Rural News
Virginia primes itself for a tax experiment in rural areas
The Roanoke Times | Posted on March 28, 2018The General Assembly has passed — and sent to Gov. Ralph Northam for his signature — a bill by Del. Will Morefield, R-Tazewell (with help from state Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County) that offers a seven-year tax break to companies that locate in certain economically-distressed localities and create a certain number of jobs (the number varies depending on the investment). The list of those eligible includes much of Southwest and Southside Virginia, along with many localities along the Chesapeake Bay. The General Assembly also passed a bill by state Sen. Ben Chafin, R-Russell County, that allows localities to declare closed schools to be a “revitalization zone” whereby it can waive certain local taxes and fees. The idea is that these buildings could become incubators for small businesses. Here’s where we get the potential trifecta of tax breaks: There are some localities in Southwest Virginia (and likely elsewhere) that can qualify for all three. Imagine a locality that’s eligible for certain tax breaks under Morefield’s bill. It’s also likely eligible for certain tax breaks under the federal tax bill. And if it has an old school sitting empty, it can declare that a “revitalization zone” under Chafin’s bill — which means an entrepreneur setting up shop there could qualify for yet a third set of tax breaks.
Food stamps cuts will hit rural America the hardest
Daily Yonder | Posted on March 28, 2018n Owsley County, a 200-square-mile patch of eastern Kentucky, Trump’s victory was propelled by a full 80 percent of the vote—an unsurprising outcome, perhaps, for a county seated in a congressional district that has elected and re-elected Republican representative Hal Rogers by similar margins since 1980. And it might have been equally unsurprising that, when President Trump unveiled his proposed budget for 2019, Rogers was silent on its 10-year $213 billion cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps), if not for one thing: nearly half of Owsley County households, and well over a quarter of those in Rogers’ district at large, rely on SNAP to make ends meet. But we still don’t understand some basic facts about the people and the places that make up rural America. This is partially attributable to the destructive cultural and political narratives that tell us programs like SNAP are not a rural issue. The roots of the racist Reagan-era rhetoric on inner city “welfare queens” run deep, and despite being long debunked, one needs to look no further than President Trump’s welfare reform proposals or Speaker Paul Ryan’s comment about the tailspin of “inner-city culture” to know that its legacy lives on. This explains how someone like Hal Rogers can so casually and routinely dismiss the basic needs of such a large segment of his constituency without fear of political blowback or consequence: prevailing perceptions of who relies on America’s social safety net and why have rendered these needs largely invisible. Sixteen percent of households in small towns and rural areas are using SNAP, compared to only thirteen percent of households in urban areas. Though striking, these averages don’t fully convey the critical role that SNAP plays in many rural communities across the country. Our analysis shows that of the 50 counties with the highest household SNAP usage, all but two of them are rural. When we looked at the 150 counties with the highest household SNAP usage, we found that a full 136 are rural.
Opportunity Zones might unblock rural America's potential
Index Journal | Posted on March 28, 2018Buried more than 300 pages into the late December tax overhaul signed by President Donald Trump is what some officials think might be a route to economic prosperity for rural America. A community development program written into the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, these so-called “Opportunity Zones” are designed to encourage long-term private investments in low-income areas by providing federal tax incentives. South Carolina is among the first states in the country to submit a list of designees to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, offering 135 such zones — with at least one in each county. Under guidelines of the program, states can identify 25 percent of their low-income Census tracts for inclusion as an “Opportunity Zone.” Anything that local governments can do to facilitate local businesses and encourage private investment into low-to-moderate income areas is always a positive thing. Our recent designation shows how local long-range planning and cooperation between various agencies sets us above other communities in the designation process.
FCC set to waste billions on the wrong rural broadband providers
Daily Yonder | Posted on March 28, 2018Rural communities have already proven that cooperatives are the way to get good, fast Internet access to underserved areas. So why are AT&T and other big corporations in line to get $2.5 billion in government funding to reach customers – again. The Connect America Fund is the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) effort to connect the unconnected, mostly by throwing billions of dollars to the companies that have most resisted investing in rural areas. AT&T, alone, is getting $2.5 billion over six years from this fund to invest in obsolete connections too slow to meet the FCC’s definition of broadband. Since the creation of the Connect America Fund during President Obama’s first term, its funding schemes and disbursements have disproportionately supported big monopolies over local cooperatives that offer superior services.
