New (sub)-California secession movement rises in exurban Sacramento

Eric Ting reports for the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline,  'This state is under tyranny': Scenes from California's latest secession movement.  Some excerpts follow:  

Sharon Durst, leader of the secessionist El Dorado state movement, knows people don't take attempts like hers seriously. Past efforts to split rural California counties off from the rest of the state have accomplished little beyond inspiring ridicule — which the former rancher, now in her 80s, experienced directly as an early supporter of the infamous state of Jefferson.

But Durst also knows that something has to change, if rural counties like El Dorado are going to have a fair say in how they’re governed. On July 10, she and former county Supervisor Ray Nutting co-hosted a town hall to explain to their neighbors why the solution is peeling the county off from California and forming a new state.

It’s true that California has a unique problem of representation in state government. No state in the country has fewer state legislators per capita; the problem is especially stark in rural areas like El Dorado County, population 192,000. In the state Senate, El Dorado is represented by a legislator who also represents voters in 12 other counties; in the state Assembly, the county is split between two legislators, each responsible for voters across several counties, with widely diverging industries and demographics. Not one of the three legislators responsible for representing El Dorado County actually lives there.

The story features a long quote from Professor Isaac Hale of Occidental College, who teaches politics: 

This has long been an ongoing problem in California politics.  There are nearly 500,000 Californians per assemblymember and a million Californians per state senator, and that’s pretty out of whack.

You could double the size of the Assembly, and we’d still have the highest number of people represented by district.  And there are serious consequences to this.

Ting explains the consequences for rural folks in the Golden State:  they feel disenfranched--disenfranchised enough to show up at long town halls to talk about secession.  That said, Ting reports that 25 people showed up for a July 10 gathering held by Durst and Nutting.  And that doesn't sound like a very robust group in the context of a county with nearly 200K residents.  Also, interestingly, the meeting was held at a Raley's Supermarket in El Dorado Hills--the posh planned community at the western edge of the county, just over the Sacramento County line.  In other words, El Dorado Hills is the part of the county one would expect to be least amenable to a secession movement.  (Here is a prior post about El Dorado Hills as magnet for Bay Area migrants during the pandemic.)  Still, here is Ting's description of the crowd: 

The political leanings of those in attendance were on full display. One attendee wore a shirt that helpfully defined the word “patriot.” Another wore a shirt reading “Save the Children” on the front and “WE RIDE AT DAWN” in all caps on the back. Durst’s introduction was punctuated by audience member comments, including “California is red, we all know it,” and “Trump won.” When she mentioned that a reporter was in the audience, the room broke out into groans, like someone had just offered the restive crowd Bud Light from the supermarket outside the meeting room.

Here's what Ting has to say about the current movement's approach to change, including its legal theory: 

Durst and Nutting concede California lawmakers would never go along with it, so Durst is gambling on what she described as a “backdoor” maneuver to go to Congress directly.

In a 7,000-word Substack post published in May, Durst argues that El Dorado County is technically not a legitimate piece of California and is instead “other property” of Congress (though she cites no legal scholars or historians who have promulgated this view). Therefore, she wrote, Congress alone could vote to turn El Dorado County into El Dorado state, without California’s approval.

Durst refused to discuss procedural steps at the meeting. Ting quotes her:

To try to speculate, ‘What if this? What if that? Blah blah blah?’ No. You know what? We’re going to just move forward, do our thing, hope for the best and see where the people take it.

Durst was also uninterested in alternative paths to improve rural representation, including those that might garner bipartisan support because they also afflict metropolitan areas.  Professor Hale provided this illustration as an urban counterpart to what is annoying this small band of folks in El Dorado County: 

Consider Mia Bonta’s East Bay Assembly district.  Why are wealthy homeowners in Piedmont linked with renters in east and west Oakland? They have wildly different interests, and you could make the argument that they each should have their own form of representation. This is a systemic problem.

The story closes with this quote from Durst:  

I’m not going to petition anyone in California. I’m going to absolutely ignore California, as if there’s a barrier between our border and California.

Don't miss this entire, deeply reported San Francisco Chronicle story, not least for its rich descriptions of some other El Dorado County residents who attended the meeting, as well as a bit of backstory on Nutting. (Read more here from a 2014 court adjudication against him).  

Prior posts about secession from California are here, here, here (featuring many photos, including one taken in El Dorado County), here, here (speaking specifically to representation issues, from 2015), here (based on a story in Harper's Magazine), here (comparing the State of Jefferson movement to the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia), and here (reporting on a 2018 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that rejected a legal theory that Californians are underrepresented because of the too-small size of the late legislative body).  Another post regarding frustration over lack of representation, this one out of Siskiyou County in the traditional State of Jefferson territory, is here.

Other posts featuring El Dorado County more generally are here (coronavirus pandemic), here (a food sovereignty movement post from 2012), here (suburban sprawl), and here (resisting the siting of a Dollar General Store).   This is about a Tea Party Meeting in the county in 2012.  This, also from 2012, features a campaign sign for a member of the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors that uses the slogan "Protecting Rural Values."). Another 2012 photo from El Dorado County is here--this one of a sign advertising a Gold Prospecting Summit at the county fairgrounds. 

Posts about other proposals to divide California are here and here.  

How Oklahoma prison gangs use rurality to conceal crimes, hide bodies

Hannah Allam writes for the Washington Post under the headline, "Missing people, buried bones at center of Oklahoma mystery." The story is out of Logan County, Oklahoma, population 41,848, where "a dozen or more people...have disappeared in recent years from the wooded, unincorporated terrain outside the Oklahoma City metro area, a rural haven for drug traffickers."  Violent "white-supremacist prison gangs are suspected."

Acting on a tip this spring, authorities "found charred piles of wood and bone on a five-acre patch of Logan County."

[Logan County Sheriff Damon] Devereaux considers himself a stickler for policing that prioritizes constitutional rights. So, he said, when he first noticed the compound “getting fortified with metal 10-foot fencing and iron gates,” he was suspicious but had no probable cause to investigate.

