Fighting city hall: Corporation 1, citizens 0

UU World: The Magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association, May/Jun 2003 by Wolman, David, Wax, Heather

Just months earlier, in a similar suit against the Zoning Hearing Board of Chadds Ford Township, the U.S. District Court of Eastern Pennsylvania awarded attorneys' fees to Omnipoint. The decision stirred interest among legal scholars, some of whom felt that the court had ignored the legislative intent behind the Civil Rights Act. The act makes it financially feasible for anyone, no matter how poor, to challenge violations of their civil rights by shifting the cost of litigation from the victim to violators. But huge corporations like Omnipoint don't need to have their court costs covered to make it financially feasible for them to sue. As Judge Julie E. Carnes of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta remarked in an opinion in 2000, "Their financial self-interest and the vast sums at stake make them more than happy to serve as 'private attorneys general' to enforce the legislative measures that they have lobbied through Congress, without the need for taxpayers to pay their litigation costs."

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Under the threat of having to pay Omnipoint's lawyers, Wellfleet officials decided to meet with Omnipoint behind closed doors. More than twenty town residents showed up for the meeting, asking to be included in the talks, but Town Administrator Bill Dugan refused, insisting he had never heard of a board discussing a lawsuit in public.

"The chairman got mad," Hiller recalls. "We stood outside and did some chanting."

After hours of talks, Wellfleet's Planning Board issued the previously withheld permit and Omnipoint agreed to drop its suit. "Our legal counsel said, 'You're dead in the water on this one,'" says selectman Donovan. "How much of the people's money can we spend to defend something? There's legislation at the federal level, and you can no longer defend the principle without saying we're going to have to throw $250,000 at something. It's really a problem and a burden for small towns everywhere.

"Omnipoint's use of the civil rights threat definitely influenced us. Then you get into serious penalties. The term 'civil liberties' has broadened so dramatically. You're a corporation! You have property rights, but that's not what civil rights laws are for."

This is the legacy of Wellfleet, where one family summarized their frustration with the system, printed it on poster-board and stapled it to their weathered, wooden fence: "Democracy is dead in Wellfleet." And if it's dead in a small town like Wellfleet, where it should exist in its purist form, what does that say for the rest of America?

David Wolman is spending this year in Sapporo, Japan, on a Fulbright journalism grant. Heather Wax is features editor of Research News and Opportunities in Science and Theology in Quincy, Massachusetts.