Message Guides & Toolkits
Overall Message Guides
These message frames, addendums to Connecting the Dots: How to Message the Abuse of State Preemption, are designed to help you talk about preemption through different lenses and to different audiences.
Home rule reform, like abusive preemption, can be difficult to explain – even if you’re doing this work day-in and day-out. That’s why our national table is releasing new message guidance to help advocates make the case for home rule reform and move people to action. This guidance is meant to help you explain what home rule reform is and why action is urgently needed now.
This guide reflects the latest messaging for how to talk about the abuse of state preemption and how many elected officials use preemption to entrench inequities and take power away from people and communities.
The Local Solutions Support Center has designed a toolkit to help organizers understand what public health authority preemption looks like and how to talk about it in a way that’s both accessible to broader audiences, and effective.
Issue-Specific Preemption Guides
Advocates and local elected officials are confronting preemption across a staggering number of issues. In response, LSSC has created a toolkit to meet the growing and urgent demand for messaging, media, legal, and research resources specific to certain types of preemption. These issue-specific preemption guides serve as a one-stop-shop for the best high-level resources associated with individual issue areas commonly preempted.
The reality is that the national cable and telephone companies behind these laws banning or limiting municipal broadband are focused on maximizing their short-term revenues.
Schools are at the heart of our local communities, but legislation now being enacted allows states to dictate what can or cannot be taught in the classroom – decisions that are currently and rightfully made at the local level in communities where students live.
Most Americans can agree that for democracy to work for everyone, it must include everyone.
The speed and scale of this lobbying effort shows how alarmed the gas industry is by the efforts of cities, states, businesses to sharply reduce fossil fuel use.
By preempting a city’s power to increase wages and failing to raise the minimum wage at the state level, state lawmakers have made it difficult for workers in the lowest-paying jobs to support their families.
None of us should be forced to choose between taking care of a loved one or losing our jobs -- but that’s exactly what too many people had to do during the pandemic.
The right to dissent is fundamentally American and core to our values. Protests are inextricably tied to some of our most consequential moments and movements in American history.
Cities and municipalities have the right to enact local policies that protect the health, safety, and well-being of the people who live and work within their communities - and that includes immigrants.
The volume of housing preemption that occurred in the years before the pandemic left many local governments unable to respond to the ongoing public health crisis and uneven economic recovery
A supermajority of Americans support measures protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination – including majorities in every single state. But that hasn’t stopped some state legislatures from singling out LGBTQ people.
Local control over local budgets is essential – it ensures that local elected officials can respond to the unique needs and concerns of their communities and enact measures that protect the health, safety, and well-being of their constituents.
By redistributing public health decision making power around COVID to state governments, these preemption measures are setting a new and dangerous precedent, where local governments will continue to be stripped of their authority to make any public health decisions for their own communities.