Allam then includes this vivid quote from Devereaux:   

We’re a county that likes to burn our trash, shoot our guns and drink our beer. And that’s kind of what we embrace in Oklahoma, the freedom to do all that.  There’s a lot of people who move out there to be left alone.

I think that could be said of lots of rural places.  A few other posts about the use of rural spatiality to conceal are here, here. and here. 

How the rural-urban split is putting the United States' democracy at risk

David Leonhardt's "Democracy Challenged:  Twin Threats to Governing Ideals Put America in Uncharted Territory" appeared on the front page of the New York Times over the weekend.  I'm highlighting here just the references Leonhardt makes to rural America, explicit or implicit.   

The economic frustrations and cultural fears have combined to create a chasm in American political life, between prosperous, diverse major metropolitan areas and more traditional, religious and economically struggling smaller cities and rural areas. The first category is increasingly liberal and Democratic, the second increasingly conservative and Republican.

* * *

The Senate today is split 50-50 between the two parties. But the 50 Democratic senators effectively represent 186 million Americans, while the 50 Republican senators effectively represent 145 million. 

* * * 

This similarity meant that the small-state bonus in the Senate and Electoral College had only a limited effect on national results. Both Democrats and Republicans benefited, and suffered, from the Constitution’s undemocratic features.

Democrats sometimes won small states like Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming in the mid-20th century. And California was long a swing state: Between the Great Depression and 2000, Democratic and Republican presidential candidates won it an equal number of times. That the Constitution conferred advantages on residents of small states and disadvantages on Californians did not reliably boost either party.

More than a decade ago, I published an article discussing some of these issues, in particular those observed in the first paragraph above.  It was titled The Geography of the Class Culture Wars.  

New York Times on falling child poverty rates, including in rural America

Jason DeParle reported earlier this week for the New York Times on recent drops in child poverty, due largely to the government safety net, in particular SNAP (formerly food stamps) and tax credits (including the Earned Income Tax Credit or EITC).  DeParle reports from three locales, depicting three racial groups. The first, which I'll focus on here because it is the most rural, is a white family in Marlinton, West Virginia, population 1405, in the eastern, Appalachian, coal-producing part of the state.  What follows gives the big picture on the drop in child poverty:

A comprehensive new analysis shows that child poverty has fallen 59 percent since 1993, with need receding on nearly every front. Child poverty has fallen in every state, and it has fallen by about the same degree among children who are white, Black, Hispanic and Asian, living with one parent or two, and in native or immigrant households. Deep poverty, a form of especially severe deprivation, has fallen nearly as much.

In 1993, nearly 28 percent of children were poor, meaning their households lacked the income the government deemed necessary to meet basic needs. By 2019, before temporary pandemic aid drove it even lower, child poverty had fallen to about 11 percent.

And here's part of the vignette out of Marlinton, WV:  

To see how the safety net protects children, consider the experience of Stacy Tallman, a mother of three in Marlinton, W.Va., who was working as a waitress last year when her teenage son, Jakob, suffered serious injuries in a car accident. Both Ms. Tallman and her partner, who has a maintenance job, missed work to care for him, and their income fell by about a quarter to $36,000.

After payroll taxes and other expenses the government takes into account when measuring poverty, their income was just below the poverty line. But the safety net delivered more than $16,000, not counting pandemic assistance. That included $8,000 in refundable tax credits and $6,500 from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.

Instead of falling into poverty, the family survived the crisis about 50 percent above the poverty threshold.

“I don’t know where I’d be right now if I didn’t have that help,” Ms. Tallman said.

Medicaid paid for Jakob’s care and saved the family from bankrupting medical bills. SNAP, the food subsidy, eased Ms. Tallman’s anxiety about the children going hungry, as did free school meals. Tax credits helped her complete a longstanding plan to buy the family’s first house.

A year after the accident, Jakob became the first in the family to earn a high school degree.

 

In addition, DeParle wrote a few days later from Huntington, West Virginia, which is metropolitan but probably qualifies as rural in the national imaginary (as, indeed, does all of WV).  The story is about how recent safety net programs are chipping away at intergenerational poverty.  It is headlined, "How Poverty Programs Aided Children from One Generation to the Next," and the excerpt that follows speaks to place, as well as time/history: 

Cornbread, beans and potatoes.

When Ms. Jackson describes the challenges of growing up poor, she starts with location. “I grew up in a cemetery,” she said. Her father owned a trailer in rural Ohio with a graveyard on three sides. “I played beside the graves.”

Though money was short even when her father worked, his injury increased the hardship and left him angry and depressed. Her mother stretched food stamps with a bare-budget meal that remains in Ms. Jackson’s repertoire: cornbread, beans and potatoes.

The opioid epidemic that raced across the Ohio Valley wreaked havoc with some of her older siblings. As nieces and nephews took refuge in the trailer, Ms. Jackson spent much of her childhood helping to care for them.

By the time she reached high school, her family had moved across the Ohio River to Huntington, and Ms. Jackson was essentially raising a sister’s toddler. She already felt hopelessly behind in school when she discovered she was pregnant. She gave birth her senior year and dropped out, with more worries than plans and little help from the baby’s father.

As a poor single mother in 2012, Ms. Jackson turned to a welfare system that had undergone profound changes in her short lifetime. There was more help for parents who worked but less for those who did not, with time limits and work requirements on cash aid.

Both of these DeParle stories are well worth a read in their entirety.  He has long reported on poverty for the New York Times.

Here is NPR's coverage of this good news on the child poverty front.  

Cultivating the rural vote in Georgia

Sam Gringlas reports from Georgia for NPR, "Georgia's rural Black voters helped propel Democrats before. Will they do it again?"  Some salient excerpts are below:  

Until recently, a statewide candidate spending significant time in this thinly-populated, substantially Black, southwest corner of Georgia was virtually unheard of.

