How and why Democrats are failing to attract rural voters: Is it the economy, stupid?

A couple of recent items in the New York Times showcase--wisely in my opinion--how the Democrats, in spite of an entertaining convention, are failing to attract rural voters.  Both of these pieces touch on a range of issues, e.g., climate change, civil rights, etc., but seem to come back to the focus of these voters on pocket book issues and the related belief of many that Trump is better on and for the economy.  I'm glad to see these stories because I've been saying for weeks, 

The first story is a huge feature out of Wilson, North Carolina, population 50,000, 40 miles east of Raleigh It is part of the Rocky Mount-Wilson-Roanoke Rapids Metro Area, but characterized as rural by the New York Times, with the headline, "Meet the Rural Voters Who Could Swing North Carolina's Election."  The lede and a few other excerpts follow:  

The most rural of the battleground states this year is North Carolina. About 3.4 million people, or roughly a third of the state’s population, reside in a rural area, more than in any other state besides Texas.

Democrats have seen their support slip in rural areas, ceding ground to Republicans. As such, rural voters in North Carolina could determine which way the state goes on Election Day, as Democrats hope to curb their losses in these communities and Republicans seek to solidify their grip.

But in interviews with more than 30 people in Wilson County, about 50 miles east of Raleigh, where backcountry roads weave in and out of tobacco fields, many residents told us that they felt both parties often overlooked their concerns, about high prices, underfunded schools and rapid growth from the state capital that is stretching into town.

* * *

Voters in Wilson described feeling alienated and worn down by the emphasis on race and identity in politics. 

And that comment reminds me of this very urban NYT story a few weeks ago in which low-income Black voters were quoted as saying they wanted less identity politics and more on what Harris would do to to help them.  

Folks in Wilson are also concerned about the social and economic consequences of rural gentrification.

Downtown Wilson was a sleepy scene decades ago. Now, it has a park decorated with oversize whirligigs, full bars on weekends and, by 2026, a new $63 million stadium that will be the home of the Carolina Mudcats, a Minor League Baseball team.

All of that development, though, has increased concerns over inflation and rising housing costs. Residents bemoaned the prices of fertilizer, electricity bills and chitlins, or sizzled pork intestines. For many people in Wilson, the math just doesn’t add up.

* * * 

Despite their differing opinions, many Wilson residents said they valued getting along with their neighbors, in part because there was no political bubble to hide in.

The story's closing quote, from a 46-year-old white woman, also echoes that theme: 

I just want my community to be OK.

And that reminded me of key finding of Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea's 2023 book, The Rural Voter:  that rural folks have a strong sense of linked fate with and to others in their community. 

The second NYT item is an essay titled, The Politics of a Hard Day's Work for Lobstermen in a Changing Climate.  Scott Elsworth, a historian, writes from Stonington, Maine, population 1056, where he spent time this summer with lobstermen.  

For young workers like Mr. Amaro and Mr. Leach and millions of other Americans like them who are busting their humps week in and week out trying to get ahead, the price of gas, groceries and housing is perhaps the most important factor in determining their vote. Not abortion, not Gaza, not the war in Ukraine. As long as the perception that Mr. Trump will do a better job with the economy remains unchallenged, the Democrats will pay a price at the polls, perhaps a dear one.

“I care a lot about nature,” Mr. Amaro said, “but also I think about my future and how I can take care of my family, and what would benefit me, in the long term, financially. And it kind of sucks to think like that.”

Though he has regularly voted Republican, Mr. Black is far from MAGA. Like many Maine Republicans, at least historically, he is fiscally conservative and no fan of big government. He believes in climate change, isn’t worried about immigration and considers the former president to be something you won’t hear Jessica Fletcher say in reruns of “Murder, She Wrote.” But it is likely, at this point, that he’ll cast his vote for Mr. Trump. “I like Trump’s decisions on stuff that he did,” Mr. Black told me. His two sternmen are, at this point, inclined to do the same, citing the rise in gas prices and the high cost of housing.

Finally, In These Times just posted this item from Joseph Bullington, "Republicans Will Weaponize Rural Suffering as Long as Democrats Ignore It."  Here's a key excerpt: 

But let us not confuse this giddiness [of the DNC] with evidence of a winning politics. What terrified me about the Republican National Convention terrifies me still: The Republicans are effectively wielding rural suffering as a political weapon, telling a potent story that — in classic fascist style — deflects the blame onto immigrants and other out-groups. Democrats could demolish these racist lies with a compelling story of their own — one that defuses the Right’s fascist messaging and shows how rural whites and immigrants (many of them in rural areas, of course) are actually being robbed and exploited by the very same profiteers, the same rigged economic system. Is this what the Democrats are doing? Of course not — that’s what makes it a bad dream.

In human form, this nightmare of mine has a name, and its JD Vance.

* * *

In his RNC speech, Vance spoke to the pain of small towns and rural areas ​“cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class,” places where ​“jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war.” 

And that brings me to my own essay, "Mustering the political will to help left-behind places in a polarized USA."   

Postscript:  This opinion piece by Patrick Healy for the New York Times makes some of the same points made above and also echoes my concern that the Democrats seemed a little too self-congratulatory at their Convention--a little too inward looking, even tone deaf at times.  The audio version of this piece, available today on the NYTAudio app, is even better.  

Pitting affordable housing against parking in a small California city

Ben Christopher reports for CalMatters from Eureka, California, population 45,000, under the headline, "Ballot battles, lawsuits and a ticked off millionaire: What’s behind Eureka’s parking lot war?"  Here's an excerpt that sets the stage:

Hugging the Humboldt County coast some 280 miles north of San Francisco and 150 miles west of Redding, Eureka is strapped for places to live. The county has more homeless people per capita than anywhere else in the state, with a disproportionate share living on the street — a problem that’s especially conspicuous in downtown Eureka. Like every California city and county, Eureka is also on the hook under state law to scrounge up space for new housing. The downtown economy could use a little goosing too.

The parking lot-to-affordable-housing plan was supposed to tackle all those problems at once. More housing. More foot traffic downtown. A satisfied California Housing and Community Development Department. Yes, the planned developments would leave the area with more people, more cars and fewer spaces to park, but that, city officials have said, is a worthwhile trade-off.

