Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, the group focused primarily on environmental health issues, including landfills, hazardous waste dumps, groundwater and wellfield protection, incinerators, pesticides, and especially, industrial pollution.

The Cincinnati ordinance became the model for laws the organization was able to pass in Akron, Cleveland, Columbus, Kent, Lancaster, Norwood, Oregon, and Toledo.

In the fall of 1985, Ohio Citizen Action and other groups across the country delivered more than a million petition signatures urging Congress to pass a strong bill.

The measure passed by a one-vote margin and included an important new component, the requirement that industries report the chemicals being used and stored at their facilities, and their emissions into the air, land, and water.

These campaigns combined community organizing, regional canvassing, direct negotiations with the company, and other techniques to cause major polluters to prevent pollution, according to former Executive Director Sandy Buchanan, “far beyond what federal or state regulations would require.” Such campaigns have involved neighbors of AK Steel, Middletown; Brush Wellman, Elmore; Columbus Steel Drum, Gahanna; DuPont, Washington, WV; Envirosafe Landfill, Oregon; Eramet, Marietta; FirstEnergy,[5] Northern Ohio; General Environmental Management, Cleveland; Georgia-Pacific, Columbus; Lanxess Plastics, Addyston; Mittal Steel, Cleveland; Perma-Fix, Dayton; PMC Specialties, Cincinnati; River Valley Schools, Marion; Rohm and Haas, Reading; Shelly Asphalt, Westerville; Stark County landfills; Sunoco Refinery, Oregon; Universal Purifying Technologies, Columbus; U.S. Coking Group, Oregon; Valleycrest Landfill, Dayton; Waste Technologies Industries hazardous waste incinerator, East Liverpool and Rumpke Sanitary Landfill, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Most groups in the coalition cited safety concerns and project mismanagement, but OPIC highlighted injustice to consumers who were paying Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) fees for a plant from which they had used no energy.

[8] By 1984, the Cincinnati Gas & Electric Company announced it would convert Zimmer to burn coal, instead of running the risk the plant would fail to secure a federal operating license after numerous cost overruns.

The group urged Governor Kasich to include language to repeal the oil and gas industry’s exemption from reporting hazardous chemicals directly to emergency planners and first responders.