But when cities get ambitious, states get defensive—an effect demonstrated recently in Texas and Florida, where state governments are starting to crack down on municipalities that push the boundaries of “traditional” local policymaking. 

Of course, the power struggle between state and local governments is nothing new. Today, the National Conference of State Legislatures estimates somewhere between 44 and 48 states operate under a version of the “home rule” regime, which allows municipalities some measure of flexibility in local policymaking, carving out certain issue areas where local governments can make decisions free from state interference. However, this structure of government hasn’t always been the default. 

The balance of power has gradually shifted toward municipalities over the past 150 years or so, starting around the end of the 19th century, when most states still governed their cities according to the “Dillon Rule.” Under that rule, municipalities had limited latitude beyond the narrow set of powers directly linked to incorporation and those expressly granted to them by the state legislatures. During this time cities and counties served a closely cabined, administrative role subordinate to the state government.

In 1875, Missouri became the first state to establish home rule when it extended to the City of St. Louis the status of “imperium in imperio,” or “a government within a government.” The City thereafter enjoyed the power to regulate its own streets, bridges, sewers, and public buildings, and as home rule spread across the country, this sphere of “local” issues has likewise grown. Today, some states circumscribe the scope of home rule to cover only strictly municipal issues, like zoning and city planning; others afford local governments legislative authority as broad as that of the state legislature, subject to preemption. 

Through the expansion of home rule, municipalities have gained the capacity to experiment with policy—and to exacerbate inequality and concentrate wealth, privilege, and status in certain communities. Home rule power, in short, allows city and county governments to accomplish a much broader range of political ends, both good and bad.

Cartoon illustration from the 1960 constitutional Home Rule campaign in Kansas. Used with permission of the League of Kansas Municipalities.

All this political action has, predictably, attracted significant attention, especially from the deep-pocketed entities which stand to be affected. As cities and counties join the fight against influence and abuse by corporate actors, these same actors have started trying to make allies of local government leaders in an effort to protect themselves against litigation and unfavorable ordinances.

In 2014, Jon Russell—a city councilman from the town of Culpeper, Virginia, known for his far-right views—brought an idea to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a technically nonpartisan but conservative organization that brings together corporate interests and state officials to advance “the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” 

ALEC has long been the subject of heated debate; it’s the engine behind some of the most controversial state policies of the past half-century, including Florida’s Stand Your Ground statute, rollbacks of environmental protections, restrictive voter identification laws, anti-union and anti-worker laws, and most recently, proposals to bar public pensions from considering environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) investment criteria.

Russell, sensing local governments were starting to take on bigger issues, dreamed up the American City County Exchange (ACCE), a sort of local-level ALEC to bring municipal officials, too, into the federalist fray. 

“It was a manifestation of what has gone on for a period of time in this country where national-type topics that advocacy groups have tried to get passed at the federal or the state level—where they were not successful—in some cases, they have taken those issues to the lower-level government,” said Andre Cushing, a county commissioner in Penobscot County, Maine, who currently serves as director of ACCE.

Cushing cited initiatives like the higher minimum wage put in place by the most populous city in his home state, Portland, as well as efforts by individual municipalities to ban flavored tobacco. Cushing argued policies like these, when instituted at the local level, create a legal patchwork which can cause a “conundrum” for businesses trying to operate across multiple locations. 

“I learned more in half an hour in that meeting than I would have with, you know, 3 to 5 minutes of testimony in my committee,” said Cushing, referring to his work in the Maine Senate. “What I saw was the value of competitors sort of keeping each other honest in these debates.”

There’s one problem with that argument: ACCE has published a host of model ordinances which would effectively create the “patchwork” Cushing criticizes.

For example, a model policy published in December 2023 would limit the establishment of new homeless shelters without first entering into a “shared services agreement” with the governing county. Under Russell’s leadership, ACCE advocated special local protections on “commercial speech,” and for any elected unit of local government (even school boards) to enjoy an “equal negotiating position” with the federal government on issues of land, water, and wildlife control.

Any of these policies would—like a local minimum wage or product ban—change the way businesses, people, and governments interact with one another in comparison to neighboring municipalities. 

Cushing admitted that it can be difficult to draw a hard line between state and local issues. “I think it has to be taken on a case-by-case basis,” he said. 

But this line-drawing exercise isn’t just about determining the balance between local and state power—it’s about the balance between ACCE and ALEC. 

That balance hasn’t always been favorable to the membership ACCE is trying to cultivate. Since its founding in 1973, ALEC has proposed countless measures to limit local power in many issue areas, especially gun regulation and immigration. How can an organization that has for so long suppressed the power of the American municipality suddenly create a subsidiary which purports to support local authority?

Source: Fibonacci Blue/Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License. Protestors associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement met on the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol in 2012 to protest ALEC and the influence of corporate money on politics.