And this goes to the heart of the conflict: 

The parking lot wars on California’s Lost Coast are part of a statewide trend of voters taking their gripes with state housing mandates to the ballot. Over the last half decade, state lawmakers have passed dozens of new laws requiring local elected officials to plan for more housing, whether they want to or not.

When these conflicts wind up in court — and they often do — courts have generally sided with state agencies.

 
But in Eureka, the political stars are aligned a bit differently. This is not a wealthy suburb in which elected officials are vowing to resist what they see as overreaching state bureaucrats. Eureka city officials are on the same page as the state housing department in wanting to see more dense housing downtown, parking be damned. It’s the voters, this November, who will have the opportunity to slam on the brakes.

Additional posts about Eureka and Humboldt County are here. 

The school vouchers story I've been waiting for because it centers rural schools and communities

This excellent long read comes from Alec MacGillis for ProPublica, and it came to my attention only because it was on the New York Times audio site.   Bottom line:  rural folks, normally conservative, have lots of reasons to oppose conservative state leaders when it comes to school vouchers.  Why:  school vouchers, by depriving public schools of money, will lead to the closure of those schools.  Of course, school vouchers, by channeling public tax dollars to private schools, will hurt all public schools.  But rural schools are more vulnerable to falling student enrollment and therefore to closure.  All of that has big implications for rural communities.  I've blogged about this issue previously, such as here, here and here (among others) 

Following are some key quotes from the story, which features vignettes from rural parts of many states, including Ohio, Georgia, and Texas.  But first, there's this lede from Tennessee:

Drive an hour south of Nashville into the rolling countryside of Marshall County, Tennessee — past horse farms, mobile homes and McMansions — and you will arrive in Chapel Hill, population 1,796. It’s the birthplace of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan. And it’s the home of Todd Warner, one of the most unlikely and important defenders of America’s besieged public schools.

Warner is the gregarious 53-year-old owner of PCS of TN, a 30-person company that does site grading for shopping centers and other construction projects. The second-term Republican state representative “absolutely” supports Donald Trump, who won Marshall County by 50 points in 2020. Warner likes to talk of the threats posed by culture-war bogeymen, such as critical race theory; diversity, equity and inclusion; and Shariah law.

And yet, one May afternoon in his office, under a TV playing Fox News and a mounted buck that he’d bagged in Alabama, he told me about his effort to halt Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s push for private school vouchers in Tennessee. Warner’s objections are rooted in the reality of his district: It contains not a single private school, so to Warner, taxpayer money for the new vouchers would clearly be flowing elsewhere, mostly to well-off families in metro Nashville, Memphis and other cities whose kids are already enrolled in private schools. Why should his small-town constituents be subsidizing the private education of metropolitan rich kids?

A further quote from Warner follows:   

I’m for less government, but it’s government’s role to provide a good public education.  If you want to send your kid to private school, then you should pay for it.

Here are some other excerpts, after McGillis notes that 11 states "now have "universal or near-universal vouchers, meaning that even affluent families can receive thousands of dollars toward their kids’ private school tuition" in the name of "school choice."  

Voucher advocates are "again and again ... running against rural Republicans like Warner," the Tennessee politician.  Those rural Republicans are also increasingly "joining forces with Democratic lawmakers in a rare bipartisan alliance.  That is, it’s the reddest regions of these red and purple states that are putting up some of the strongest resistance to the conservative assault on public schools."

Conservative orthodoxy at the national level holds that parents must be given an out from a failing public education system that force-feeds children progressive fads. But many rural Republican lawmakers have trouble reconciling this with the reality in their districts, where many public schools are not only the sole educational option, but also the largest employer and the hub of the community — where everyone goes for holiday concerts, Friday night football and basketball. Unlike schools in blue metro areas, rural schools mostly reopened for in-person instruction in the fall of 2020, and they are far less likely to be courting controversy on issues involving race and gender.

* * *

The response from voucher proponents to the resistance from fellow Republicans has taken several forms, all of which implicitly grant the critics’ case that voucher programs currently offer little benefit to rural areas. In some states, funding for vouchers is being paired with more money for public schools, to offer support for rural districts. In Ohio, voucher advocates are proposing to fund the construction of new private schools in rural areas where none exist, giving families places to use vouchers.

But the overriding Republican response to rural skeptics has been a political threat: Get with the program on vouchers, or else.

That’s what played out this year in Ohio’s 83rd District, in the state’s rural northwest.

* * * 

In Georgia, of the 15 Republican state representatives who blocked a voucher proposal last year, more than half came from rural areas with substantial Black populations. One of them was Gerald Greene, who spent more than three decades as a high school social studies teacher and has managed to survive as a Republican in his majority-Black district in the state’s southwestern corner after switching parties in 2010.

Greene believes vouchers will harm his district. It has a couple of small private schools in it or just outside it — with student bodies that are starkly more white than the district’s public schools — but the majority of his constituents rely on the public schools, and he worries that vouchers will leave less money for them.

The story next turns to Texas: 

The highest-profile rural Republican resistance to vouchers has come in Texas, the land of Friday Night Lights and far-flung oil country settlements where the public schools anchor communities.

* * * 

Among those [legislators] targeted was Drew Darby, who represents a sprawling 10-county district in West Texas and who frames the issue in starkly regional terms: The state’s metro areas depend on his constituents to provide “food, fiber and hide,” to “tend the oil wells and wind turbines to provide electricity to people who want to be just a little cooler in the cities.” But without good public schools, these rural areas will wither. “Robert Lee, Winters, Sterling, Blackwell,” he said, listing some hamlets — “these communities exist because they have strong public schools. They would literally not exist without a good public school system.”

* * * 

“In rural Texas, there’s not a whole lot of private school options, and we want our schools to get every dollar they can. This doesn’t add $1, and it’s not good for rural Texas.”

* * * 

But in Tennessee, Todd Warner and his allies staved off the threat again this year. To overcome rural resistance, voucher proponents in the Tennessee House felt the need to constrain them and pair them with hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding for public schools, but this was at odds with the state Senate’s more straightforward voucher legislation.

Then the story circles back to Warner, the rural Tennessee Republican, with a vignette hitting on rural intergenerational roots in a place:  

For Democratic voucher opponents in the state, the alliance with Warner and other rural Republicans was as helpful as it was unusual.

* * * 

Warner remains unfazed by all this. He is pretty sure that his voucher opposition in fact helped him win his seat in 2020, after the incumbent Republican voted for a pilot voucher system limited to Nashville and Memphis. And he notes that no one has registered to challenge him in the state’s Aug. 1 primary.

