Who is “Opelika’s Smart Grid” and the Concerned Citizens of Opelika?
Stop the Cap! has researched both “groups” and discovered they are essentially one and the same. Some of the members of “Concerned Citizens” are also the authors, and primary participants on “The Opelika Smart Grid” website. They are strongly anti-government, and their opposition to municipal services borders at times on the paranoid. Neither group has more than a handful of loosely-associated members, but they do bring along those who share a common, mostly Libertarian/anti-government philosophy. Think “tea parties against municipal broadband.” Domain name records show the website was first registered July 4th, 2010 by William Mayfield who lives on 9th Street in Opelika. Mayfield’s concern about the project’s capability to deliver “smart grid” technology to the local electricity provider prompted him to launch into some pretty far-out conspiracy theories about the implications of the project (taken from Google web cache): The so-called smart-grid is a government controlled power and i
