Rural China especially vulnerable to "dark COVID winter"

Emily Feng reports for NPR this afternoon.  Here are some excerpts that illustrate the problem: 

As COVID-19 spreads largely unchecked from Beijing to Shanghai, China is bracing for a second surge, jumpstarted by millions of people who are planning holiday travel from cities back to their rural villages, where the health care system is far patchier.

"I really don't think the village doctors, or even the township or county hospital, can handle the increased number of severe cases," says Huan Wang, a researcher at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions. "I think the rural villagers are just left on their own in a dark COVID winter."

As the Lunar New Year approaches, health officials are concerned the celebrations could turn into superspreader events, catching rural systems off guard and driving up infections in a country where natural immunity is nearly non-existent and vaccine hesitancy has remained stubbornly high among the older population.

* * * 

However, the strain China's on countryside is already evident as medicine shortages hit rural pharmacies. On Chinese social media, rural residents have been asking for donations, posting pictures of ransacked pharmacy shelves devoid of fever and pain medication. Some of the medication has been diverted to cities, which were initially hardest-hit by the surge and where supplies first ran out.

"People from the cities have been coming over and buying all of our medicines, or they'll order online and have our pharmacies mail it over to them," says Li Qian, a recent college graduate, who lives in a village in China's southern Jiangsu province. She worries most about her asthmatic grandparents; the nearest hospital, she says, is two hours away.

* * *

Last Thursday, China's national health commission said it was accelerating the expansion of fever treatment clinics – where patients can get quick medical consultations and supplies from a pharmacy — to cover 90% of rural areas to prepare them for the anticipated increase.

The audio has some information not in the transcript, so it's worth a listen.  

Postscript:  Here's a mid-January 2023 story from the Washington Post speculating about the impact Lunar New Year travel will have on the pandemic in China, again because many will travel from urban to rural areas to mark the holiday.

Law and order in the Ozarks (Part CXXXVI): My hometown prepares for the 2024 eclipse

I've been aware for several years that Newton County, Arkansas (population 8,330), where I grew up, will be in the path of totality of the Great North American Eclipse of April 2024.  I made my reservation for lodging more than six months ago when no premium was being charged for rooms during this period, perhaps because the owners of the cabin were unaware of what was going to happen on that date nearly two years off.  I'd started nagging an area dude ranch to let me make a reservation two and a half years in advance, following up two years in advance, but they turned me away because it was a full year outside their usual window of booking.  They were so unbending that I wondered if they were completely unaware of the eclipse and the onslaught of requests that were sure to pour in at some point.  Thus I moved on to other, more flexible vendors.  

More recently, it's been interesting to see my hometown newspaper begin to cover plans for the event.  This story a few weeks ago was headlined, Cost of eclipse is a concern.   Here's the bulk of the story, which serves as a sort of laundry list of things a locality has to think about when expecting a big influx of visitors, a particular challenge when a locale has so little infrastructure and so little developed human capital: 

The Newton County Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC) met Nov. 14 to discuss the preparations that will be involved, but one question remained when the meeting ended. How much will the eclipse cost?

At this early date there are no funds budgeted for the eclipse. Kim Williams, named 2024 Eclipse project manager for Arkansas Tourism, spoked to local business owners in Jasper last October and said it is assumed the governor could release some state funds prior to the eclipse.

The LEPC is a non-funded coalition that works to help the county's planned response to emergencies. Byron Mann, pastor of the Jasper Methodist Church, serves as the chairman. He said while a lot of visitors are anticipated it's important to make sure the residents are taken care of and given information about the eclipse they need to know.

"We need to figure out the best way to gather information and to disburse it," Mann said. That should start in January 2024 with regular mailings. Organizations represented on the LEPC may be asked to help with the expenses of printing and mailing.

Jasper Postmaster Ken Fry said the post office offers Every Door Direct Mail service. It is the least expensive costing about 18 cents per flat piece. He recommended not doing it until the final month. He advised using fliers and handing them out at different locations and using social media before making mail outs.

The key focus is going to be water, fuel, groceries and medicine, Mann said. Residents will need to stock up on these items which will be in short supply after thousands of people suddenly arrive. The worst case scenario, due to the influx of vehicles on local roads and highways, is nobody is going to be able to move, unless you walk or ride a four-wheeler, Mann said. The residents who live in the county will be limited on access to town and won't be able to make their regular shopping trips.

"The pharmacy really needs to be on board on this," Mann emphasized. People need to have their medications in hand or in house a week to 10 days prior to the eclipse because they may not be available.