For years, Democrats failed to win statewide in Georgia. The ground began to shift about four years ago when Stacey Abrams made her first bid for governor.

"Atlanta cannot live without Albany, and Albany cannot live without the investments that come from Atlanta," Abrams said in 2017, launching her campaign, not in Atlanta, but in Albany. "We need to talk to those forgotten voters, the ones who are rarely talked about. I am running for governor because we need a governor who comes from a town like Albany. Where we begin does not dictate what we become."

Instead of bending over backward to court more conservative voters, Abrams focused on activating non-voters and irregular voters, especially people of color in overlooked parts of the state. 

* * *

More than 50,000 people have registered in Southwest Georgia since 2018. The majority are non-white, the New Georgia Project says.

"Look, for the most part, the rural characterization is true," says Dante Chinni, a researcher with the American Communities Project who has studied rural African American counties in the South. "Rural America tends to vote for Trump, tends to be Republican. But when you divide the vote further, you see these subtleties and nuances."

Nearly a quarter of rural Americans were people of color in 2020, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution. And while the country's rural population is shrinking overall, its diversity is growing.

Still, the biggest shifts from red to blue in 2020 were in the suburbs of metro Atlanta, where newcomers have poured in from out of state and where then-President Donald Trump repelled many moderate voters.

And even while Democrats in racially diverse rural communities in the South turned out more voters in the 2020 presidential election than in 2016, turnout for Trump soared even more in these same counties, driven by white, rural voters.

Gringlas quotes Professor Andra Gillespie, who teaches political science at Emory University in Atlanta.  

This is a both/and strategy. I think some people want to use it as an either/or.  

Even though Democrats expect to lose in rural parts of the state, they can't underperform there. Because if they underperform there, they end up losing the election.

The next part of the story focuses on some recent rural challenges, in particular the closure of a nearby hospital in Cuthbert, which is more truly rural than Albany, which is a regional center. 

Prior posts about Albany, Georgia are here and here; both are pandemic focused.

"Rural America Lost Population Over the Past Decade for the First Time in History"

That's the title of a policy brief by Kenneth Johnson, from the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.  Here are the first few paragraphs:   

The economic turbulence beginning with the Great Recession of 2007 and continuing through the next decade had a significant demographic impact on rural America. Recent data from the 2020 Census reveal that the rural population declined between 2010 and 2020.1 The loss was minimal, just 289,000 (-0.6 percent) out of 46 million, but it is the first decade-long rural population loss in history. In contrast, the rural population grew by 1.5 million between 2000 and 2010, and by nearly 3.4 million in the 1990s. Just 33.1 percent of rural counties gained population between 2010 and 2020, compared to 53.2 percent in the prior decade. Population growth was impacted in metropolitan areas as well, but the urban population continued to grow between 2010 and 2020. Thus, both rural and urban America have been buffeted by the aftermath of the Great Recession, which continued to exert a significant impact on migration, fertility, and mortality throughout the decade.

Population growth or decline depends on the balance between natural change (births minus deaths) and net migration (in-migrants minus out-migrants). Between 2010 and 2020, the United States experienced the least population growth since the 1930s because of the economic turbulence of the Great Recession and its aftermath. During the decade, immigration to the United States slowed and internal migration diminished because residents were frozen in place by high unemployment, housing debt, and poor economic prospects. At the same time, natural increase declined because there were fewer births and more deaths. In 2020, fertility rates hit record lows and there were the fewest births since 1979. At the same time, deaths were at record highs because of population aging and growing deaths of despair (including from drug overdoses and suicide).

These changes in national demographic trends had significant implications for rural America. A key question is how did the components of demographic change combined to produce the population loss in nonmetropolitan areas after 2010? The rural population declined because more people moved out than moved in, and because diminishing rural births only minimally exceeded the rising number of deaths. Between 2010 and 2020, the rural population declined by 289,000 because the net migration loss of 510,000 reduced the rural population by -1.1 percent, a loss which exceeded the gain from natural increase of 221,000 (0.5 percent). In contrast, in the prior decade, the rural population grew by 1,516,000 (3.4 percent) because there was a net gain of 464,000 migrants (1.0 percent) plus 1,052,000 more births than deaths (2.4 percent) (Figure 1). The shift from net migration gain to loss was widespread. Just a third of rural counties had migration gains between 2010 and 2020, compared to 45 percent between 2000 and 2010. In contrast, the metropolitan migration gain remained stable over the two decades.

The sharp reduction in natural increase following the Great Recession had a significant impact because it traditionally produced most of the rural population gain, as it did between 2000 and 2010. However, between 2010 and 2020 natural increase contributed only 21 percent as many new residents to rural America as it had in the last decade. This small gain from natural increase was not sufficient to offset the net migration loss. Fewer births and more deaths also increased the number of rural counties experiencing natural decrease (when more people die than are born). Between 2010 and 2020, deaths exceeded births in 55 percent of nonmetropolitan counties, up from 37 percent in the previous decade. This is the highest incidence of rural natural decrease in history, and it predates the onset of COVID-19, which is likely to further accelerate the incidence of natural decrease.

Download the entire brief here.   

Postscript:  Here is an interview with Kenneth Johnson about this matter, published in The Hill.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CLXXVII): New Yorkers who decamped to rural places (mostly) return to the city

The New York Times reports today on New York City residents who fled to the country during the pandemic and are now mostly returning to the city.  The headline for Julie Lasky's feature is "They Fled for Greener Pastures, and There Were Weeds."  Here's the humorous lead anecdote:  

For Andrew Joseph, the unexpected challenge of rural living was summed up in a single word: beavers. Mr. Joseph was enchanted by baby beavers swimming in the brook on his four-acre property in the town of Saugerties, N.Y., [population 19,482, in the Hudson Valley] where he and his partner, Paul Pearson, have been sheltering since March 2020.