Warner is quoted as saying, with a chuckle,

They tried to find a primary opponent but couldn’t.  I was born and raised here all my life. My family’s been here since the 18th century. I won’t say I can’t be beat, but bring your big-boy pants and come on, let’s go.

I'm just remembering that my most recent post on "school choice" is here, out of my home state, Arkansas.  It links to prior related posts, too.  Those posts are about school choice in the context of consolidation.  But vouchers are now also a thing in Arkansas, and a rural school advocate and patron is among the plaintiffs challenging Arkansas' new LEARNS Act, a voucher program and the product of a big push by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  Here's an October 2023 guest opinion piece in the Arkansas Times that makes the link between the LEARNS Act and the threat to rural Arkansas, "Disappearing towns: The LEARNS Act and the myth of schools as community panacea."  

My Rural Travelogue (Part XL): Esmeralda County, Nevada

Esmeralda County Seal on county vehicle behind courthouse in Goldfield
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

I got interested in Esmeralda County, Nevada (population 729) last month after reading Eli Saslow's piece in the New York Times about how conspiracy theories regarding elections have taken over there, threatening the recall of a Republican county clerk in this remote corner of The Silver State where the population density is 1 person per five square miles.  Here is an excerpt from the story, which centers on Cindy Elgan, the County Clerk, a Republican, who some residents wanted to recall once they became suspicious of her handling of the 2020 election results:  

They falsely claimed the election was stolen by voting software designed in Venezuela, or by election machines made in China. They accused George Soros of manipulating Nevada’s voter rolls. They blamed “undercover activists” for stealing ballots out of machines with hot dog tongs. They blamed the Dominion voting machines that the county had been using without incident for two decades, saying they could be hacked with a ballpoint pen to “flip the vote and swing an entire election in five minutes.” They demanded a future in which every vote in Esmeralda County was cast on paper and then counted by hand.

And when Elgan continued to stand up at each meeting to dispute and disprove those accusations by citing election laws and facts, they began to blame her, too — the most unlikely scapegoat of all. She had served as the clerk without controversy for two decades as an elected Republican, and she flew a flag at her own home that read: “Trump 2024 — Take America Back.” But lately some local Republicans had begun referring to her as “Luciferinda” or as the “clerk of the deep state cabal.” They accused her of being paid off by Dominion and skimming votes away from Trump, and even though their allegations came with no evidence, they wanted her recalled from office before the next presidential election in November.

* * *  

[Elgan] took the recall petition back into her office, and over the next several days she continued to flip through the pages in disbelief. She counted at least 130 signatures, which at first glance appeared to be enough to force a recall election if the signatures and corresponding addresses proved legitimate. 

You'll have to read the rest of the story to find out what happened with the petition. 

A place of business, apparently, in Goldfield

 So, when I drove through a few different parts of Esmeralda County a few weeks after Saslow's story appeared, the place was definitely on my radar screen.  I stopped--even amidst 100 F temperatures--to  take lots of photos.  

Esmeralda County Courthouse, Goldfield, NV
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

One of many flyers on front door of the courthouse
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Back of Esmeralda County Courthouse, presumably jail
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

A church across from the county courthouse, Goldfield
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Esmeralda County Transit 
(c) Lisa R Pruitt 2024

Public School Gymnasium, Goldfield
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Yesterday, The Daily, the NYTimes podcast, featured Saslow's story as its Sunday read, so it seemed the time was right to publish my photos of Esmeralda County and Goldfield, the tiny county seat where the vast majority of residents live in what looks like an outsider to a time warp, or maybe a twilight zone.  

Surprise:  an electric car charger at the Visitor Information Center, Goldfield
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Both NYTimes and LATimes cover the matter of electric school busses in rural America

Last December, Hailey Branson-Potts wrote this LA Times story about electric school busses in far northern California,  The dateline was Susanville, population 17,000, county seat of Lsssen County, which is about the size of Delaware, with a population density of 7.2 persons per square mile. The headline is "California is pumped about electric buses.  Rural schools say they're a pain." (The alternative headline is "California rural schools say electric buses won't work."

Dionne Searcey wrote this NY Times story about electric school busses in Nebraska, published just this week.  Her story is out of her hometown of Wymore in Gage County, population 21,000, in the more populous eastern part of the state.  Because Searcey is writing about her hometown, she frequently mentions having been in school with several of the men featured in the story.  Her headline is "A Brand New Electric Bus, No Charge. (That Was One Problem)."  The subhead is "In tiny Wymore, Neb., a sleek new battery-powered school bus became a Rorschach test for the future."

As reflected in their respective headlines, both of these stories engage the politics of the rural-urban divide, as well as the practical challenges of traversing the long distances associated with rural living and doing so with little charging infrastructure.  Here's a representative paragraph from the NYT story:

[T]he electric bus became a surrogate for far bigger issues this quiet corner of the nation is facing. In conversations in the school boardroom, at the volunteer fire hall and at the American Legion bar, the bus exposed fears of an unwelcome future, one where wind turbines tower across the flatlands, power generated by Nebraska solar farms is sent out of state and electric cars strand drivers on lonesome gravel roads.

Both pieces are well worth a read.  Here's a prior post I wrote about the federal program supplying the electric buses--and how it was playing in my hometown. 

For contrast, here's a Los Angeles Times story on the uber-urban Oakland (California) School District going all electric with its school bus fleet. 

On loss of services--aka "desertification"--as a reason for rural disgruntlement

"In the French Countryside, a Deep Discontent Takes Root" is the headline for the pre-election story by NYTimes Paris bureau chief Roger Cohen.  The subhead is "In northern Burgundy, services have collapsed and the far-right National Rally has risen."  What's striking to me about this story is the similarity between this French form of rural neglect/resentment and what we have seen in the United States of a similar ilk.   Here are some relevant quotes: 

Residents in this sparsely populated region of France — the Yonne district in northwestern Burgundy has only about 335,000 inhabitants — describe what is happening to their community as “desertification,” by which they mean an emptying out of services, and of their lives.

Schools close. Train stations close. Post offices close. Doctors and dentists leave. Cafés and small convenience stores close, squeezed by megastores. People need to go further for services, jobs and food. Many travel in their old cars but are encouraged by the authorities to switch to electric cars, which are priced way beyond their means.