Cushing disagreed that this “tension” is a problem. Rather, he said, “It’s that pressure that causes you to slow down on certain policies. The value that I have seen from my experience in different levels of government that ALEC and ACCE partnership offers is on some issues, we’re in the same meetings and part of the same discussion groups, so that you’re representing both the local and the state perspective on some of these issues.”

Cushing emphasized the importance of these discussions and ACCE’s role in creating a “platform” for corporate stakeholders to promote their interests to government officials. Cushing recounted one of his earliest memories of ALEC: at a conference in 2011, he attended a task force meeting on communications and technology, at which a number of competing telecommunications companies debated a proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile. 

“I learned more in half an hour in that meeting than I would have with, you know, 3 to 5 minutes of testimony in my committee,” said Cushing, referring to his work in the Maine Senate. “What I saw was the value of competitors sort of keeping each other honest in these debates. … So, as a policymaker, I found it valuable to have that resource at the table. Didn’t mean I had to pick a winner or loser, but it gave me a broader perspective of the issue.”

“Information sessions” like these may form the basis for model policies, arguably the bread and butter of ALEC and ACCE. Issue-based task forces—made up of private- and public-sector members of the organizations—hear debates like the one Cushing described, and members vote on a proposed policy. If a majority of both private-sector and public-sector task force members vote to advance the policy, it reaches the board of ALEC for review and adoption. 

After that, ALEC and ACCE publish the model policy on their public website, at which point legislators can duplicate and introduce the proposals in their own governments. 

Doesn’t it defeat the purpose of local government—a smaller, decentralized lawmaking body created to be more responsive to community needs—to enact policies shaped by multibillion-dollar companies and drafted by a nationwide organization? 

Cushing doesn’t think so. He compared ACCE’s model policies to a “recipe,” subject to adaptation by individual decisionmakers. 

“It doesn’t come down branded as… a model policy from ACCE that you must use in its entirety,” said Cushing. “It’s a concept draft.” 

Fair enough, but community members may be unaware that their lawmakers have been following someone else’s “recipe” at all. When asked whether he was concerned about the lack of transparency of ACCE’s policymaking process, as compared to a public legislative hearing, Cushing referenced the fable of the hen whose fellow farm animals are loath to help her make the bread—but eager to help her eat it.

“It’s a membership organization,” said Cushing. “So, if they are wanting to become a member, they can become a member of the organization and participate.”

Cushing explained that ALEC and ACCE do not release their membership records to protect their members from “adverse situations” or negative reactions from competing interest groups. These concerns may be legitimate, but sometimes the secretive nature of ALEC and ACCE’s operations means that lawmakers who aren’t members of either organization unknowingly find themselves caught up in controversy. 

Dr. Mara Grujanac, an elected trustee for the Village of Lincolnshire, Illinois (population: 8,000), is one of those lawmakers. 

“The blinders came off as a public official,” said Grujanac of her unintentional run-in with ACCE. 

In December 2015, Grujanac was the only trustee on the six-member board to vote no on an ordinance to make Lincolnshire a “right-to-work” municipality. Right-to-work laws forbid labor organizations and employers from entering into union security agreements, which require all employees—not just union members—to pay union dues. These agreements are intended to solve the free rider problem that can arise when a union must represent an entire workforce, but only a portion of the workers contribute to the cost of that representation. The anti-labor movement has fought for decades to ban union security agreements, with success in at least 22 states.

Their next target? Local governments. 

Grujanac said she was and is personally opposed to anti-union laws. What troubled her most about the 2015 ordinance, though, wasn’t the content of the proposal—it was the “backdoor politicking” that surrounded its passage. 

A few weeks prior to the official introduction of the right-to-work ordinance, Grujanac started hearing murmurs about an upcoming vote; the purpose and motivation of the law were left vague. Other players in the Lincolnshire local government tried to convince her it was just another ordinance. 

“It was slightly touched on, but sort of like baloney. You know, like it’s nothing,” said Grujanac. “But I had been on the Board long enough to know: I think this is not going to be a baloney thing.”

“The takeaway for me, all these years later, is that we got busted doing shady things,” said Grujanac. “The Village of Lincolnshire tried to do all sorts of shady stuff and got busted. And I think it was right.”

Leading up to the monthly Village Board meeting at which the ordinance would be debated and voted on, Grujanac was told in private that the right-to-work law was intended to court a “big corporation” which was looking to site its headquarters in Lincolnshire—but when she asked for more information on the corporation and the alleged deal, she was refused.

“It was this whole secret, like, ‘I can’t tell you,’” said Grujanac. “And so that was off-putting.” 

According to Grujanac, the Village of Lincolnshire is no stranger to catering to commercial interests: The area is home to a number of corporate headquarters, drawn in by the municipality’s business-friendly policies as well as its celebrated public high school, where Grujanac works. That this particular deal was taking place off the record, however, Grujanac thought was unusual.