“I quickly learned that they’re horrible, nasty creatures that wreak havoc and destruction,” said Mr. Joseph, the head of a Manhattan public relations firm who still maintains a home in Harlem. The beavers dammed the brook in three places, creating a swamp behind the house, and built a den that is “the size of a small van.”

Mr. Joseph, 51, applied for a permit to remove the animals and awaited a visit from a beaver trapper. After a preliminary visit, he never showed up again, though a bear did.

Then one night the couple heard gunshots from a neighbor’s property, and, lo, the beavers were gone.

Here's another excerpt, this one focusing on what the data tell us about population movement:

According to a report published in November by the New York State comptroller based on United States Postal Service change-of-address forms, a trend in migration from New York City following the March 2020 lockdown had reversed itself as of July 2021, motivated by the reopening of schools, offices and arts and entertainment offerings.

There are more humorous anecdotes, this one about Tara Silberberg, who moved with her family from Brooklyn to Gallatin, population 1,668, also in the Hudson Valley, early in the pandemic:

Having been raised in rural western Massachusetts, where her parents retreated [from Brooklyn] after a horrific 1973 acid attack left a Park Slope child blind, Ms. Silberberg said she speaks two languages: country and city. “I’m very direct and the people on my board appreciate that about me. In the country, there’s a lot of couching and people trying to say something and not wanting to be aggressive about it.”

She is also schooled in the sometimes-operatic inconveniences of rural life. In the first year of her family’s Massachusetts sojourn, the 1930s gravity-fed water system broke “and nobody knew how to fix it and we didn’t have water for a year,” she recalled. “I understood that the country doesn’t mean it’s always picking daisies.”

Some transplants came to realize that urban density, the close contact with fellow citizens that seemed so threatening in a time of pestilence, was the first thing they missed.

And here's yet another, focusing on the "harsh demands" made by "big rural parcels":  

“I hurt my back over two years ago when I did weed whacking, one of the perils of country life,” said Annette Schaich, 58.

Ms. Schaich, a New York-based marketing consultant in the design industry, has spent the pandemic in a southern New Hampshire farmhouse she shares with her husband, Tony Conway, 71, an artist who grew up and was educated in the state. The couple are stewards of 20 acres, which has claimed a bit of their health. “Tony fell from a ladder when he was renovating the barn and broke his knee,” Ms. Schaich said. She added that there is an excellent hospital in the area.

And the presence of that excellent hospital sets it apart from other rural locales, where the transplants to rural places found themselves missing all sorts of services.   

Read the whole story.  Among other things, you'll find a mention of New Yorker--or urbanite--as identity. 

Here's a related post--now more than a decade old--by a student, "The uninformative rural mystique."  

What's in the infrastructure bill for rural America

The Rural Blog reports in some detail here, so it's a good place to start.

And here's a story from Ski-Hi News in Grand County, Colorado (Grand Junction) indicating that the infrastructure bill renewed the Secure Rural Schools Act, a significant boon to rural communities.    

I'm seeing lots of stories mentioning rural broadband.  Here's one from August, speculating about what might happen under the infrastructure bill.  I'll be on the lookout for more recent coverage post-bill passage.  

Here's a story that suggests several states with significant rural populations, e.g., Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, the Dakotas, and West Virginia are getting more money per capita from the infrastructure bill.  (Interestingly, uber urban Washington, DC, is also in the highest per capita range).  This may look like old-fashioned pork, but it probably more accurately reflects the fact that when a road or bridge needs repairing, it needs repairing regardless of how dense or how sparse the population.  

And this story calls out how much Texas, with vast rural reaches, specially in the west, will get from the infrastructure bill, $30 billion.  

Rural community vignettes from the Montana Amtrak crash

It's been interesting to see how journalists --especially national journalists--have described what happened yesterday with the Amtrak derailment in Joplin, Montana (population just a couple hundred folks) in Liberty County, population 2,339.  The New York Times story today includes some interesting comments from a man who was on the Empire Builder when it derailed, Steve Glaser, 66, along with officials and residents of this remote corner of Montana.    

After the crash, Mr. Glaser said “the community took over.”

Sarah Robbin, the disaster emergency services coordinator for Liberty County, Mont., one of the most rural counties in the state, had spent much of her time over the past few years playing out a scenario like this in her head and planning how best to respond.

In each of the small towns that dot Route 2, which cuts through northern Montana along the railroad tracks, there are just a few hundred to a few thousand residents. The nearest major hospital is hours away by car. Emergency services are sparse.

“We are a small county,” she said, adding that anything like Saturday’s crash “would immediately overwhelm us. Being small and rural, relying on your neighbors is extremely important.”

In the town of Chester, about 7 to 8 miles west of the derailment, a siren system alerts the 1,000 or so residents to any important news. One ring signals a city meeting. Two, an ambulance. Three, a fire call. And four, “some terrible disaster,” said Jesse Anderson, who owns the MX Motel, a 20-room stopover that typically caters to anglers, construction workers and hunters.

When Mr. Anderson heard four sirens yesterday, he assumed it was a mistake. But then he saw fire trucks speeding through the 25 miles-per-hour main street.

“We had no idea it was going to be something of this scale,” he said.

Emergency responders from across at least seven counties rushed in to help. As the only motel for 50 miles, east or west, Mr. Anderson was called on to house some of the passengers. He offered his available rooms free of charge.

Families from a nearby Hutterite colony brought food for passengers while they waited for rides and lodging in the school gym. 

Here's a post from July about the strain on rural ambulance service in places like Montana and Wyoming, where fewer people are stepping up to do the work.  

Law and Order in the Ozarks (Part CXXXIII): another rural story about the U.S. Census

I've been trawling around my hometown newspaper, The Newton County Times, for pandemic coverage and saw this story about the 2020 Census count for Jasper, the county seat of Newton County.  While I was growing up there in the 1970s and 1980s, the sign at the edge of town announcing the population was either 394 or 512, as best as I can remember.  A photo I took of the sign in 2008 said 498, as featured in this post from Legal Ruralism's early days.  