At the same time, since the war in Ukraine, gas and electricity bills have shot up, leading some to switch off their heating last winter. They feel invisible and only just get by; and on their televisions they see President Emmanuel Macron explaining the critical importance of such abstract policies as European “strategic autonomy.” It is not their concern.

Along comes the National Rally, saying its focus is on people, not ideas, the purchasing power of people above all.

The story quotes National Rally party candidate Sophie-Laurence Roy, whose reference to territory I read to be linked to "place," even land. 

My party is anchored in this territory, it is not, like our president, trying to give moral lessons to the whole world.

As for the receptivity to these appeals, here is a quote from André Villiers, "a centrist allied to the party of Mr. Macron — and Ms. Roy’s opponent in Sunday’s runoff":  

Our French heartland has the feeling of being forgotten.  What you see here in the National Rally surge is anger and alienation.

Note how similar some of these thoughts are to what has been labeled rural resentment--and often dismissed as unreasonable--in the United States. Another relevant post is here.   Recall that Kathy Cramer's 2016 book about the shift in Wisconsin politics was titled The Politics of Resentment. 

The yellow vest protests of a few years ago also seem relevant.  Some posts about those protests are here.

The Guardian publishes two-part series on Los Angeles' continuing control over California's Owens Valley

Don't miss Katie Licari's excellent, in-depth reporting here and here.  She is writing about the long-term consequences of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP)'s secretly buying up Owens Valley water rights decades ago.  In short, LA DWP still owns so much land in the Owen's Valley, part of the Eastern Sierra, that both public and private entities there remain beholden to this Los Angeles entity.

The first story focuses on how LADWP is hurting private enterprise in the Owens Valley, where it is the landlord for so many businesses.  A short excerpt follows: 

The land under [Mike] Allen’s [feed and outdoor supply] store belongs to an owner 300 miles away: the city of Los Angeles, specifically its department of water and power (DWP).

LA has owned large swathes of the Owens valley, where Bishop is located, for more than a century. The city first swooped in in the early 1900s, at the dawn of California’s water wars. As the metropolis grew at breakneck speed, its leaders searched for ways to sustain that population, and when they entered the Owens valley, they found what LA lacked: plenty of water.

* * *

Today, DWP owns 90% of privately available land in Inyo county, which encompasses the Owens valley, and 30% of all the land in neighboring Mono county. Aqueducts transporting water from both counties provided 395,000 acre-feet of water to LA last year – about 73% of the city’s water supply.

Stories of LA’s brazen land grab in the Owens valley have been told for decades – it was loosely depicted in the 1974 film Chinatown. And the fierce legal battles that have ensued, including over the environmental impact, have made regional headlines for years.

But residents, business owners, and some municipal leaders in this rural region say LA’s landownership in the valley has taken on a new, and crippling, dimension in recent years.

DWP has taken steps to exert even greater control over its land holdings in the valley. An AfroLA review of hundreds of documents obtained through records requests, as well as interviews with municipal officials, residents, legal experts and business owners, reveals DWP started changing the terms of leases in 2015, and formally added restrictions on the transfer of leases from one owner to the next in 2016.

DWP’s moves have meant that hundreds of families who have built lives in the Eastern Sierra region have seen their plans upended, often being left with the stark choice of abandoning their livelihoods or fighting DWP.

The second story is about how LADWP is hurting public infrastructure, like airports, by ham stringing the ability of local government agencies to make necessary repairs and improvements.  Here's more:  

Two rural California airports that are crucial to local air ambulance services, firefighting efforts and search and rescue operations are unable to perform critical repairs, blocked by an agency 300 miles away: the city of Los Angeles.

The airports are two of several major pieces of infrastructure in California’s Owens valley left in disrepair because of LA policies, an investigation by AfroLA, the Sheet and the Guardian reveals.

Los Angeles has owned large swaths of Inyo county, where the Owens valley is located, for more than a century. With ownership of the land comes rights to its water – water that is key to servicing the thirsty metropolis of 3.8 million people. Aqueducts carrying water from Inyo and neighbouring Mono county to LA provided 73% of the city’s water supply last year.

Today the Los Angeles department of water and power (DWP) owns 90% of privately available land in Inyo county, the majority of which it leases back to the county, its residents, business owners and ranchers.

But in recent years, county officials say, DWP has refused their applications to renew long-term leases, including those for the land that includes county airports, landfills and campgrounds.

An analysis of tax records shows nearly every DWP lease held by Inyo county is expired. More than 60% of leases between the county and DWP have been expired for more than a decade, and half of those have been expired since the aughts.

Without these long-term leases, the officials say, the county cannot apply for state and federal funding that supports critical infrastructure work. With fewer than 20,000 residents and a limited tax base, the county does not have the funds to bankroll those projects itself.

A novel approach to (literally) meeting criminal justice system-involved individuals where they are

NPR reported last week from Aneth, Utah, in the state's southeast corner.  That's part of the Dine (Navajo) nation, and the story features a novel program for easing the burden of criminal justice-system involved individuals' engagement with the federal court based hours away in Salt Lake City.  The headline is "Utah, hoping for tangible results on recidivism, is looking for possible solutions."  

Tilda Wilson reports on the work of U.S Magistrate Judge, Dustin Pead and federal parole officer who are going to where the system-involved individuals are, rather than expecting the individuals to come to them, hours away in other corners of the state:  

Aneth, Utah, is a tiny town on the Navajo Nation, surrounded by a beautiful landscape of red rocks and desert. On a chilly winter morning, it was just starting to rain at the Aneth Chapter House, a sort of reservation town hall. Today, U.S. magistrate Judge Dustin Pead is holding court here.

DUSTIN PEAD: The district is quite large. We don't have a probation officer located in the area.

WILSON: Pead drove six hours to be here, about 350 miles from the federal courthouse in Salt Lake City. He comes down once a month to check in on people under court supervision. In Salt Lake, there's a lot more drug and mental health treatment available to help people when they get out of prison. Out here, those things are hard to come by. Pead says it makes sense that it's so much more difficult to get out of bad patterns of crime. So nine years ago, Pead started bringing court to the reservation, traveling with probation officers, a prosecutor and a public defender. It's called Tribal Community Reentry Court.

PEAD: It would be the first reentry court that we had heard of that would actually travel to people instead of having people travel to the court.

