Hi folks,

Firstly, congratulations to everyone on reaching 40,000 signatures!

Let's celebrate by voting in our Community Poll to choose the winner of our Poster Contest. After studying all of the posters in the gallery, you can vote in the poll for your five favorites. The winners will be announced in our June 26th Town Hall (registration open). Thank you for your participation!

Secondly, a fast update on the ongoing Copperwood Grant Saga:

The $55M Copperwood Grant was considered again in last week’s Michigan Congress Appropriations Committee meeting, but the vote on that grant — as well as other grants from the SOAR Fund — has not yet occurred. The reason for the delay is quite interesting: it seems that scrutiny over the SOAR Fund has been mounting in recent months, with chief criticisms being that these multimillion dollar corporate welfare handouts — approved by a group of unelected businesspeople known as the Michigan Strategic Fund — quite often undermine community concerns and are not even creating the quantity or qualify of jobs promised (more info here: 1, 2).

These are all points that our campaign has raised, and we are in good company. Legislators are actually considering slashing the SOAR Fund in half in the coming year, and they even seem hesitant to pass the already-approved grants crossing their desks. 

Given this context — and given that it’s an election year and anything can happen — it is crucial that we keep up the pressure. We don’t know when a vote will finally take place, but we know that over a thousand of you have written to your legislators already, and now is not the time to stop! If you’ve written once, write them again — or call them! You will find the details on our Take Action page.

There’s no need to get overly emotionally invested in this action: contacting our legislators takes just a few minutes, so it’s no huge waste of time if we don’t get the desired outcome. But even if the Copperwood handout is approved, our efforts will not have been for naught, because we are showing legislators that there’s growing momentum to prioritize the protection of water above all else, and we are laying the groundwork for much-needed reform in mining regulations so that the Copperwoods of the future will never be permitted in the first place.

We’ll never know what might’ve happened unless we keep fighting until the very end. It’s like we’re digging for treasure— what a shame it would be to lay down the shovel with just a single scoop remaining! 

In solidarity,
Tom Grotewohl
www.ProtectThePorkies.com