In "Backroom Deals in our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back" (The New Press, 2025), Miranda S. Spivack follows five "accidental activists" in their yearslong struggles against corporate and government collusion, against the public interest, often in violation of law.
Spivack's accidental activists are residents of small to medium-size towns who found themselves harmed by or at risk from city, county, state and federal government actions and inactions, despite the law - or in spite of it. With their own lives and their neighbors' health at stake, a few stubborn citizens learned how to break open the black boxes in which governments and corporations hide their collusion.
In five concise chapters, Spivack shows how a few determined citizens shouldered their way through unresponsive - at times purposely neglectful - public officials, to rescue themselves and their neighbors from carcinogenic drinking water, sewer systems, "protective gear" and other hazards.
In Hoosick Falls, New York (pop. 3,150), Michael Hickey, an insurance man, was disturbed that his father had died prematurely of cancer. He suspected that carcinogens in the drinking water came from local factories churning out plastics and Teflon, though the village advertised itself as having "New York's Best-Tasting Water." Spivack chronicles Hickey's yearslong struggle to pry loose what should have been public information, and the resulting multimillion-dollar class-action settlement.
In Worcester, Massachusetts (pop. 208,000), Diane Cotter's husband, Paul, contracted prostate cancer after working for 28 years as a firefighter. With no training in public-health law, Diane found that "the federal and state governments and industry were working together to set standards for firefighters' gear, but had allowed the manufacturers to conceal known risks."
Diane found cancer clusters among firefighters, which the manufacturing industry, with state and federal approval, attributed to smoke - not to manufacturers' faulty equipment. As in Hoosick Falls, tests, when finally conducted, found outsize levels of "forever chemicals," PFAs, (perfluoroalkyl and perfluoralkyl) "that can be found in nearly every waterproof item and in Teflon."
In Bannockburn, Maryland (pop. 4,300), a suburb of Bethesda, Richard Boltuck warned local officials and the state that someone would die unless they put a left-turn signal on River Road. But the state wanted traffic to flow faster to and from Washington, D.C. , on that four-lane highway.
Boltuck knew that students at the high school, including his daughter, took that left turn five days a week, into fast oncoming traffic, to get to class on time. Eight years after Boltuck began his lonely crusade to get accident information about that left turn, a mother, father and son were killed there, and their daughter seriously injured, by a moron driving 155 miles an hour in the other direction.
Before the deaths, Maryland refused to release the information it had collected, which should have been public. It wrote to Bolduck: "Disclosure of the accident, traffic and study date is against the public interest because it would deter SHA [the Maryland State Highway Administration] from seeking important and valuable information, related to traffic accidents and signalization or because it could be used to attempt to discover SHA's thought process in taking or choosing not to take action as part of SHA's ongoing and systematic hazard elimination program."
Spivack does not raise the question, but I will: Maryland state officials did not want their "thought process" discovered? Geez, I wonder what else is not in there - if anything.
It took nearly a decade to get that simple road sign installed.
Spivack's fourth chapter, "Toxic Brew, Concealed Deals," reveals the immense harm that government and corporate secrecy and lies wrought upon the mostly Black residents of Uniontown, Alabama (pop. 2,100), allowing a dysfunctional sewer system to poison the town's drinking water - which came out brown from the tap.
I have covered government and corporate abuses for 40 years, but seldom have I read such a solid, unemotional, fact-based report, so sharply written that it made me want to vomit.
Spivack has written an excellent book. I do not have the heart to summarize her chapter about Uniontown. It needs to be read at length. If you have the heart, or stomach, for it.
Spivack's final two, short chapters offer resources for accidental activists. Even more valuable are her 336 footnotes to 174 pages of text, with citations to thousands of pages of court rulings, lawsuits and government documents.
If you can get them. If the Supreme Court lets you see them.
Source: Courthouse News Service