WILSON: Pead, the lawyers and probation officers are able to spend face-to-face time building rapport with each supervisee and their loved ones.

PEAD: I want them to have trust that we want them to grow. I'm not waiting to catch them in a violation. So for me, that's frequently calling them by their first name, giving accolades, knowing them, knowing their family, communicating with their family during court.

WILSON: It's working. The federal court says the recidivism rate has dropped to just 6% for people who participate in the Tribal Reentry Court. Cordell Wilson is a parole officer who has been working on the Navajo Nation since 2002. He's based 5 1/2 hours away in St. George. He used to only be able to visit people on the Navajo Nation every three months or so when something went wrong. Now visiting monthly, Wilson says he's able to build trust with the people he works with. He says it works a lot better.

Literary Ruralism (Part XLVII): Kent Haruf's "The Tie that Binds"

Kent Haruf's 1984 novel, The Tie that Binds, leads with something of a contrast--or perhaps it's a more  subtle distinction--between rural and urban.  The opening paragraph also introduces one of the principal characters, Edith Goodnough, whose life the novel chronicles from her birth.  Indeed, it goes farther back still, to her parents' migration from Iowa to eastern Colorado and the fictitious small town of Holt, where all of Haruf's novels are set: 

EDITH GOODNOUGH isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there in that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bud Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough. (p. 1)

Sheriff Sealy--representing "the law" plays roles throughout the novel.  He is a peer, for example, of the narrator, Sanders Roscoe.  

(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2011
Kilmarnock, Virginia 

Early on in the novel, Roscoe is visited by a journalist from the Denver Post, and this exchange ensues: 

“Mr. Roscoe,” he says. “I’m Dick Harrington. With the Post.” 

“That so?” I say. “I hope you’re not selling anything.” 

“No,” he says. “The Denver Post. It’s a newspaper. Maybe you’ve heard of it.” 

“Sure. I’ve heard of it,” I say. “But we keep it out on the back porch where we scrape our boots, so we don’t have to track cow into the kitchen.” Then I throw my head back and laugh. “It saves throw rugs,” I tell him. 

But he doesn’t think that’s real funny; he looks at me like How can I be so dumb and live? Guys like him think they drive the 150 miles out here due east from Denver and when they get here we don’t know anything. They think they have to educate us poor dumb country bastards. They think we don’t know what the Denver Post is. We know all right. We just don’t give a damn. (p. 6) 

How interesting that Haruf offered this observation four decades ago because it's surely even more true now--this assumption that rural folks are stupid.  I am reminded of this recent empirical academic work by Michael Carolan of Colorado State University.  It documents the annoyance of rural Coloradans at their urban counterparts, an annoyance born of feeling unseen and unappreciated.  

The Tie that Binds also features this comparison of rural and urban teens' experiences; it also acknowledges the role of generational change. This excerpt features Edith Goodnough as a teen, along with her younger brother Lyman. 

BUT if Edith and Lyman had been city kids, things might have been different. City kids, even in 1915, had some opportunities to escape which farm kids didn’t have. City kids could take off and walk ten or fifteen blocks or jump on a trolley car going across town and end up as far away from home as if they were in another state entirely, another country even. Then they could make their mark, or not make it, and start their life over or end it, but whatever happened, at least the ties would have been cut, the limits of home would have been broken.

Or if Edith and Lyman had been country kids living now, alive and howling in the 1970s, things might have been different too. It’s TV and movie shows and high school and 3.2 beer and loud music and paved highways and fast cars (and what goes on and comes off too in the back seats of those cars, until maybe Bud Sealy shines his flashlight in through the side windows)—it’s all those things and more that country kids have now, and you can’t tell a farm kid from a town kid, even with a program. They’re just about all the same, all alike in their cars, driving up and down Main Street every Saturday night, honking and howling, in Holt, Colorado. 

But Edith and Lyman didn’t have those things, those chances and opportunities to escape. They were farm kids in the second decade of this violent century, and they were stuck. Their mother died early, like I’ve already said; their father was Roy Goodnough, and even if he was a raging madman sometimes, even if he yelled too much at them, he was still their father.  (p. 52-53)

I am not certain I agree with Haruf that city kids and country kids are now so indistinguishable... but I did love this novel, not least for its intimate, small-town setting.  

Holt is said to be based on Yuma, Colorado, where Haruf once lived.  Interestingly, Yuma was in the news yesterday because of a hail storm there on Monday.

Art Cullen turns his attention to rural poverty

This is from Cullen's Substack today, "Iowa's unique sort of rural poverty."  Cullen recently traveled to New Orleans and back from northern Iowa (and he did so in an electric Ford pick up truck, no less).  Here's a rumination that begins as he passed from northeast Arkansas into southeast Missouri.  

Coming from relatively prosperous Iowa, I continue to be stunned by the scenes of grinding rural poverty when you get off the freeways and revisit Hwy. 61 or its cousins.

Drive the edge of gorgeous Mark Twain National Forest enroute from Jonesboro, Ark., to the Gateway to the Ozarks, Poplar Bluff, Mo., where the downtown is dead empty on a Saturday afternoon but for an open sports bar with no customers. A sign on the bar proclaims it is doing what it can to save the downtown.

The action is out on the highway in a town of 16,000 whose population steadily declined since 1980, set in the prettiest hills you could behold.

Shacks line the road in Arkansas, Black and White folks. You see the same in South Dakota off Interstate 90 (substitute Native American for Black), or in eastern Colorado, or in a Kansas cowtown time and progress passed by.

You get back to Iowa where the farmsteads look better, the dirt blacker, the machinery shinier. Yet the rust sets in here, too.

Nationally, the rural poverty rate is about 15% compared to an urban rate of about 11%. Those statistics do not reflect the extremes you see in the little burgs waylaid by the freeways.

Cullen goes on to offer further comparisons of that Arkansas/Missouri area to northwest Iowa, where he lives,  The entire post is well worth a read, not least for its discussion of the significance of immigration and race--and, of course, what freeways have done to downtowns, including those like Poplar Bluff. 