(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2008

The 2010 count was 524.  Now, the 2020 Census has found the population of Jasper to have again fallen below that 500 mark, to 482.  

Here's the coverage from the Newton County Times on August 23, 2021:

It wasn't a surprise, really, but Jasper Mayor Jan Larson said she didn't expect the town's census to drop as much as reported by the US Census Bureau which recently released results of the 2020 Census.

According to the census bureau, Jasper's updated population figure is now 482. The 2020 census had Jasper's population at a high of 524 in 2010, and according to its figures, has fallen yearly since.

But Larson said she and city staff conducted their own census count using water meter subscriptions and other city data and estimated the city's actual population is around 538.

The undercount can be attributed in part to the COVID-19 pandemic that delayed the accumulation of data by the census bureau, but other factors should be taken into account. Larson noted that the county still hasn't completely incorporated 911 addressing, noting that Jasper residents still have post office box numbers that are not recognized by the bureau. The bureau also relied on receiving data via of its website on the internet, but some residents don't have access to it or in some cases the bureau's electronic forms would not accept the data city residents tried to input.

There were also problems experienced by the canvassers who made repeated visits to residents because their information would not be recorded by the bureau.

All of this has me thinking more about this story from rural Colorado, where a county official took the accuracy of the count into her own hands, if you will, working to ensure that residents responded in spite of the Census Bureau's approach to the count, which is not necessarily a good fit for rural places and small towns.  

Also related is this recent post, which suggests that Newton County is about to "blow up"--meaning to experience explosive growth due to ecotourism.  Reminds me:  I wish this Newton County Times story had some data on the 2020 Census count for the county.  In 2010, it was 8,330.  

This overall population loss story is in contrast to another Newton County Times story in the same edition about an over-crowded 5th grade at Jasper school.  Here's an excerpt: 

Jasper Elementary School is experiencing growth in its fifth grade classroom. So much so that the Jasper School District Board of Education passed a resolution at its last board meeting, Aug. 16, supporting a waiver request affecting the class size and teaching load. 

Under the state statutes, for grades five through six, except for those courses that lend themselves to large group instruction, the average student/teacher ratio in a school district shall be no more than 25 students per teacher in a classroom. There shall be no more than 28 students per teacher in any classroom. 

Superintendent Dr. Candra Brasel told the school board that the fifth grade is up to 33 students this year. That amount of growth does not warrant hiring another teacher, but the school district can ask the education department for a waiver. She said that the plan calls for a paraprofessional to be assigned to the fifth grade classroom to assist the teacher.

This reminds me that when I was in the 5th grade at Jasper School, I was in a mixed 5th-6th class. which is how such matters were handled back then.   

In any event, it seems that the Newton County population bulge that is coming was born in 2011.   Will they stick around for the 2030 Census?  

Postscript:  About a month after this post, I read that Arkansas' population increased 3.3% between the 2010 and 2020 Censuses.  

FEMA limitations in sparsely populated regions?

This line from a story in the New York Times today triggered a lot of questions about how FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) works when disaster strikes in sparsely populated places, aka #rural America.  The story is about the massive Bootleg fire in rural southeast Oregon.  More than 160 homes have destroyed there.  But given that it's the biggest fire in the country right now at 413,000 acres burned, that could be stated as just 160 homes.  And that ratio of homes to land area illustrates how sparsely populated the region is.  The story's dateline is Beatty, Oregon, a Census Designated Place in Klamath County. 

Here's what got me thinking about what seems perversely wrong with FEMA--perversely wrong given the correlation between wildfire and rurality: 

In the aftermath of the fire, Mr. Valens and Ms. Golden are uncertain whether they and others who lost their homes will receive any state or federal aid. In a meeting with President Biden and a group of governors on Friday, Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon asked the president for flexibility in using federal disaster-relief money in sparsely populated areas, which are currently ineligible for Federal Emergency Management Agency funding, a spokesman said.

Mr. Valens is Marc Valens, a retired environmental attorney.  Ms. Golden is his wife, Anne Golden, a business consultant.  Lucky for them, they have a second home a few hours away in Ashland.  

Why would the status quo be a lack of flexibility "in using federal disaster-relief money in sparsely populated areas"?  This seems illogical given the association of disaster with rural places.  

Accentuating the rural in the Secretary of Transportation's job

A few weeks ago, Pete Buttigieg appeared before the Senate for hearings on his nomination to be the Biden administration's Secretary of Transportation, and yesterday he was confirmed for that role by a vote of 86-13.  This nomination and confirmation have been most discussed because Buttigieg is the first openly LGBTQ cabinet member in U.S. history--and that is pretty remarkable.   

Twitter thread on 
Senator Tester's 
comments re: Buttigieg 
nomination and
confirmation as
Secretary 
of Transportation

But there are ruralist reasons to focus on this nomination.  I think that when most people think of the Department of Transportation, they are thinking of airports and train stations--think of the film "planes, trains [but less] automobiles."  Most people are focused on transportation infrastructure that is visible to metropolitan folks--or to those driving across the country, e.g., interstate highways.  But transportation infrastructure is also critical to rural folks--especially roads and the links that rural folks enjoy to airports and rail.  Some representative stories are here and here.  

So I thought it was interesting that when Pete Buttigieg appeared on January 21, 2021 before the U.S. Senate, Jon Tester, the senior Senator from Montana, commented on what is at stake for rural residents when it comes to federal transportation policy.  

Here's a transcript of some of Tester's comments:

Your intellect has preceded you into the room. You have put on a clinic on how a nominee should work and act. You haven’t avoided the questions. You’ve been straightforward. And you know what the hell you’re talking about. And that’s really pretty damn refreshing. 

