Ohio Citizen Action

Ohio Citizen Action is Ohio’s largest environmental organization, with a focus on environmental health. The organization was founded in Cleveland in 1975 as the Ohio Public Interest Campaign, a coalition of union, senior citizen, church, and community organizations. Responding to a wave of factory closings in Northeast Ohio, the coalition proposed state legislation to require advance notice to employees before a closing (1977). The Ohio legislature balked, so U.S. Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH) sponsored it as a federal bill. It became federal law in 1988.

Based in Cleveland, Ohio Citizen Action recruits members and conducts issue campaigns with door-to-door canvass staffs and organizers in Cleveland and Cincinnati, and a telephone canvass staff in Cleveland. Rachael Belz of Cincinnati is its Executive Director. The President of the Ohio Citizen Action Board of Directors is Dr. Anne Wise of Cleveland. The President of the organization's research and education affiliate, Ohio Citizen Action Education Fund, is Dr. Richard Wittberg of Marietta.

The organization has increasingly focused on environmental health issues, including landfills, hazardous waste dumps, groundwater and wellfield protection, incinerators, pesticides, and especially, industrial pollution.

In 1980, Ohio Citizen Action, working with allies in neighborhoods, firefighters, and labor unions, began a contentious two-year campaign that passed a Cincinnati toxic chemical right-to-know ordinance over the opposition of Procter & Gamble and the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce. The Cincinnati ordinance became the model for laws the organization was able to pass in Akron, Cleveland, Columbus, Kent, Lancaster, Norwood, Oregon, and Toledo.

In the fall of 1985, Ohio Citizen Action and other groups across the country delivered more than a million petition signatures urging Congress to pass a strong bill. The measure passed by a one-vote margin, and included an important new component, the requirement that industries report the chemicals being used and stored at their facilities, and their emissions into the air, land, and water. That was the birth, in 1986, of the Toxics Release Inventory.

Since then, Ohio Citizen Action has used the Toxic Release Inventory as the basis for “good neighbor campaigns” with polluting companies. These campaigns combine community organizing, regional canvassing, direct negotiations with the company, and other techniques to cause major polluters to prevent pollution, according to former Executive Director Sandy Buchanan, “far beyond what federal or state regulations would require.”

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