Developers of proposed new Bay Area city gather enough signatures to get re-zoning on November ballot

Solano County, California (April, 2024)
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

The Associated Press reported last week that California Forever, the group associated with secretly buying up farm land in southeastern Solano County, California (population 453,000), on the periphery of the San Francisco Bay Area, has garnered sufficient signatures to have placed on the November ballot whether the land can be re-zoned urban to permit its development.  Read more of the background on this matter here, here, and here.  A short excerpt from the AP story follows:  

Rio Vista Youth and Community Hall
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

A wealthy Silicon Valley-backed campaign to build a green city for up to 400,000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area has submitted what it says are enough signatures to qualify the initiative for the November election.

The campaign submitted more than 20,000 signatures but would need only about 13,000 valid ones to qualify for the ballot. If verified by Solano County’s elections office, voters will decide in the fall whether to allow urban development on land currently zoned for agriculture. The land-use change would be necessary for the development to be built.

Child visitors to the sales office express
their desires for the new community 
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader who heads the company behind the campaign, California Forever, said at a news conference Tuesday that he heard from thousands of people who want careers and homes in the county where they grew up but can no longer afford because of high housing costs and a lack of nearby work.

I had the opportunity in early April to travel to the parts of Solano County that will be most affected if this new development moves forward.  Those areas include the town of Rio Vista (population 7,360), on the Sacramento River Delta, and along the Montezuma Hills.  I found Rio Vista to be a charming town with one of the most appealing (and highly utilized) small public libraries I've ever visited, among other amenities.  The town also has a pharmacy that isn't part of a national chain, which I thought was pretty cool.  Plus, there are small eateries and an auto body shop with a prime location on the waterfront.  

Poster in California Forever sales office, 
also featured in brochures
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Though it was not well publicized and not on my car's GPS, I did find the California Forever office in downtown Rio Vista--having taken up residence in the city's old Vista Cinema on Main Street.  Two California Forever employees were there, one who self-identified as a salesman.   They are collecting wish lists for community amenities, and I took a few photos of those lists--including one from what visiting children wanted.  (I list some of these at the bottom of the post).  

The salesman chatted me up about the project, noting that many residents of Rio Vista support it because, currently, there is "nothing" for their grandkids job-wise and in terms of activities.   If the city is built, it will provide not only jobs, but also many amenities for Rio Vista residents.  The salesman said some amenities are currently available to residents of Liberty and Trilogy, two nearby planned communities, but that the new city will make facilities and amenities available to those living in nearby Rio Vista. 

I raised with the salesman the issue of the lawsuit California Forever brought against some area landowners who had refused to sell and been accused of price-fixing.  He said those sued by California Forever were not family farmers but instead were large corporate farms--basically "BigAg."  I disputed that based on my personal acquaintance with one of those land-owning families.

California Forever Sales Office in Rio vista
in former Vista Theatre
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

At the end of my visit, the salesman asked me if I was on board with the project, and I told him I was still undecided, but generally skeptical.  I'd already explained to him that I didn't live in Solano County and so could not vote on the anticipated ballot initiative.  

Here are some bullet points/highlights from the brochure I picked up at the California Forever sales office.  

Windborn Church,
Main Street
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt

The farmland in "East Solano County today" is "Rated among the worst for agriculture in all of Solano County." (I wonder about the quality of that farm land generally, in comparison to 

Auto Repair in Rio Vista
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

• The community California Forever wishes to build is a "new future for East Solano County, a new community for all of us." 
• "Middle-class neighborhoods.  Safe, walkable, and affordable.  $400 million in downpayment assistance for Solano County residents."
• "Good local new jobs.  15,000 new local jobs in manufacturing, services and technology paying $88,000 a year or more"
• "Parks and green space.  4,000 acres of park, trails and habitats.  The project affects less than 2% of Solano County's current agricultural production." 
• "Rio Vista Parkland.  A new 712-acre park between the new community and Rio Vista." 
• "Downtowns.  Major offices, entertainment, arts, shops, cafes, locally owned restaurants, apartment buildings and more"
• New Employers Zone.  New Manufacturing jobs and technology research labs in defense and other important industries.  A way to bring new employers and the good jobs of the future to Solan County."

Entrance to Marina
(c) L.R. Pruitt 2024

• Maker zones.  Workshops, art studios, and ohter light industrial spaces.  Also restaurants and entertainment, and loft-style homes."
• Open Space.  The plan requires at least 4,000 acres of parks and open spaces aligned with natural features, distributed across the new community, programmed with a variety of playgrounds, parks, and shared spaces for all ages and activities.
• Solar sheep are happy sheep.  Solar panels and grazing sheep make for great friends. The sheep happily eat the grass, greatly reducing wildfire hazards and  keeping weeks off the solar panels, as well as creating income for sheep farmers so they to rely less on meat sales.  The shade from the panels help the sheep stay cooler, rest more and experience less heat stress.  (This one incudes a reference:  New Scientist Magazine 2/1/2023)
• Solano Jobs Guarantee.  All new community growth beyond 50K residents is frozen, unless the new community creates at least 15K new jobs.  And each new job must be a good job, paying at least 125% of the average wage in Solano County (about $88K a year today).

Sign at Montezuma Hills area
along Highway 12
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

• Solano Homes for All.  We will provide $400 million to help Solano residents buy home sin the new community, and to build more affordable homes.  If $300 million is allocated to down payment assistance, that's enough to help 6K Solano families buy homes with a $50K each down payment grant.
• Solano Scholarships.  The new community will bring good new jobs.  To prepare, we will provide $70 million in funing to help Solano residents pay for vocational training, college, or to start or expand a small business.  

  

  Riverview Middle School
  Rio Vista, California
  Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

  
  
• Green Solano.  We are providing $80 million in community-benefits funding for public parks and trails, open space and natural habitats.  This funding will also help support Solano's agriculture economy, including family farms and workers.  We are exciting to work with the Solano community to help identify priorities for this funding, to nurture our county's strong connections to its lands.  
• Solano Downtowns.  We believe in investing in all areas of Solano--both in the new community in East Solano and in Solano's existing cities.  Why not just invest in existing cities?  We need more room for homes families can afford and for new industries.  We will provide $200 million in new investment in building and renovating homes, offices,  shops, and other mixed use projects in the downtown areas of Benicia, Dixon, Fairfield, Rio Vista, Suisun City, Vacaville, and Vallejo.  
• Smart Growth Guarantee.  Our initial commitments are to provide $500 million in community-benefits funding and $200 million for investments in Solano Downtowns over the build-out towards $50,000 residents.  But our commitment to Solano does not end there.  If our community grow beyond 50,000 residents, all of these financial commitments will continue to scale up in proportion to the growth of our community.  We are excited to grow with Solano, and be a good neighbor for generations to come. 

