Ohio Citizen Action
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Ohio Citizen Action is Ohio’s largest environmental organization, with 100,000 dues-paying members. The organization focuses on environmental health, and also tracks political corruption in the state.
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[edit] Overview
Based in Cleveland, the organization also has organizing offices in Columbus and Cincinnati. The organization recruits members and conducts campaigns with a statewide door-to-door canvass and a telephone canvass staff in Cleveland. Sandy Buchanan of Cleveland has been its Executive Director since 1993; the current Board President is attorney Ellis Jacobs of Dayton. It is the largest canvass-based state organization in the nation.
[edit] Origins
The organization was founded in 1975 as the Ohio Public Interest Campaign, a coalition of unions, churches, and community organizations, working to pass legislation to protect employees and communities from the damage done by plant closings. Before the organization focused on environmental health, it was involved with a range of issues including tax abatements, community reinvestment, municipal electric power, natural gas prices, grocery store price-fixing, nuclear power plant construction, health insurance, and victims rights. Since 1994, Ohio Citizen Action has tracked political corruption in the state, based on exhaustive analyses of campaign contributions to Ohio candidates. The organization helped the State of Ohio establish a comprehensive public database of campaign contributions.
[edit] Good Neighbor Campaigns
Beginning in the 1980’s, the organization has increasingly focused on environmental health issues, including local toxic chemical right-to-know ordinances, landfills, hazardous waste dumps, groundwater and wellfield protection, incinerators, and pesticides. Since 1997, Ohio Citizen Action has concentrated on what it calls “good neighbor campaigns” with polluting companies. These campaigns combine community organizing, regional canvassing, direct negotiations with the company, and other techniques to cause major polluters to prevent pollution, according to Sandy Buchanan, “far beyond what federal or state regulations would require.”
So far, such campaigns have involved AK Steel, Middletown; Brush Wellman, Elmore; Columbus Steel Drum, Gahanna; DuPont, Washington, WV; Envirosafe Landfill, Oregon; Eramet, Marietta; FirstEnergy, Northern Ohio; General Environmental Management, Cleveland; Lanxess Plastics, Addyston; Mittal Steel, Cleveland; Perma-Fix, Dayton; PMC Specialties, Cincinnati; River Valley Schools, Marion; Rohm and Haas, Reading; Shelly Asphalt, Westerville; Stark County landfills; Sunoco Refinery, Oregon; Universal Purifying Technologies, Columbus; U.S. Coking Group, Oregon; Valleycrest Landfill, Dayton; and Waste Technologies Industries hazardous waste incinerator, East Liverpool.
Ohio Citizen Action has published a Good Neighbor Campaign Handbook (Lincoln, Nebraska: iUniverse, 2006), describing how such campaigns are organized.
