# American City County Exchange (ACCE) The **local-government extension** of [[ALEC]] — a project (not a separate corporation) launched in 2014 to bring the ALEC model-legislation template to city councils, county commissions, mayors, and local school boards across the United States. ## Founding context ACCE was launched in 2014, the year following ALEC's 2012–13 corporate-exodus crisis over Stand Your Ground and voter-ID legislation. The founding was a strategic expansion response: with state-level brand exposure proving costly, ALEC extended its reach to the local level where scrutiny is substantially lower and where — critically — progressive cities had been passing minimum-wage increases, paid-sick-leave ordinances, plastic-bag bans, and local environmental rules that ALEC's state-level preemption models were designed to cancel out. ## Operational model Identical to ALEC's state model, scaled down: - Local elected officials (mayors, council members, county commissioners, school-board members) join as legislator-members - Corporate and trade-association members pay higher dues and sit jointly with local officials on policy committees - ACCE produces model ordinances — the local-government equivalent of ALEC's model bills - Officials take these ordinances home and introduce them at council and commission meetings ## Policy focus ACCE's output has concentrated on: - **Municipal deregulation** (zoning, permitting, regulatory rollback) - **Labor preemption** (blocking local minimum-wage and paid-sick-leave ordinances where state preemption is not yet in place) - **Public employee benefit reform** (pension, healthcare, union-dues restrictions) - **Education** (charter-school authorization, school-board governance changes) - **Opposition to municipal broadband** (coordinated with ALEC's state-level Communications task force) ## Organizational status ACCE is not incorporated separately. It operates as a task-force-style program of ALEC. Its finances are inside ALEC's 501(c)(3) filings. This structural choice keeps overhead low and avoids a separate disclosure footprint. ## See Also - [[ALEC]] — Parent organization - [[Jeffersonian Project]] — Sister 501(c)(4) - [[ALEC Ecosystem]] — Full ecosystem map