Downtown Rio Vista
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Water Guarantee. Before a brick is laid, we guarantee to provide our water supplies through the highly regulated and state-mandated Water Supply Assessment and Water Supply Verification process.  Regulated closely by the State of California, this process requires us to prove we can deliver water to the new community for many decades going forward, including through drought periods. 

• Transportation Guarantee.  We will provide right of way for upgrades for Highway 12 and 113, including the Rio Vista and Dixon bypass, and we will pay above our proportionate share to fund these upgrades.  
• Schools Guarantee.  We are required to ensure that new schools are ready in our new community when first residents move in. That way parens and teachers an be sure that existing schools are not overly burdened with new students.  Our schools remain in the existing school districts, but we will ensure that new schools are ready by the time the first children move in. We want the new community to be a big win for public education in Solano County.
• Solano Taxpayer Guarantee.  We will pay our own way through the significant tax revenue we will generate as the new city gains residents.  The initiative guarantees no new cost to Solano taxpayers, except to those new residents who live in the new community. 

Wind turbines and gravel road running 
South from Highway 12 between I-80 & Rio Vista
area known as Montezuma Hills
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

A significant part of one 12-page brochure addresses nearby Travis Air Force Base and a buffer zone that will lie between it and the new community. 

Til this weekend, the only billboard I'd seen promoting California Forever was on eastbound I-80 in Solano County, and it touted the 15K jobs paying more than $88K.  Then, on May 5, traveling westbound on I-80 , I saw one touting the $400 million in downpayment assistance for Solano County residents.  

Among the items on the crowd-sourced list of amenities folks had written on giant note pads in the sales office   

• Music events, dining destinations, emphasis on nature in the community
• Affordable housing--not market rate
• Smart growth
• Movie theatres (good for teens)
• Let's re-create our normal!
• Medical Center
• Big Box retailers
• Preserve wetlands
• Widen Highway 12 from Suisun
• Satellite junior college campus
• Archeological recognition (Native Americans)
• Nightclub!!!
• Chain Hotel (Nice!)
• Elderly/Alzheimers dementia care facility (home) with 24/7 nurse on site
• Quality restaurants on the water front

On the kids list, one wrote, "If I had my own city, I would want a dirt bike track, a Walmart, and lots of houses."  The child included a drawing of this place, complete with a dirt bike track and a church, along with a Walmart and several houses. 

Crowd-sourced list of desired amenities
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

California Forever has three sales offices in addition to the one in Rio Vista; the others are in Vacaville, Vallejo, and Fairfield.  

"When you say 'California,' rural is not one of the adjectives that comes readily to mind."

Near the San Bernardino and Kern County line
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

That is one of the most memorable comments from today's Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) event, "Spotlight on Rural California."  It was made by PPIC president and CEO, Tani Cantil-Sakayue, former Chief Justice of the State of California, and it's one I appreciate given how difficult it seems to be to draw attention to rural issues, rural people, rural needs here in the Golden State.  It's an issue I've written about occasionally here on the blog, but more commonly ranted about verbally to friends and anyone who would listen.  One problem with people not thinking about the rural character of big swaths of California is that rural places don't command legislators' and policymakers' attention.  They don't seem important in the scheme of all the other things going on economically and culturally in the Golden State, but if the speakers are today's event are to be believed, rural California is absolutely critical to the success of its more urban counterparts.   

Wind turbines over Tehachapi Pass, Kern County
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Thus I found this event really helpful and hopeful, a sort of bridge-building affair.  It featured Cantil-Sakayue in conversation with California Assemblyman and Republican leader James Gallagher (R) of Yuba City, one-on-one. Cantil-Sakayue then convened a panel that included California State Senator Shannon Grove (R) of Bakersfield, Chris Lopez of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors and Chair of Rural County Representatives of California, and Ashley Swearengen, Executive Director of the Central Valley Community Foundation.  I found all to be excellent and thoughtful speakers and advocates for rural California and what the state's rural reaches need.  All touched in one way or another on how rural places support and prop up urban areas, but in ways that typically go unseen, unacknowledged.     

The themes that came up over and over again were

• Rural and urban interdependence:  the food, fuel and fiber supplied by rural California, including green energy that comes from places like Kern County and permits urban areas like Los Angeles to claim green designations (see photo above of wind turbines over Tehachapi pass).  Grove asserted that 52% of California's clean energy comes from her district.  She mentioned, for example, a 6,000 acre solar installment, something you "can't put in Santa Monica," she quipped.
• The closure of rural hospitals and the threat of more closures, as well as other geographic inequities in health care.  As Grove mentioned, for example, the hospital in Ridgecrest recently closed its labor and delivery unit, a move that has national security implications because of nearby Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake.  She says that installation won't be able to attract young talent without health care access.  The nearest hospital with labor and delivery is 70 miles away, and those are not an easy 70 miles, Grove noted, with a ravine off to one side and a granite all on the other.  

  

  The number of Tesla superchargers in Mojave 
  may be the highest per capita in California.  
  (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

  
  
• The cost of living for all California families, including rural families, who tend to face non-negotiable transportation costs--to work, the grocery stores, and such.   They don't have the option of public transportation, and electric vehicle technology and infrastructure are not fully viable there--at least not yet.  The housing shortage was also addressed; Lopez, for example, mentioned thousands of industry-built units for farmworkers near Salinas, behind what he called "the lettuce curtain."  The rising cost of insurance--"if you can get it," Gallagher noted, is another concern.  
• The significance of green energy infrastructure--such as those thousands of acres of solar panels (noted above) and hydrogen-fueled airplanes being developed in Mojave.  (I wondered why there were so many Tesla chargers in Mojave--dozens of them--when I drove through last month; perhaps energy is especially cheap there and Tesla wants good charging infrastructure en route to Death Valley and other other remote points up Hwy 395 into the Eastern Sierra).
• The need for regional collaborations between rural and urban places.
• The struggle to staff rural law enforcement; Grove noted that only one law enforcement officer serves the entire "west side" of her district.  (I'd be interested to know where that officer is based, but I notice that the town of Maricopa, south of Taft, is the western-most point in Grove's district).
• The importance of rural tourism to California's economy--as well as its unrealized potential, including in the north state. 