Not only will people be coming for the eclipse, but this is prime floating season on the Buffalo National River, Mann reminded, along with being in Arkansas's tornado season.

Mann said of an incident that happened in town the prior weekend when some computer lines went down and stores couldn't accept debit or credit cards. What could happen if the local digital transmission systems are overwhelmed. Can the communications utilities handle it?

Mitch Brasel, of Ritter Communications in Jasper, said "we never had it happen before." He said the credit card problem was an issue beyond the local service.

Tim Koren, a board member of the Ozark Mountain Regional Public Water Authority, said he is concerned cell phone towers will be unable to meet demand for service. He said the companies that utilize the few local towers don't appear to understand the trouble customers have accessing service.

Toinette Madison, director of the Newton County Chamber of Commerce, said her organization has been bringing awareness to local businesses. Because Jasper will be in totality it will likely draw not only people just outside the area, but could draw people from as far away as Tulsa, Oklahoma. "We just don't know," she said. Businesses can prepare for the people who make advance reservations for accommodations. It 's those who come unannounced that the area has to be prepared for.

Margie Rutledge, information technology manager for the Jasper School District, asked about the costs to the city or the county. She asked if the city has money for events such as this.

Mayor Jan Larson said overnight rental businesses only pay sales taxes, there are no special fees or taxes collected by the city. There is a bed tax tbut that revenue goes to state tourism.

Rutledge also asked, who's going to foot the bill for clean-up? What if we have 10,000-20,000 people come in and leave behind their trash?

The county handles the city's trash, Larson said. She did not know the capacity of the county's solid waste transfer station.

Larson also noted the need for facilities for dumping liquid waste from the number of travel trailers that might arrive.

The city has only one dump station at Bradley Park.

Mann said he has heard people are already having to go out of state to reserve portable toilets.

Shane Kilgore, Newton county OEM manager, suggested charging additional fees for waste removal. Particularly people who will allow camping or parking on their property. They will be liable for clean-up. He said he believed the county's transfer station is capable of meeting the demand, but it might require hiring additional workers temporarily or working overtime.

Sheriff Glenn Wheeler was asked if his office has began planning to meet the increased demand for law enforcement.

He said he has begun contacting the National Park Service, the US Forest Service and the Arkansas State Police for possible assistance. "We started those wheels turning, but haven't got very far." He said he can also reach out to other counties for help if the need arises.

Will Jasper School have classes that day? Jasper Fire chief Pam Emerson asked.

Rutledge said school will not be in session that Monday. No decision has been made about Tuesday.

"Everybody knows we have a little time, but that window is going to close pretty fast. We don't want to get caught a month out and not know what to do," Mann said.

Here's a more recent story about what the Buffalo National River is doing to prepare for the eclipse.  The headline is "Park service prepares for the eclipse," but the story suggests that the federal agency is doing little to prepare.  Here's an excerpt:

Discussions continued at the Dec. 12 LEPC meeting that was attended by NPS staff members Justin Gibbs and and Casey Johannsen. They explained Buffalo National River hasn't made any specific plans as yet due to the park service does not make reservations for camping facilities no sooner than six months ahead of time. However, the pavilion at the Oark Campground near Jasper can be reserved a year ahead of time.

National Parks in other parts of the county have experienced eclipses in the past, they said, and protocols will be announced and followed at the Buffalo National River. They acknowledged the eclipse will come when floaters are attracted to the river at that prime time of year.

Newton County Justice of the Peace Arlis Jones attended the meeting. He was looking for more specific information about how many visitors the county will have, how traffic will be routed and the costs associated with clean-up afterward. He endorsed a heavy presence of law enforcement and local volunteers to police for littering and taking down license plate numbers.

He also said he would ask the quorum court to petition the state for additional funding to cope with the eclipse aftermath.

Newton County Chief Deputy Sheriff Mike Blocker said state and federal law enforcement will be busy within their own jurisdictions and that Newton County will have to rely mostly on its staffs, reserve officers and in most cases volunteers who can help direct traffic and assist wherever they can.

Jasper Fire Chief Pam Emerson said she plans to station some emergency vehicles to the north and south of Jasper to try to reduce response times to calls while the roads closer to the city are expected to have more traffic on them.

* * *

Besides roads, other infrastructure may also be pushed to capacity. Jacob Collins, director of the Jasper Public Works Department, said he felt the Jasper water system can meet the demands. He said there is a small number of public restrooms, which is a good thing because it is unlikely the wastewater plant would be compromised.

