he road from public ownership of a municipal water system to privatization is a one-way street paved with regret. Once public ownership is lost, it’s a rarity to recover control. Bolingbrook, Illinois, has been trying to for the last 15 years. Missoula, Montana, is one extraordinary success story, but it took sustained public support, political will across administrations, costly decades in the courts, and ultimately hardball tactics like the invocation of eminent domain.

In southern Illinois, an ad hoc people’s movement is going after government officials who are trying to smooth-talk residents toward the edge of the privatization bluff. Many Illinoisans, once they find out about the issue, are refusing to let corporations take control of their water and dole it out only on their terms. They’re storming into public meetings not with pitchforks but with insistent hard questions. They come armed with damning facts about backroom shenanigans gleaned from citizen-led scrutiny of public records requests, as well as relentless social media reminders that the smell of money is in the air — one man satirically called the attempted privatization of his town’s sewer a “Turd Tax.”

So far, they’ve flushed the threat.

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