Protesters on Village Hill, activists at City Council meetings, and writers of multiple Gazette op-eds and letters have all sought in the last few months to push military contractor L3Harris out of Northampton. They are convinced of their good sense and moral rectitude, and the recent candidate forums have shown that many Northampton politicians, including three of the four mayoral candidates, are supporting them.
This is nonsense. The protesters are wrong. The supporting politicians are irresponsible.
Consider first the protesters. Their core participants from Demilitarize Western Mass define themselves as “a collective of antiwar, anti-imperialist, abolitionist activists confronting the military-industrial complex.” They certainly take their stance with fervor, but a small group with a bucket of fake blood in Northampton is not a convincing case for a veto over the decisions on military or foreign affairs made by elected officials in Washington.
Claiming to stake out a demilitarized part of the country is also just freeloading on national defense or NIMBYing your way out of military facilities. Aren’t these obligations that we share with the country as a whole?
There is in fact no local ordinance as sought by the protesters — and as supported by Mayor Gina Louise Sciarra — that would ever have any teeth to stop a military facility or military contractor from coming into town. This is not a statement about the abuse of power by the lawless man in the White House, but about the established power of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The protesters’ fury at the L3Harris employees is also way off base. Look, L3Harris making periscopes on Village Hill is not IG Farben using slave labor in service to the Nazis and knowingly making Zyklon B for the gas chambers at Auschwitz. There is no equivalency, and none of the 300 or so employees at L3Harris in Northampton is going to end up guilty of crimes against humanity … other than in the muddled minds of the protesters.
The biggest stretch of all, though, is the charge that L3Harris makes Northampton a target in a nuclear war.
This was the focus of a Gazette op-ed last week and came up as well in the candidate forum. It really should not be a factor. Northampton will not be fine in any nuclear war, but Kim Jong Un or Russian ICBMs would in any case aim at America’s counter-strike capabilities and points of maximum damage, and not at a small city with a small plant on the supply chain.
Here’s a more realistic fear: L3Harris says enough with this crazy town, picks up stakes, and Northampton loses 300 high-wage manufacturing jobs, loses the multiplier effects that the local economy derives from this income, and loses the significant property tax revenue and all the teachers and other public services that that money supports.
It is shocking to me that any Northampton elected official or city administrator would be willing to accept this loss. Mayor Clare Higgins certainly didn’t. She was the Northampton mayor in 2011 when Kollmorgen (later acquired by L3Harris) outgrew the property on King Street where it had been since 1951. Rather than see the city’s largest industrial employer go elsewhere, Higgins supported the changes to the Village Hill master plan that made the site available to Kollmorgen and the tax increment financing deal that encouraged the company to take it.
The irresponsibility of so many of today’s local elected officials and candidates goes even deeper. Complicity of city officials in seeking to push a big business out of town could lead credit rating agencies to question the city’s management and consequently to lower our vaunted credit rating. It could also expose the city to a wildly expensive lawsuit.
Here’s a case to keep in mind: Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College. A 2016 shoplifting and assault incident led to Oberlin College students protesting against the local bakery and accusing it of racial discrimination. Various college faculty and administrators then jumped on the bandwagon and so fanned the anti-Gibson’s flames, that the bakery sued the college for engaging in tortious interference of business and for defaming the owners and employees. The college lost, and after running through subsequent appeals, it ended up paying Gibson’s Bakery $36.59 million — an amount that the college’s insurance companies refused to cover.
If the anti-L3Harris sentiments expressed at the candidate forums ever became the city’s clear and official policy, then it would not be tough to see the City of Northampton in the role of Oberlin College and L3Harris following the Gibson’s Bakery approach of suing for
tortious interference of business.
I hope that elected officials and candidates will take this to heart. I hope too that the L3Harris protesters will forego the theatrics and try to make their case more sensibly to federal officials through well-reasoned arguments. I’m not holding my breath on that on
Marc Warner lives in Northampton.