Dear Colorado Progressive Coalition Members & Friends:

The Rolling Stones have Mick Jagger, The Supremes had Diana Ross, and U2 has Bono.  CPC has Margaret Montano Mora, our very own rock star.  Margaret is CPC's Pueblo-based Southern Colorado Regional Director and an organizer second to none who, this Thursday, celebrated a major environmental justice organizing victory in Pueblo.

For the past 13 months, Margaret has worked with the residents of Pueblo's tiny Peppersauce Bottoms neighborhood, a low-income and hard working community fighting against LB Foster, a Pittsburgh, PA based corporation with $390 million in sales in 2006.  Thanks to lax environmental enforcement by former Colorado Governor Bill Owens's administration, an LB Foster facility operated in the Peppersauce Bottoms neighborhood for seven years without an important pollution control permit.  Meanwhile, neighbors worried about contamination of water flowing through their neighborhood, air pollution, and unbearable noise coming from the plant.

Thanks to Margaret's work with great Peppersauce Bottoms neighbors - and CPC members - like Teresa Almeda and Gloria and Jose Cornejo - and environmental enforcement action taken by new Governor Bill Ritter's administration, LB Foster announced this week that it would be closing its facility in the neighborhood.  Peppersauce Bottoms neighbors are now celebrating this rare victory for environmental justice, although they know that this is just a first big step forward to cleaning up their polluted neighborhood.

CPC works on issues that make a difference in peoples' lives.  We do so to build a more progressive future for Colorado and to help people gain a sense of the power that they have to make changes.  As Jose Cornejo said in a Pueblo Chieftain article spotlighting this victory (link below), "This gives our family hope that we don't have to live that way any more.  Hopefully this land can be used for something good for the community."

Click here to see the environmental justice victory article in The Pueblo Chieftain (11/2/07)
http://www.chieftain.com/metro/1194016732/7

Click here to read a Pueblo Chieftain article giving background to this fight (July 12, 2007)
http://www.progressivecoalition.org/Pueblo5398.htm

This victory is rare and a true David v. Goliath struggle.  CPC does not accept direct corporate or government support in order to maintain our independence and take on the right fights for progressive social change.  We hope that you, too, will join in our work.

If you like the work that CPC does, we count on you.  Please click here www.progressivecoalition.org/join.htm to renew your membership or to become a member today.  Thank you!

In peace,

Bill Vandenberg
Executive Director