Quick Take
Measure Z, the sugary drink tax, which adds a tax of 2 cents per ounce on distributors of sugar-sweetened beverages in the city of Santa Cruz, has passed. Mike Rotkin, Lookout politics columnist, isn’t surprised, despite the $2 million the American Beverage Association spent against it. He writes that Santa Cruz is a community primed to fight.
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It is not an accident the city of Santa Cruz passed the sugary drink tax, Measure Z, and has become the kind of community where citizens stand up and pass a health-focused beverage tax despite being outspent by the corporate soda lobby 50 to 1 ($2 million to $40,000).
How is it possible that citizens in our community stood up to such a massive corporate assault? In too many communities in the United States, people are disconnected from each other, feel generally alienated from their government, including local governments like city councils and county boards of supervisors.
In such communities, all it takes is an expensive political campaign that significantly outspends its opponents to elect someone to public office or pass a public policy. Such communities don’t offer their citizens alternative sources of information about the issues in campaigns, and the ability to “buy an election” is the rule rather than the exception. If one is bombarded by a torrent of misinformation, it is hard to resist the message being sent.
In the most general terms, most people feel a lack of agency over their own lives, and this alienation leads people to irrational and self-defeating decisions in the political realm.
I believe the only antidote to this free-floating alienation lies in engaging people in community-building organizing that gives them a sense of their own collective power. This is not something national, state or even local government or politicians can deliver.
It requires people to gather together and find ways to address problems they perceive in their daily lives. It has to start at a local level, but it is not something that gets addressed even in the most participatory electoral campaigns.
This is not a 30-second talk at a door during a precinct operation, but a grassroots effort that demonstrates to people they have agency and that their engagement can make a difference in the world. It might begin at the level of fighting for a stop sign on a dangerous corner or saving a treasured piece of coastal open space. It’s something you can’t get on your own, but that you can get with the help of your neighbors.
Fortunately, in Santa Cruz, in the shift from a very conservative community of the 1960s to arguably among the most progressive in the country, we are already well into this process.
The grassroots neighborhood organizing that occurred here in the 1970s and early 1980s was not a partisan pitched battle between Democrats and Republicans, but a truly populist effort to connect neighbors with each other over common interests like environmental protection, affordable health care and housing, safe neighborhoods and community connection.
This kind of organizing does not typically lead to quick results. It takes patience and a deep underlying commitment to democratic and community communication at the personal level.
But when it works well, it has positive long-term impacts that are critically important to citizens’ sense of who they and their neighbors are. It allowed us to address issues of race and gender in a way that was not abstract but helped forge real personal connections to overcome what had earlier been separation and prejudice.
This kind of organizing can also take place in workplaces through union struggles, but they have to go deeper into engaging participants in decisions about daily work interactions and not be just about winning contracts for higher compensation or better benefits – although those are, of course, also important.
People don’t become practicing democratic (small d) citizens because they read about it in books, hear a great speech or get a 30-second call or email during an electoral campaign. They become democratic citizens who value their community and support their governmental institutions and candidates by actually experiencing success in collective action over things that matter to them.
The residents of Santa Cruz who formed the Westside Neighbors in the 1970s and all of those other neighborhood groups in this community did not change overnight from conservative Republicans to progressive Democrats. They became citizen activists who helped force the city of Santa Cruz to become a different kind of local government on a wide variety of their concerns. In the process, as it turned out, a large majority of them did come to believe that the Democratic Party offered them a better way to get their needs met than the Republican alternative; and that belief extended beyond the local community to their voting choices at the state and national level.
But that was a result, not the basis of the struggle.
As a result, when the corporate soda lobby organized its campaign against Measure Z by trying to persuade local citizens that the city council would not actually spend the $1.3 million tax revenue on community health projects, it didn’t get much traction. It certainly is not universal trust in local government, but most local citizens believe that if the city council says it will spend tax dollars for a particular purpose, it is likely to do so.
The same logic was in place in the successful passage of Measure Q at the county level. Arguments that the board of supervisors could not be trusted to actually spend the tax on fire protection and clean water projects fell – seemingly – on deaf ears.
As active citizens, local voters also appear to have understood that what might appear as a regressive tax focused against low-income residents, was actually intended to support low-income residents whose health problems like diabetes, heart disease and tooth decay are disproportionately impacted by consumption of cheap sugar-laden sodas. Once again, local voters here have a basic trust in the health organizations like Dientes Community Dental and the local medical establishment that backed Measure Z and raised the majority of the funding for the Yes on Z campaign.
So the lesson here is simple: Progressive communities like Santa Cruz that have developed strong ties among their population have the ability to resist an outside corporate onslaught. There is probably a lesson here for our state and national politics as well, but that is the topic for another day.