From Promise to Practice - What makes community benefits agreements enforceable?

Aug 15

Ryan/Google/City of Pine Island continuously fall back on what they call a “Community Benefit Agreement”-the tax abatement and assurance of jobs. But that’s not what Community Benefit Agreements (CBAs) are. CBAs are legally binding and residents give up their right to sue. Three primary critiques of CBAs are:

1) They’re used more as symbolic gestures to garner public support rather than tools to ensure residents/community members are justly and fairly compensated for adverse impacts they are expected to experience without a choice in the matter.

2) They risk legitimizing projects communities would otherwise object to, especially when benefits are offered in exchange for accepting environmental, financial and/or social risks. Focus shifts away from cumulative impacts or long term environmental harms to a consolation prize, rather than a tool for preventing the inequitable siting of the project in the first place.

3) Significant resource disparities exist between well resourced developers and local governments, community members and community organizations. Such inequity undermines the legitimacy of a CBA and limits its potential to actually deliver equitable outcomes.

So, Pine Island, would you give up your right to sue Ryan Co/Google over the next 20+ years for short term construction jobs? For a tax abatement that supposedly will result in property tax revenue but there’s no guarantee your mortgage will go down? When have mortgages EVER gone down? Is that enough for your children or grandchildren, who will inherit the consequences of our lack of due diligence today, to give up their rights to sue?

You can’t CBA away water pollution, cancer, asthma and ER visits. You can’t CBA someone back to life from a preventable disease.

What the city did was performative-classic pitfalls mentioned above. Their version of a CBA-in the form of the tax abatement and development agreement-doesn’t absolve us of our right to sue as far as I can tell. But you better think long and hard when you see and hear “Community Benefit Agreement,” what you’re being asked to accept and give up and whether it’s truly an equitable exchange.