I will come back with more details in a future post, but I wanted to provide at least this teaser, for now, about an event I found encouraging, an event that left me optimistic than I typically am about rural California's future and the possibility that state government might invest in it. 

Are rural places getting more than their fair share from metros? A report from Minnesota

That's the gist of this Minnesota Reformer piece headlined, "Twin cities metro sends money to rural counties."  Madison McVan reports: 

A common refrain from Minnesota Republicans goes something like this: Rural communities are overtaxed, underfunded and ignored by legislators. Greater Minnesota sends their tax dollars to the Twin Cities, where metro residents benefit from government programs.

At a Nov. 15 event in New Ulm, Republican State Sen. Gary Dahms repeated the sentiments that have fueled the kinds of outstate Republican campaigns that helped them win the Minnesota House a decade ago:

“If you look at the money that’s collected in rural Minnesota, for gas tax and things like that, we do not get our fair share for transportation. If you look at health care, we do not get our fair share for health care,” Dahms said, according to the New Ulm Journal. “It really shows up in education, when you see what we get per student, versus what the seven-county metro area … there is a major, major difference there.”

It’s a sweeping argument that plays into the state’s often bitterly divided partisan and geographic politics, which have become deeply intertwined during the past decade, with Republicans dominating greater Minnesota while the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has locked down the metro. It also simplifies a complicated web of tax and revenue distributions — and it’s factually untrue.

Department of Revenue data show that the Twin Cities metro is the state’s biggest driver of tax revenue, and rural counties benefit more than the metro area from government aid.

Twin Cities metro residents paid an average of $4,362 in taxes and received $3,252 in aid and credits per capita in 2019, according to analysis by the Minnesota House Research Department. In the non-metro area counties the same year, residents paid an average of $2,871 per person in taxes and received $3,423 in state aid and credits per capita.

That the 7-county metro would contribute more to Minnesota’s overall tax base isn’t surprising, nor complicated: The metro has more people, its jobs pay more, and the property values are higher. Because both income and property taxes are progressive — the more you make and the more your house is worth, the more you pay — the metro’s contribution is larger.

Kelly Asche of the Center for Rural Policy and Development speaks to the higher costs facing rural programs, which tend to be "less efficient when people are spread out."  She said, 

In a rural area, we are fighting against the economies of scale. It is the rural enemy to be efficiently run.

Read more analysis of what rural Minnesota needs here, with accompanying map here.

This is, of course, an old debate.  In California, for example, we hear it in relation to the would-be State of Jefferson when people ridicule the notion that Jefferson would be better off separate from California, given that these rural counties get more from the state coffers than they pay in.

We usually see this rural v. urban funding debate play out at the federal level--that is, which states get more than their fair share.  I wrote about that most recently here.   

Amtrak: carrying more than passengers

Last week, Tony Pipa spoke at the UC Davis School of Law in a talk titled "Creating Sustainable, Equitable Rural Prosperity in the U.S.: Opportunities and Challenges for Federal Policy." Part of the conversation was about transportation to rural communities. You can read more about rural transportation here and here.

Transportation inequality is stark for those living in rural places in the U.S. "Federal transportation policy and funding programs heavily favor new highway and interchange construction." While this type of investment can make it easier for people to get to rural places and engage in ecotourism, for example, it doesn't encourage spending time in the rural communities themselves. 

Those living in rural communities are more reliant on cars to get around compared to those living in urban places. For instance, in 2019 rural residents drove 33% more miles than urban residents as 1,200 counties in the U.S. do not have access to public transportation. As a result, rural fatalities accounted for 49% of all traffic fatalities nationwide. 

Since airlines and bus companies have been cutting services to small towns for decades, the value of Amtrak in these rural communities cannot be overstated. Amtrak provides numerous benefits to residents and travelers regarding ease of use, safe transport, and economic prosperity. In 2015, Amtrak's long-distance services transported 4.5 million passengers, many of whom lived in places without other reliable transportation options. Over 2.5 million people say they can only travel with Amtrak services. 

From 1972 (Amtrak's first full year of operation) to 2019, passenger numbers went from 16.6 million to 32.5 million, even with route mileage shrinking by 1600 during the same period. Recently, Amtrak trains serving rural Virginia have had a 13% increase in riders between 2013 and 2019. In 2019, Montana mayors were asked what effect losing their Amtrak service, the Empire Builder, would have on their people, and all responded "devastating." 

Previously, Amtrak considered a plan to break up their Southwest Chief Service (which travels from Chicago to Los Angeles over a 40-hour journey). If the plan to break up this service had gone through, 32 universities would have lost train service along with 47 hospitals. Another way of expressing the impact is to note that 130,000 auto trips would have been added— and on roads four times more dangerous than the national average. These roads run alongside rural and small communities with the lowest median income across the entire corridor. 

Amtrak services often benefit rural communities economically. A Rail Passengers Association study reported in 2019 that the Southwest Chief brings in $180 million in direct and indirect activity to Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico.   

In Cut Bank, Montana, population 3,056, all together, residents pay $12,000 via federal income tax for their Amtrak service. That $12,000 investment results in $327,000 in benefits for the town.

This economic prosperity is partly due to the jobs Amtrak brings to rural places. Amtrak directly employs thousands of workers who reside in rural areas, which in turn provides millions of dollars in wages. Amtrak also employs subcontractors in these areas for manufacturing, equipment, and infrastructure work. 

In addition to employment, Amtrak services allow people to visit isolated places like those in Northwestern Montana, which boosts these regions' tourism economy. Even if people are just traveling through small towns on their way from Chicago to Los Angeles, for example, the nature of train service draws people towards new areas where passengers can wander around during long stops, supporting local vendors. 

Rural towns are aware of the benefits train travel has on their small communities and have invested in it. Meridan, Mississippi, population 39,000, invested $7.5 million on a new Amtrak station with another $200 million invested within the 3 blocks surrounding the station in the last 20 years. In Normal, Illinois, a $49.5 million grant created $220 million. However, due to shortages in funding for grants, "the burden frequently falls on towns for infrastructure and station costs."

Providing rural towns with reliable public transportation has ripple effects that benefit people in them, the economic health of the area, and even those living in urban areas who have an opportunity to visit places they might not have ever heard about. While Amtrak service in the U.S. has a long way to go before its positive impact can reach all of America, it currently provides a lifeline to many rural communities.