By BILL KNIGHT
For The Weekly Post
Three law professors who specialize in advocating for rural areas recently proposed ways the federal government could help non-metropolitan communities. And officials in The Weekly Post area generally agreed or thought their areas weren’t directly affected.
“Rural communities provide much of the food and energy that fuel our lives,” said Ann Eisenberg (University of South Carolina), Lisa Pruitt (University of California/Davis) and Jessica Shoemaker (University of Nebraska/Lincoln). “They are made up of people who, after decades of exploitative resource extraction and neglect, need strong connective infrastructure and opportunities to pursue regional prosperity.
“A lack of investment in broadband, schools, jobs, sustainable farms, hospitals, roads and even the U.S. Postal Service has increasingly driven rural voters to seek change from national politics,” they continued. “And this sharp hunger for change gave Trump’s promises to disrupt the status quo particular appeal in rural areas.”
However, little improved, they say, noting that urban dwellers frequently complain that the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College give sparsely populated states power unjustified by the number of citizens there.
“Yet that power has not steered enough resources, infrastructure investment and jobs to rural America for communities to survive and thrive,” the advocates said.
The trio suggested improving high-speed internet access; enacting aggressive government action like LBJ’s War on Poverty; providing financial assistance to local governments facing the fiscal effects of the pandemic (part of a stimulus proposal excluded from a final bill in December); stepping up antitrust enforcement in agriculture (8 percent of U.S. farms control 70 percent of the nation’s farmland, they say), and addressing racial disparities outside cities.
Ensuring better internet service is more vital for work, schools, health care and even recreation, they say. That need that may be less urgent in this area after Mid Century Communications greatly expanded fiberoptic service, “yet [nationally] 22.3 percent of rural residents and 27.7 percent of tribal-lands residents lacked access to high-speed internet as of 2018, compared with 1.5 percent of urban residents,” the scholars noted.
Apart from the COVID19 pandemic, local governments are coping with a fiscal crisis due to job loss and population decline, which mean less tax revenue to provide for everything from public health and code enforcement to garbage pickup.
“Federal institutions could help by expanding capacity-building programs, like Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) and Rural Economic Development loans and grants that let communities invest in long-term assets like street improvements and housing,” the three wrote.
The Western Illinois Regional Council helps communities submit CDBG and Rural Development grant applications for Fulton, Hancock, Henderson, Knox, McDonough and Warren Counties, mostly for water, sanitary and storm sewer upgrades, according to WIRC planning coordinator Josh Mercer.
“These grant funds are a lifeline for small communities, but they do not cover the design engineering and that can be a roadblock for rural villages,” Mercer tells The Weekly Post. “We’ve had many inquiries over the seven years I’ve been in planning from really small communities, but the cost of design is so expensive at times that they will table these projects due to a lack of funds.”
Matt Tonkin, Williamsfield Village President, says, “The cost of these things to a small municipality is very large perhead, and any help in these areas would be very welcome.”
A priority should be “infrastructure spending, such as roads, drainage, grading, sidewalks, public building upkeep, general maintenance,” he says. “I agree [on their ideas on] agriculture but feel that targets one part of the community. Broader infrastructure spending should be bi-partisan and wide-reaching.”
Besides existing CDBG possibilities, “USDA Rural Development is another source of grant funds for rural areas,” Mercer says.
“They offer many programs, but the one we get the most interest in is the Community Facilities program.
“Most of the applications we submit are for police vehicles, snowplows, storm sirens and the like,” he adds. “A lot of the communities in our part of the state have main street buildings in poor shape. We get a lot of requests from them for grants to fix up the facades or tear them down. Unfortunately, these do not exist.
“A community must be under a certain population to qualify,” he continues. “and there is a required match that can range from 25-85 percent depending on the communities’ median household income.”
That can be a doubleedged sword for towns that don’t qualify based on their incomes.
Calling for anti-monopoly enforcement to “rein in Big Agriculture,” the professors said “only 6 percent of rural people live in counties with economies that are farming dependent. Rural towns get less and less wealth.”
Consolidated corporate farms can result in less safe drinking water, lower incomes and greater income inequality, they said, and they’re unsure whether new USDA head Tom Vilsack is the change agent required.
“Former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack back in the same role he held in the Obama administration has cast doubt on whether [President] Biden is really committed to change,” they wrote. “Vilsack built a suspect record on racial equity and has spent the past four years as a marketing executive for big dairy, leading many to worry his leadership will result in ‘agribusiness as usual’.” (See box.)
As far as systemic racial issues, the professors say justice isn’t just a problem in cities.
“One in five rural residents are people of color, and they are two to three times more likely to be poor than rural whites,” they reported. “[Also,] more than 98 percent of U.S. agricultural land is owned by white people, while over 83 percent of farmworkers are Hispanic.”
Peoria County doesn’t want to serve the city at the expense of rural residents, says Peoria County Administrator Scott Sorrel.
“The County of Peoria is committed to addressing the social determinants of health throughout the county,” Sorrel says.
“This includes addressing poverty and racial disparities in the rural portions of our county.”
The three law professors said the bottom line for the U.S. government is to focus on the basics, as exemplified in efforts that came during the Great Depression.
“The greatest historic progress on rural poverty followed large-scale federal intervention via Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty,” they said. “A new federal antipoverty program could go a long way to improving rural quality of life. The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act targeted many of these issues.”
Such efforts created public jobs programs that helped conservation and school building repair, established relationships between universities and communities for agricultural and economic progress, improved federal funds for K-12 schools and made higher education more affordable, and expanded the social safety net to address hunger and other health needs, they added.
“It would be nice to see a large-scale federal program similar to the War on Poverty or the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal era,” Mercer says. “These projects could put rural people to work and upgrade the infrastructure of rural communities.”
Elmwood Economic Development Director Amy Davis said remnants of those endeavors still operate.
“We still see programs today from LBJ’s War on Poverty,” she says. “We benefit from Bright Futures program, for example. I am always excited when people are advocating for rural areas and would welcome the benefits that would come of that.”
BILL KNIGHT can be reached at bill.knight@hotmail.com