Domestic Migration and Fewer Births Reshaping America
University of New Hampshire, Carsey School | Posted on March 28, 2018New Census Bureau data released on March 22, 2018, demonstrate the continuing influence of domestic migration on U.S. demographic trends. Migration patterns are reverting to those common before the recession. Suburban counties of large metropolitan areas, smaller metropolitan areas, and rural counties proximate to metropolitan areas all gained more domestic migrants in the last year. In contrast, domestic migration losses grew in the core counties of metropolitan areas of 1 million or more and remained substantial in rural counties that are not adjacent to an urban area.
Rural Counties Are Making a Comeback, Census Data Shows
Pew Charitable Trust | Posted on March 28, 2018Some long-declining small towns and farming and manufacturing counties are adding people as population growth in large cities cools, according to a Stateline analysis of census estimates released Thursday. “This seems to be the beginning of a return to population dispersal after a decade or so of clustering into cities and the biggest metropolitan areas,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. Steady improvement in the economy and recovering housing markets may be prompting employers and job seekers to look again at areas that were growing before the Great Recession — suburbs, exurbs and small towns, Frey said.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch growing rapidly, study shows
Science Daily | Posted on March 28, 2018A new study shows that 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic weighing 80,000 metric tons are currently afloat in an area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- and the problem is rapidly getting worse.
Direct evidence of exposure of pregnant women to Glyphosphate
Science Daily | Posted on March 28, 2018The first birth cohort study of its kind has found more than 90 percent of a group of pregnant women in Central Indiana had detectable levels of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, the most heavily used herbicide worldwide. Researchers from Indiana University and University of California San Francisco reported that the glyphosate levels correlated significantly with shortened pregnancy lengths.
How some rural hospitals were used to score huge paydays
CBS | Posted on March 27, 2018As many Americans struggle to pay rising health insurance premiums, a CBS News investigation has uncovered a scheme that could make those premiums go even higher. It raises costs for insurers, who could then pass the increase along to you. Jorge Perez is CEO of Empower Group, a Miami-based healthcare company that claims to specialize in saving rural hospitals."We've gone to these towns and basically some of them we bought out of bankruptcy or they were just days before closing," Perez said.But one of the hospitals Perez promised to save in the Florida panhandle is now shut down and boarded up. We spoke to attorney Michelle Jordan who represents that hospital, Campbellton-Graceville, which was days away from closing when Perez and his partners swooped in. We asked if she wondered, what was in it for them? Perez's associates agreed to pay off the hospital's debt and manage it for a fee of $30,000 a month. Jordan begged the board not to sign, but she says they wanted to keep the hospital open. It did, thanks in part to deals Perez made with drug testing laboratories all over the country.To keep rural hospitals in business, insurance companies reimburse them for tests at much higher rates. A lab in Dallas might get $200 for a urine screen. The same test billed through a rural hospital could be more than $1,000. That explains why Perez struck deals with dozens of labs around the country to pass their testing through Campbellton-Graceville, and their billing along with it."I can tell you what was actually funneled through the facility, and that was over $120 million in about 14 months," Jordan said. "It sounds too good to be true."
The Great Puerto Rico Doglift
Village Voice | Posted on March 26, 2018The Sato Project is working to rescue Puerto Rico’s street dogs for U.S. adoptions — and to reunite them with their storm evacuee families. Puerto Rico has had a stray dog problem for so long that the animals have become part of the island’s cultural landscape. But while many of the dogs in the airlift were mixed-breed satos — rescued from the street, the beach, parking lots, or major roads — others had recently lost their homes when their owners fled the island after Hurricane Maria and were forced to leave their pets behind. “It’s a public health crisis,” says Chrissy Beckles, founder of the Sato Project, a nonprofit dedicated to rescuing abused and abandoned dogs in Puerto Rico. “If nothing is done about it, it will continue to escalate.”