Before the vote, Grujanac took things into her own hands. “I start to do a little bit of digging behind the scenes,” she said. “I do some homework on it, and I realize this is a union-busting vote.”

Higher rates of union membership are correlated with reduced income inequality; anti-union policies like right-to-work laws suppress worker wages and widen that gap. Used with permission of the Economic Policy Institute.

Local labor unions and workers caught on, too—when Grujanac arrived at the Village Board meeting that night, an inflatable rat was set up in the Village Hall parking lot, and dozens of people had lined up to speak in favor of and against the ordinance.

After just an hour of discussion, though, Lincolnshire Mayor Elizabeth Brandt cut off public comment. Grujanac remembers asking questions at the meeting, all of which went unanswered. The Board proceeded with the vote, and the ordinance passed 5-to-1. 

“I wanted to see if she was going to come out in public and say something,” said Grujanac of the mayor, “because I felt that it was politically motivated. I just felt that we were not doing this for a real reason. We were doing this because someone tried to talk someone else into it.”

“I know in Maine you must register as a lobbyist if you are before the Legislature or the Executive Branch,” said Cushing. “There is not, for most communities, a requirement that you are registered per se to lobby at the local level.”

As it turns out, Grujanac was probably right. Local “right-to-work zones” were a core agenda item for then-Governor of Illinois Bruce Rauner, whose administration had close ties to the Lincolnshire government: Brandt served as campaign chair for Rauner’s deputy governor, Leslie Munger, during Munger’s run for state comptroller. 

Lincolnshire was the first and last Illinois municipality to follow Rauner’s advice. Within weeks, a number of labor groups had sued the Village of Lincolnshire in state and federal court, arguing that the ordinance was unlawful and that Brandt prevented union members from speaking at the Village Board meeting. The Village agreed to settle the state suit for $10,000 paid by the Liberty Justice Center, the conservative Chicago-based litigation group representing the Village, which would go on to back the plaintiffs in a landmark anti-labor Supreme Court case barring union security agreements for public employees. A federal court struck down Lincolnshire’s law in 2017. 

For good measure, the Illinois General Assembly followed up with a state law banning local right-to-work ordinances, and Illinois voters approved an amendment to the state constitution in 2022 which barred right-to-work across the state.

“The takeaway for me, all these years later, is that we got busted doing shady things,” said Grujanac. “The Village of Lincolnshire tried to do all sorts of shady stuff and got busted. And I think it was right.”

Grujanac learned later that the “big corporation” looking to set up shop in Lincolnshire had decided to locate elsewhere. Grujanac never knew, however, that the ordinance hadn’t originated in the Village of Lincolnshire—or even in the Governor’s office. In fact, the text of the right-to-work ordinance was almost identical to a model policy published by ACCE in January 2015.

ACCE’s fingerprints had been wiped from Lincolnshire’s ordinance, a common feature of “copy-and-paste” or “copycat” legislation originating from outside organizations and marketed to legislators across multiple bodies of government. State and federal policy is often similarly untraceable, but disparities in openness and access to resources are even more pronounced at the local level, making it harder for people to figure out who is drafting their community ordinances.

For these same reasons, local lobbying is often easier for corporations and organizations to hide; most citizens aren’t even aware they should be on the lookout for private influence. 

At a fundamental level, not all states define “lobbyist” the same way—sometimes an individual must spend a certain amount of money or time on lobbying to be an official “lobbyist.” All 50 states have laws which require state government lobbyists (and sometimes the entities that employ them) to file registration paperwork, but local government lobbyists aren’t always covered. Some municipalities, like the City of Boston, have their own lobbying regulations altogether, but some have none at all.

The information lobbyists must disclose on this paperwork varies widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and on top of it, statutory filing and disclosure requirements aren’t always clear. As a result, the agencies responsible for reviewing these disclosures have broad discretion in determining whether a lobbyist is in compliance.

Indeed, even Cushing—the director of a nationwide organization which publishes model ordinances, hosts conferences of local officials, and facilitates relationships between corporate interests and municipal governments—doesn’t need to register as a lobbyist to do his job.*

“I know in Maine you must register as a lobbyist if you are before the Legislature or the Executive Branch,” said Cushing. “There is not, for most communities, a requirement that you are registered per se to lobby at the local level.”

Apparently, there might not be such a requirement at the state level, either. ALEC and its subsidiaries are a 501(c)(3) organization, which according to the IRS “may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities”—meaning it isn’t technically a lobbying group. That designation has, understandably, raised eyebrows. As insurance, ALEC has managed to secure exemptions from at least three separate states allowing it to avoid registering or disclosing its lobbying expenditures, and it has created a sister 501(c)(4) organization, the Jeffersonian Project, which can (and does) lobby more openly. 