Infrastructure in rural America is as important as it is anywhere in the country. And making sure that rural America has access to the dollars, even though we don’t have as many people per square mile, is critically important – and let me give you an example: There’s a little highway that runs south of my farm. It’s about twenty miles long. It was built when I was in grade school and extended out when I was in high school. That little highway saves every farmer that lives out in my community, literally hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars every year. Why? Less flat tires, front ends aren’t knocked out of align, less wear and tear on vehicles so you can run ‘em longer. That is why we need to make sure rural America is taken care of.

This part at the end is just so practical, so concrete that I can hear my father saying it.  He was always fretting about whether we were optimally taking care of our vehicles so that their lives were preserved.  The cost of new tires, of re-aligning a front end ... these are meaningful expenses for many rural Americans.  May sound little small potatoes for city folks, but that just shows their disconnectedness from rural livelihoods and rural household budgets.  

So who voted against Buttigieg?  lots of senators from lots states with significant rural populations:  Cotton (R-AR); Rubio (R-FL); Hawley (R-MO); Cruz (R-TX); Cassidy (R-LA); Blackburn (R-TN); Shelby (R-AL): Tuberville (R-AL); Scott (R-SC); Marshall (R-KS); Scott (R-FL); and Hagerty (R-TN).  Of course, regardless of the amount of rural territory, surely all of these senators have the ability to see how an intelligent technocratic Secretary of Transportation can be a benefit to their states.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CXVIII): The difficulties of vaccine rollout

It’s a common sentiment amongst many news articles I’ve read this week that getting rural Americans vaccinated is much harder than getting those individuals in suburban or urban areas vaccinated. Bennett Doughty and Pamela Stewart Fahs explored this difficult issue in their piece, Why Getting Covid-19 Vaccines to Rural Americans Is Harder Than It Looks, and How to Lift the Barriers. Among the key obstacles in vaccinating rural Americans are storage, distribution, and misinformation.

The first issue has to do with storage. The first two authorized vaccines – one made by Pfizer and BioNTech and the other by Moderna – are mRNA vaccines that require storage in very cold temperatures. The Pfizer vaccine must be stored at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit and Moderna’s at minus 4 Fahrenheit. Once thawed and prepared, the Pfizer vaccine must be used within five days and Moderna’s within 30 days. 

Unfortunately, small hospitals, which are more prevalent in rural areas, are less likely to have expensive freezers that can accommodate storing these vaccines. An article by Thomas C Ricketts, III and Paige E Heaphy puts forth a number of figures demonstrating the numbers and distributions of hospitals in rural America. I found the most telling statistic to be the following: 

Nonmetropolitan hospitals are smaller: 72% have fewer than 100 beds, and 42% have fewer than 50 beds. Twenty percent of all hospital beds are in rural hospitals. The median number of staffed beds for nonmetropolitan hospitals is 59 compared with 156 for urban hospitals, while the average number of beds per hospital is 82 and 245, respectively. Rural hospital inpatient days account for 20% of all hospital inpatient days in the United States. Medicare and Medicaid are important sources of payment for hospital patients.

Having always lived in a city or suburbia, I found it to be astounding that hospitals with fewer than 50 beds even existed. Moreover, with the influx of coronavirus patients, I can easily see how rural hospitals with these small numbers of beds would be overwhelmed with the number of patients they need to treat. 

On another note, this got me thinking: the time limit to use the vaccines, within 5 and 30 days respectively, proves to be a larger issue because rural populations are much smaller compared to their urban or suburban counterparts. I decided to do some research and came across the following Census data, where Census Bureau Director John H. Thompson noted, “Rural areas cover 97 percent of the nation’s land area but contain 19.3 percent of the population (about 60 million people).” As a result, rural areas may not have enough individuals to vaccinate within the time limit set by the FDA, thus leading to wastage of unused vaccine doses. 

This is a great 3-minute listen provided by NPR that discusses the significant challenges faced by rural hospitals to rollout mass vaccinations. 

The second issue has to do with big batches. The vaccine doses are currently being shipped in special containers with dry ice, and for now, vaccines are being delivered only in large batches. While urban areas will be able to quickly distribute these large batch doses, finding enough patients to vaccinate quickly in rural areas may be more difficult. As a result, the vaccine distribution efforts will favor hubs that cater to more populated areas to avoid wasting any vaccine or leaving patients unable to get their second dose. 

The article notes: 

The current vaccines’ cold storage requirements and shipping rules mean many rural hospitals can't serve as vaccination distribution hubs. That can leave rural residents – about 20% of the U.S. population in all – traveling long distances, if they’re able to travel at all.

The third issue has to do with difficult barriers to healthcare access. This is not a new problem in rural America. As Haider Warraich, Robert Califf and Sarah Cross discuss in their article, Beyond covid-19, rural areas face growing threat from chronic heart and lung diseases:

Rural hospital closures grab all the headlines and perhaps rightfully so. From 2010 until today, some 134 rural hospitals have closed, and a report released last spring, before the pandemic had hit many rural areas, showed a quarter of surviving rural hospitals in dire financial straits. Cancellation of routine medical care necessitated by the novel coronavirus, which causes covid-19, has pushed more hospitals off the cliff.

 The Rural Health Information Hub has also noted that:

Recent years, however, have presented challenges for rural hospitals. Factors such as low reimbursement rates, increased regulation, reduced patient volumes, and uncompensated care have caused many rural hospitals to struggle financially.” 

Rural areas have fewer health care providers that serve a more geographically diverse population than in urban or suburban communities. Moreover, in many of these areas, the closure of rural hospitals has forced individuals to travel farther for care. This got me thinking about more vulnerable populations such as the elderly and poor, which, I would imagine, have an even more difficult time traveling for care. Not only do these vulnerable populations lack access to public transportation to help them reach hospitals, at least in comparison to their urban or suburban counterparts, but at the same time, the “distance and geography, such as mountain roads, can mean driving to those sites takes time."

