Community benefits agreements are trickle down privatization.
Trickle down economics and privatization are things that have been repeatedly discredited, yet repeatedly pushed, and combining them is corruption.
I’ve been seeing a lot of mention of CBAs in regards to data center projects, and sadly I see a lot of data center opposition activists seemingly believing this might be an avenue to get treated fairly, except that Community Benefits Agreements seem to never culminate in a fair exchange. So at first glance perhaps it looks like it’s a great Idea, but it’s most certainly not. It’s a privatization scheme based on thoroughly discredited ideas around trickle down economics, which is, of course a trick.
Community benefits agreement - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“A community benefits agreement (CBA) in the United States is a contract signed by community groups and a real estate developer that requires the developer to provide specific amenities and/or mitigations to the local community or neighborhood. In exchange, the community groups agree to publicly support the project, or at least not oppose it. Often, negotiating a CBA relies heavily upon the formation of a multi-issue, broad based community coalition including community, environmental, faith-based and labor organizations.”
It’s a needlessly complicated way to work out the math in favour of the corporations with the community still carrying the burdens, with a lot of confusion, instead of just having corporations and tycoons pay their fare share of taxes, and then providing community amenities and regulatory protection with that tax revenue. So it’s really diabolical, a most convoluted privatization scheme. Companies benefit from tax breaks or even taxpayer funded grants, for projects in communities that don’t even want the projects, and for development that isn’t necessarily actually useful to society, and just exists for the owners to make money, and then communities are cajoled into taking token gifts by signing agreements that may not even in the end be enforceable. And sometimes the promised gifts may never come to fruition if the company involved goes under or otherwise skips out. And this is all in order to dodge real true accountability.
From what I’ve seen, community benefits agreements in general are typically garbage too, they almost never actually offer a fair trade in any sense that would be considered compensation. It often looks like a cheapskate insulting bribe in exchange for allowing companies to do irrevocable damage to a community. Maybe they offer the town a firetruck, or to build a park someday in the future, in a town that’s been made extremely undesirable in a bunch of other ways.
They seem to include things that look like “concessions” by the company that are in fact already required by laws and regulations in the jurisdiction, so it’s weighting the balance sheet by passing off as “good will” things that are legally required anyway. In some cases tricky language can be used to make the community think something that’s not quite true. For example, in the case of the Lancaster City data center CBA, the term “clean energy” is used, and reports in the news were claiming the Community Benefits Agreement provides for “100% renewable energy” data centers only, when I could find no such evidence of that being guaranteed in the CBA text in the summary nor in the long form. It said “clean energy” and Donald Trump has referred to “clean coal” and I’ve even been hearing methane gas generally described as “clean” too. Nowhere in that CBA does it specify renewable, nor is there language to exclude fossil fuel, especially not to ban “backup generators” which are often called “temporary” but then utilized long-term for multi-year continuous operation, such as the data center plant in Memphis Tennessee.
So in the end the business interests get away with what would otherwise be considered horrible, or even criminal, avoid being held accountable by regulatory bodies, force arbitration maybe, or otherwise avoid getting sued which might have a hope of restitution, so instead, as the cost of doing business, they can just do a pittance “investment in the community” and call it even when it’s not, because it’s a lot cheaper than impact fees or paying their fair share of taxes. Often in the cases where CBAs come up, the corporations and business entities are already getting big taxpayer money grants or tax credits or tax breaks of some kind. So one part of government tries to give the companies freebies on the backs of the taxpayers, and another part of government under pressure from the actual community members paying those taxes and living in the community, comes up with the idea of a “Community Benefits Agreement” as a superficial fix, to try to claw back some token in order to try to appease constituents who recognize the harm being done.
CBAs are a tool for privatizing the profits and socializing the losses. So nobody who considers themselves “left” or “liberal” or who considers themselves “fiscally responsible” with taxpayer money should be on board with this corporate friendly industry catering privatization scheme.
Community benefits agreements are really privatization at its most cynical. And of course it’s not lost on me that it’s not the community members fighting against the harm of corporations that are coming up with the idea of a CBA, it’s most readily embraced with interest by organizations and people who work for organizations, and I think there are a few reasons for this. I think in some cases people who work for orgs see this as an opportunity for involvement in the process in a way that justifies their existence. In some cases certain organizations may actually be the ones getting paid for the services around negotiating community benefits agreements. And yet in other instances the organizations may be enthusiastic about CBAs because they are either openly or covertly on the side of the industry and working to grease the wheels for the project this way.
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