This complicated collage of local, state, and federal laws means that a lot of activity—from ALEC, ACCE, and other, lesser-known interest groups—falls through the cracks. What’s worse, even properly reported lobbying can be tough to monitor. Following the death of the local paper, people receive little help in keeping tabs on their local governments—unless, of course, you’re a public affairs professional (or a lobbyist) with access to cutting-edge and costly local policy tracking software. 

When it comes to local lobbying, this ease of concealment was at one point outweighed by the difficulty of reaching hundreds, if not thousands of discrete municipal government bodies. Decentralization used to cut both ways: Corporate interests could target local officials to evade state lobbying schemes, but only with a lot of money and time. Rather than meet with a handful of representatives, lobbyists had to convince city and county governments piecemeal to elect business-friendly officials or enact ordinances protecting corporate interests.

Technology is starting to erode these practical safeguards. 

“It is easier to lobby municipalities than it’s ever been. Anybody could do it,” said Tierney, citing social media and videoconferencing as means by which an out-of-town lobbyist can reach voters in towns across the country without ever leaving their corner office. 

So, as local governments become more powerful, corporate interests are motivated to exert a stronger influence at the community level, with assistance from the rise in remote communication. Due to the lack of a legal infrastructure to enforce transparency and accountability standards against municipal officials, residents are ill-equipped to stop a takeover. 

How, then, do we save local governments from becoming just another tool of corporate political influence? 

Stripping municipalities of home rule authority—making them less powerful and therefore less attractive targets for corporate lobbying in the first place—is one possible solution, but Tierney said the genie is out of the bottle. People have begun to rely on their local governments to meet a wider range of political and social needs, and it’s unlikely that municipalities will be willing to give up that authority, either. 

“I think, if you want a prediction, [municipal governments] will increasingly ignore state restrictions,” said Tierney. 

For the most part, then, the responsibility falls on self-motivated residents to monitor their government officials.

To help, some transparency watchdogs have introduced innovative tools to help community members determine the sources of their local laws. In 2011, the Sunlight Foundation introduced Superfastmatch, open-source software that analyzes and compares bill texts to track similar legislation from one legislature to another, revealing when passed or proposed policies come from ACCE, ALEC, or other outside drafters. The organization closed its doors in September 2020, but the program is still seemingly available online. 

Also in 2011, the Center for Media and Democracy launched ALEC Exposed, a wiki with information about ALEC’s bills, members, policy priorities, and more, intended to help citizens “understand the depth and breadth of how big corporations are changing the legal rules and undermining democracy across the nation.” ALEC Exposed includes some limited information on ACCE, which is listed on the site as one of ALEC’s “task forces”; curious citizens can search the site for bill text and titles to determine whether ALEC or ACCE was behind a particular initiative.  

People can also support nonprofits that foster the development of local journalism, such as the American Journalism Project, or even start their own local news organizations to shed light on local government goings-on. 

Legislative initiatives might include extending state lobbying disclosure requirements to apply to local governments, possibly in combination with establishing a nationwide ethics standard to prevent individual states from becoming “lobbying havens.”

Still, monitoring is only half the battle—and with organizations like ACCE and ALEC working against reform, passing laws will be far from easy. 

“We have to start with the problem and then use all the tools you’ve got—state, local,” said Tierney. 

Consequently, a crucial element of any reform agenda is to vote in local elections for candidates you trust, and encourage your friends and neighbors to do the same. Voter turnout for municipal elections is dangerously low—just 27 percent on average, and even less in minority and low-income communities—meaning a single vote really can make all the difference.

Use that increased leverage to exercise, in the words of law professors Benjamin Sachs at Harvard and Kate Andrias at Columbia, “countervailing power” that works against the outsized influence of wealth on politics. Start by building coalitions in your community—in the form of neighborhood associations, community arts and cultural groups, and other political and apolitical grassroots organizations—to mobilize and amplify a diversity of local voices across class, race, and geography. 

Together, demand a more responsive and truly democratic system of municipal government. Corporate influence may be more difficult to detect at the local level, but buy-in from even a few attentive community members can act as a potent defense.

Moreover, the effects of local advocacy can radiate far beyond city limits. As our state and federal governments confront existential threats like gun violence, climate change, and public health crises, robust multi-level cooperation and collaboration will be critical. Local governments have a lot to contribute to the larger fight.

“We have to start with the problem and then use all the tools you’ve got—state, local,” said Tierney. 

Better yet, make like my dad and run for office yourself at the local, state, or federal level. But first, take my grandmother’s advice: Make sure you know how to run a meeting.

* Note: In 2023, concerns were raised regarding Andre Cushing’s failure to recuse himself when voting on a lobbying contract with a firm with whom he had had a previous business relationship.  He did not respond to requests for comment regarding those concerns.