At a more local level, Hailey Branson-Potts notes in her article for the LA Times:

In the battle against COVID-19, health officials in Northern California face the daunting task of vaccinating more than 683,300 people spread across a mountainous, heavily forested region where calamity — either from illness or physical trauma — can mean hours-long drives to the nearest medical facility.

This further demonstrates the difficulty that rural areas across our nation face in regards to vaccinating a population that is much more spread out amongst various geographic areas. 

The fourth and last issue involves widespread suspicion and defiance. Aside from growing skepticism that the virus is a serious threat only in major towns, there is also a common fear amongst the rural community that the new vaccine is unsafe. Moreover, there has been a constant and continuous open rebellion against health orders.

As Hailey Branson-Potts discusses, “the pushback in rural parts of California is emblematic of the challenge in many parts of the United States, particularly outside more liberal urban centers.” 

"We’re getting very frustrated here in Northern California,” said Dr. Richard Wickenheiser, the Tehama County health officer. “We have a lot of anti-vaxxers and a lot of independent people who just feel that COVID was a hoax, that it was going to go away when the election was over. And that didn’t happen. ... The excuses just go on and on.” 

In Shasta County, some speakers at supervisors’ meetings have compared mask mandates to Nazis forcing Jewish people to wear a yellow Star of David and spouted conspiracy theories about vaccines containing tracking devices. The county health officer has been threatened repeatedly.

In Tehama County, where indoor dining is banned by the state, restaurants were still seating maskless customers in recent days. In downtown Red Bluff, signs in store windows read: “Please respect everyone’s personal space. ... Masks are welcome, but not required” and “Due to pre-existing health conditions, some of the staff are not wearing a face mask” and “MASKS OK."

The widespread suspicion and defiance exhibited by rural communities across Northern California are a telltale sign of the difficulties of vaccine rollout, not simply due to logistical issues, but rather of a more deeper belief system. 

This is a great podcast on the vaccine rollout in rural areas. 

Other posts on this topic are here, here, and here.

 

Among all states, the highest percentage of residents who supported Trump were in Wyoming

That is, compared to any other state. West Virginia was a close second. North Dakota and Oklahoma ran  third at about 65% each.  See more here.  Of course, all of these states have significant rural populations.  

Trump cancels rural Nevada rally, still heads to Vegas

Here's the story from the Elko, Nevada newspaper.  Guess Trump is taking the rural NV vote for granted and aiming for more bang for his buck in Las Vegas.  Elko's population is 18,297, which isn't technically rural but is the county seat of nonmetro Elko County, population 50K. 

Washington Post cartoon contrasts rural-urban voting opportunities in Texas

 Here it is:

This cartoon focuses--not inappropriately--on relative population size to suggest it'll be easier for rural folks to vote in Texas than it will be for urban folks.  What this overlooks is another important aspect of what is happening in Texas.  Limiting each county to one ballot drop-off location is also bad for rural voters who live in counties that cover more land area (what I sometimes call "material distance").  That includes many in West Texas, as is visible from this map. And voters there are also less likely than metropolitan voters to have access to public transportation to get to that single drop-off location.

The rural vote in 2020 (Part VI): Didn't hear any mention of rural in tonight's presidential debate

But I saw this piece from Niskanen Center re-upped on Twitter, with a focus on population density as determinative of political leanings.  Here's the lede:  

In this new paper, I weave recent research in political science, economics, psychology and more into an account of political polarization and the rise of populist nationalism as a surprising and overlooked side-effect of urbanization.

I claim that we’ve failed to fully grasp that urbanization is a relentless, glacial social force that transforms entire societies and, in the process, generates cultural and political polarization by segregating populations along the lines of the traits that make individuals more or less responsive to the incentives that draw people to the city. I explore three such traits — ethnicity, ideology-correlated aspects of personality, and level of educational achievement — and their intricate web of relationships. The upshot is that, over the course of millions of moves over many decades, high density areas have become economically thriving multicultural havens while whiter, lower density places are facing stagnation and decline as their populations have become increasingly uniform in terms of socially conservative personality, aversion to diversity, and lower levels of education. This self-segregation of the population, I argue, created the polarized economic and cultural conditions that led to populist backlash.

Because the story of urbanization just is the story of a strengthening relationship between density, human capital and economic productivity, it’s also the story of relative small town and rural decline.

What liability is at stake when a county sheriff deputizes citizens, who then get badly hurt?

That's the question the Sacramento Bee story asked two years ago here, and today the California Supreme Court finally made a decision in the case.  Here's an excerpt from Ryan Sabalow's story today:

Nine years ago, a rural California sheriff’s corporal called Jim and Norma Gund and asked them to check on their neighbor, who had called 911 and hung up. When the Gunds arrived, a murderer armed with a Taser and hunting knife attacked the couple and almost killed them. 

Did the Gunds become de facto deputies when they agreed to help Cpl. Ron Whitman, or were they just being good neighbors? 

On Thursday, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trinity County Sheriff’s Office in a case that sought to answer whether people who volunteer to help law enforcement should be entitled to sue for damages if they get hurt, or if they’re merely eligible for workers’ compensation as employees.

“We conclude the Gunds were indeed engaged in ‘active law enforcement service,’” the Supreme Court wrote Thursday. “When the Gunds provided the requested assistance, they delivered an active response to the 911 call of a local resident pleading for help. A response of this kind unquestionably falls within the scope of a police officer’s law enforcement duties.” 

The sheriff’s attorneys argued the Gunds were volunteers and only entitled to workers’ compensation for their injuries.

This part of Sabalow's story sketches the remote context in which these events took place:

The Gunds’ story, which raises troubling questions about the lack of law enforcement in the vast rural reaches of California, began March 13, 2011, in the remote former timber town of Kettenpom, about 250 miles north of San Francisco.

The California Supreme Court decision uses the word rural only twice, both when referring to the Amicus Brief of the Rural County Representatives of California (who filed with California League of Cities on behalf of defendants/respondent, Trinity County.  One of those mentions is in the text of the opinion and another is in the listing of attorneys and briefs.     