Legal Scholarship: Localizing minimum wage laws: a rural perspective

Travis Andrews published this essay in the Cornell Law Review Online.  The abstract follows: 

Since launching in 2012, the Fight for 15 movement has successfully lobbied for a $15 per hour minimum wage in many urban localities. Today, more than 50 localities have their own minimum wage laws that set a rate higher than state or national pay floors. Two of the primary justifications for raising the minimum wage are based on a nationwide surge in income inequality and the inability of a full‑time minimum‑wage employee to earn enough money to keep a family above the poverty line.

A significant amount of legal scholarship has examined whether localities have or should have the ability to pass minimum wage ordinances. The common theme in most scholarship is the focus on cities—which makes sense, given that the movement for a higher minimum wage has been mostly confined to urban areas. But remarkably little attention has been paid to the reverse issue: whether across‑the‑board minimum wage hikes, based on urban areas’ high cost of living and income inequality, are necessary or desirable in nonurban areas. Recent proposals by congressional Democrats and the Biden administration to increase the federal minimum wage ignore the impact of uniformly raising the minimum wage on rural small businesses and employment—a problem that Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has hinted at in his opposition to a $15 per hour minimum wage. Of course, it is not only Democrats who support increasing the minimum wage. In fact, nearly one-third of Republican voters support a higher minimum wage, and voters in Republican-leaning Florida approved a ballot initiative in 2020 to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2026.

This Essay addresses some of the issues that universal minimum wage rates pose for rural areas. A modest hike in the minimum wage for all workers is debatable; what seems less justifiable are the calls for a $15 per hour minimum wage in nonurban areas, which generally have less income inequality and a much lower cost of living than the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. Herein lies the problem with minimum wage laws as we have come to know them: they are one‑size‑fits‑all prescriptions, whether at the national or state level. This model ignores the vast differences in the economies of nonurban and urban areas. Put simply, a blanket minimum wage, whether federal or statewide, risks disproportionately harming growth and employment in nonurban areas—particularly as these communities try to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

This Essay contains three sections. Part I argues why the common justifications for a significant minimum wage increase are weaker in nonurban areas. Part II explains why nonurban areas are likely to be disproportionately and negatively affected by a large increase in the national or state minimum wage. Part III concludes with a few brief proposals for creating more precise minimum wage laws.

Encyclopedia of Rural Crime published today

The editors of this volume from Bristol University Press are Alistair Harkness, Jessica Rene Peterson,  Matt Bowden, Cassie Pedersen, and Joe Donnermyer.  Here's the link on amazon, and the brief overview follows: 

The key reference guide to rural crime and rural justice, this encyclopedia includes 85 concise and informative entries covering rural crime theories, offences and control. It is divided into five complementary sections: 

• theories of rural crime;

• rural crime studies; 

• rural criminal justice studies; 

• rural people and groups; 

• rural criminological research. 

With contributions from established and emerging international scholars, this authoritative guide offers state-of-the-art synopses of the key issues in rural crime, criminology, offending and victimisation, and both institutional and informal responses to rural crime.

Tom Vilsack on rural-urban interdependence

U.S. Department of Agriculture Tom Vilsack tweeted this today.  It is, at least implicitly, a reminder of rural-urban interdependence.  I like it!  

Also, I'll just note that this interdependence is a theme of Ann Eisenberg's forthcoming paper in the Richmond Law Review, "Rural as Commons." It is also a theme of my forthcoming paper (with Kaceylee Klein), "Rural Bashing."  We will be presenting these papers at the University of Richmond Law Review symposium in mid February 2023.

On politics in California's Imperial Valley

This LA Times column by Jean Guerrero, out of Imperial County, California, speaks to what Democrats need to do to attract the Latino/a vote there, on the Mexico border.  Here's the lede:

For Democrats who mistake demographics for destiny, Imperial County is a mystery. It’s California’s most heavily Latino county, and yet Republicans have been making gains here.

This isn’t south Texas, where former President Trump’s appeal was rooted in cowboy-idolizing Tejano culture. This is Southern California. The GOP’s allure here is more complicated.

About 200 miles southeast of Los Angeles, the still-blue county does have similarities to the Rio Grande Valley, such as proximity to Mexico and a rural economy. The sprawling fields of the Imperial Valley supply the country with winter vegetables such as lettuce and carrots.

