishment. And so that's why we can find these little wiggles to be like, "Oh, you want to do that? Okay, well, we're going to go back here and we're going to undercut the price with the guy whose sister knows the cousin's mom's brother down at the grocery store." Oh, I'll call in a favor. That kind of a thing is so New Orleans that once we start implementing that on this level, it starts to upset larger agencies and those things.

Wendy Ake:
Yeah, for sure. And I wanted to ask, you Donald, this impressive organization that they've been able to stir up for sentiments that are privatization of education, but really are riding the wave of anti-DEI, anti-trans work, and inspiring that from a base of the idea that the majority of students under 18, the majority of people under 18 are what the census calls like multi-racial or more than one race. All of this is riding that wave. What have you seen communities organizing around that or that even the popular discourse or realization that that's what the project is?

Donald Cohen:
That's a good and hard question. So we spent a lot of time last year. I mean, we work with groups around the country. We don't organize, we help people who do organize. And we're part of lots of networks. We work with both education unions and education advocates and everything in between. The first thing we thought was really important to say, let's keep our eye on the ball. This is a distraction. Now, when you're under attack, you can't not defend. You can't. But they changed a conversation about education from adequate funding to CRT that nobody even knew what it meant. I still not sure I know what it means. I didn't study it. So I think it's important to say this is a political project, pure and simple, to take over school boards, to take over legislatures, to drive wedges through people in the middle who are not so... Who don't know a person of trans. So it's like the other for them, but not like this because they've never had the experience of meeting a person who is trans.

And so it's an entirely political project, and we had to spend, I mean, we didn't do anything about this, but in terms of our world, it's like, let's be clear. Let's keep our eye on the prize. They're trying to dismantle the system, and that's exactly what they're doing. I think here's what they did. They took over the states. I think it's really important for us to be clear in this here in particular. They took over the state legislatures and the governorships. You've got a pretty horrible governor right now. In Tennessee, they made it possible on Thursday of this week to have teachers with guns in classrooms.

And some of the people who were friends of mine who were in the capitol saying, "Don't do this." Were with the parents of people who were killed at the covenant a year ago who were saying, "Don't do this." Oklahoma, no, excuse me, Nebraska just passed a school voucher Bill. Most people in Nebraska don't think school vouchers are a good thing. Most people think guns should be regulated. They took over the state legislatures. They want take the, and so the reason I'm saying this over and over again, is if we're not focused on that, nothing happens. You need to take over the state legislature, you need to take over. What I heard you say is you take over the city council. I mean, I really did. If you don't take over the city council, you can't get the ordinance to pass to put the thing on the ballot to do that.

I think we have to be a lot clearer about that, this is a power play. And we need to exercise our power to take over the institute, the public institutions that determine whether we have public goods, whether we have control over those public goods, and know that we have the money to pay for them so that everybody gets it.

Wendy Ake:
Yeah. It's interesting that all of these ideas turn into needing to learn how to read a financial report, how to study bond rating agencies about water runoff charges. These are the really... And in a way, that's a beautiful thing because we're able to operationalize our grand aspirations and get it on the ground.

Donald Cohen:
Well, governance is hard. I've never run a city, I've never built a water system, I've never run a school district, I've never taught a class. I was just talking to somebody yesterday who was one of our foundation program officers who was in government for the last eight years [inaudible 00:59:32] this shit is hard. It's hard to run up thing, and democracy is pretty... Here's the thing about democracy people should understand it's a battleground. It's not just an aspiration. And so you may win in a majority of city council, but the other side not going away. And if you're a city council member, you got to listen to them, you represent everybody. So the point I'm making here, to your point, was we need our experts, we need our finance people, we need our teachers. We need the people who could run the thing. But if we're not taking it over, what's the point?

Wendy Ake:
Thank you to our panelists who were perfect fits for the topic.

Outro:
And that concludes this episode of our special series of Who Belongs, a podcast from the Othering and Belonging Institute. For more episodes from this series featuring discussions from our Othering and Belonging Conference in April, visit our website at belonging.berkeley.edu/who belongs. Thank you for listening.