Here's the salient excerpt with the word "rural" highlighted:

We have good reasons to embrace, in this context, a more capacious understanding of what “law enforcement service” means. For reasons detailed below, we conclude that the term “active law enforcement service” — as used in section 3366 — falls short of encompassing every conceivable function a peace officer can perform. But neither is it quite so narrow that we are compelled to hold it only applies to the arrest and detention of criminals, or the direct suppression of crime. We conclude that “active law enforcement service” includes a peace officer’s duties directly concerned with functions such as enforcing laws, investigating and preventing crime, and protecting the public. Whatever the outer limits of the term, “active law enforcement” certainly includes the arrest and detention of criminals, as well as — given the range of reasons that ordinarily trigger emergency calls to police — responses to emergency calls for unspecified assistance, such as Kristine’s 911 call for help. (See, e.g., Livingston, Police Discretion and the Quality of Life in Public Places: Courts, Communities, and the New Policing (1997) 97 Colum. L.Rev. 551, 559 [investigation, arrest, and prosecution of those committing serious crimes is “straightforward” police intervention]; see also id. at p. 567 [the modern “ ‘crime-fighting’ ” strategy of policing includes rapid response to 911 calls for service].)  

Consider at the outset the structure of section 3366. It applies when an individual is injured while engaged in active law enforcement service, either on command or voluntarily at the request of a peace officer. Government Code section 26604 indicates that sheriffs “shall command the aid” of inhabitants as they think necessary to execute their duties. This authority for calling forth citizens to aid in law enforcement is the posse comitatus power. (Kopel, The Posse Comitatus and the Office of Sheriff: Armed Citizens Summoned to the Aid of Law Enforcement (2015) 104 J.Crim. L. & Criminology 761, 769– 806.) The posse comitatus power predates the nation’s founding and has a complicated history. (Id. at pp. 792–793.) At the federal level, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 contained posse comitatus provisions enabling federal law enforcement officers to compel northerners to assist in the capture of enslaved people who had escaped bondage. (Id. at pp. 798–800.) After the Civil War, the power was used in reverse to enforce civil rights legislation in the Reconstruction south. (Id. at pp. 800–801.) But the more familiar use of the posse comitatus power was the western frontier version: where a sheriff summoned the posse to pursue an escaped outlaw or confront a violent gang. (Id. at p. 802.) During this era, preservation of the peace did not fall exclusively to peace officers. (Pressel, The Western Peace Officer (1972) pp. 30–31.) On the frontier, preserving the peace was public duty. (Ibid.) Amicus curiae Rural County Representatives of California explains that unlike with the large, organized police forces for urban centers, peace officers in remote areas — like Trinity County — still rely on community members to assist in ensuring community safety.

That last line has me querying:  Is this sort of rural or frontier "policing" the original "community policing" we hear so much about today?

This case also reminds me of my 2014 book chapter:  The Rural Lawscape:  Space Tames Law Tames Space.  There I argue that law enforcement agencies struggle to adequately police  remote and sparsely populated places.  That is the sense in which "space" tames or resists the authority of law/the state.

Coronavirus in rural America (Part LXVI): City folks still seeking country retreats, this time to buy

Just two stories on this topic in the past several days are one out of Wyoming (which is nearly rural in its entirety) and one out of New York.

WyoFile, Wyoming's non-profit news website, reported last week here, under the headline "COVID refugees bring mini-boom to some Wyo real estate markets." Angus M. Thuermer Jr. reports:

As Wyoming’s economy gets back in gear following a COVID-19 stay-at-home lull, one corner of the business world is seeing at least a mini boom — the rural refuge real estate market. 

From Torrington to Cody, Jackson to Sheridan, rental and real estate agents report brisk business driven in part, they believe, by big-city customers seeking new homes they think will be farther from trouble. 

Some of the surge could be called a COVID comeback. But enduring Wyoming qualities, from the state’s small population, to low taxes, rural landscape, mountains and rivers figure in a bounce-back in some communities that aren’t tied to energy production. 

“During the official quarantine, certainly we did get a lot of phone calls — some of them attributed to people saying ‘I want to get out of the big city and [move] to wide-open Wyoming,’” said Ty Pedersen, president of the Northwest Wyoming Board of Realtors and a Cody real estate agent. “There’s a prediction we will start to see more of that. The feeling is there’s going to be a little resurgence here for Wyoming.” 

While Cody has the draw of world-famous Yellowstone National Park, the Sheridan region’s own Bighorn Mountain beauty suggests a broader attraction. “I think in general people are looking for a more rural setting,” said Karen Chase, marketing manager for the Powder Horn Golf Club and community. “I would say they’re looking for a less populated area.”

At the other end of the rural-urban continuum (at least in terms of the state at issue) is this New York Times story about how the Catskills are booming because of refugees from NYC.  Julie Lasky writes of a run on houses in that region.    An excerpt follows:

In Sullivan, Ulster, Greene and Delaware Counties, urbanites with the wherewithal to venture beyond the city are snapping up primary and weekend houses, many in what real estate sales agents say is a financial sweet spot from $200,00 to $450,000. They are forging ahead despite the inconveniences and uncertainties of buying in a pandemic (masked, self-directed house tours; cautious lenders; virtual closings).

An early-quarantine story about a rural area in France that had escaped the pandemic is here.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XXXXIX): mapping the virus in rural America

Note that the map here from the New York Times on May 16 treats "low population density" and "no cases reported" the same way.  Both appear in white.  That's unhelpful from the standpoint of trying to inform readers about rural spread.  It goes without saying that some places of low population density are going to have cases reported, and for those counties, the reader won't know which reason places them in the "white" category on the map. 

I'll note that my home county, Newton County, Arkansas, is in the "white" category.  I know they have had at least one case reported among 8,000 residents, so they must be in the "low population density category" rather than the "no cases reported" category.