Voting patterns among the valley’s more than 180,000 residents look like a paradox: trending progressive in some local races while inching toward Republicans in state and national ones. Michael Luellen II, an 18-year-old out gay Latino, won a City Council seat in Calipatria. Raúl Ureña, 25, who is transgender, was reelected to Calexico’s City Council, alongside their ally Gilberto Manzanarez, 29. Countywide leadership is becoming younger and more diverse, reflecting a desire for change.

At the same time, Democrats’ margins of victory for top-of-the-ballot positions, such as governor and attorney general, shrank in the midterm elections last month. The GOP is continuing to make inroads here after Trump won 36% of the county’s vote in 2020, up from 26% four years before. There’s one through-line here: rejection of the status quo.

At the county’s southern end in Calexico, where the border wall’s steel columns and barbed wire cast shadows over farms and houses steps from neighboring Mexicali, common adjectives that people used to describe Trump to me were “loco” and “racista.” Crazy and racist.

In this part of the county, people roll their eyes at Republican rhetoric about “open borders.” Locals see the reality: The region is militarized and has been for years. Border Patrol vehicles are everywhere. Green-clad agents stroll on the sidewalks and eat in the taco shops, guns on their hips. Nearly 50 miles to the north, a Border Patrol checkpoint serves as a second border.

The column is worth a read in its entirety.   

Interestingly, California's new Chief Justice grew up in the Imperial Valley.  She is the first Latina Chief Justice in the state.  Former Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court, Cruz Reynoso, also grew up in the Imperial Valley. 

More on the rural vote, starting with Gluesenkamp Perez and WA-03

Coverage of the rural vote in the 2022 midterms continues to stream in, and I'm going to highlight some of it here.

First, I want to features this piece from The Nation on Marie Gluesenkamp Perez's victory in Washington's third district, which includes Vancouver, just north of Portland.  She defeated Trumpist Ed Kent, who had deposed moderate Republican Jamie Butler-Herrera in the Republican primary.  (I've previously written about the race here and here).  What follows is an excerpt from the story by Nick Bowlin, who writes for the High Country News, with a focus on rurality:

Without party support, Gluesenkamp Perez built a different kind of Democratic campaign. She talked candidly about the decline of the timber industry and the loss of manufacturing jobs, while promoting right-to-repair legislation, which would give people the tools and legal authority to repair everything from cell phones to John Deere tractors to medical equipment. Right-to-repair is an especially important issue in rural areas, where repairing heavy machinery can be banned by manufacturers.

I will just note here that Senator Jon Tester, the only farmer in the Senate, also talks frequently about right to repair.  

Here's more from the piece about Gluesenkamp Perez: 

Gluesenkamp Perez did not run as a centrist. She put abortion access at the center of her campaign, often telling the story of her own miscarriage. She also pledged not to support Nancy Pelosi as House caucus leader and talked openly about the guns she owns.

The Democratic Party’s collapse in rural areas ought to be obvious to all at this point. In the 2020 presidential election, Trump won 65 percent of rural voters.

The rest of the article is presented as Q & A between Bowlin and Gluesenkamp Perez: 

NB: It’s my understanding that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee [the party’s arm for House races] didn’t spend on your behalf, is that right? How did you pull off the win with minimal party support?

MGP: The DCCC never put in any money. Near the very end, I believe the House Majority PAC did come in [The House Democratic caucus’s main Super PAC spent $300,000 on her behalf in the final week]. I listen to my friends at home. I found allies. I found neighbors. I built a coalition. And I really got to stay focused on what matters to my district.

It was very frustrating to never be taken seriously by many in the party establishment. But it’s also not surprising, because people like me who work in the trades are used to being treated like we’re dumb.

NB: Do you think that perception explains why it took so long for them to even consider you as a viable candidate?

MGP: Yes, I do. I don’t think they think that, but when I went to a meeting with the DCCC after I won, I asked, “How many of your candidates don’t have graduate degrees? How many didn’t go to college? How many work in the trades?” And they said, “I don’t know.” Well, maybe you should know. Maybe that should be important to you, because it’s important to many, many Americans.

They really need to reassess what they think makes a qualified candidate. I’m not special. There are a lot of people like me, who really can serve our districts who understand them deeply. We have got to do a better job of recruiting those folks to run if we want to be relevant in rural places.

NB: I’m glad you brought up health care monopolies in rural areas. When we talk about corporate consolidation and power in the US, these conversations can leave out the specific ways these issues impact rural economies. On the campaign trail, you talked a lot about right-to-repair and other monopoly issues. Can you say more about this?

MGP: Right-to-repair is honestly one of the biggest reasons that I ran for Congress. Democrats love to talk about how they support the trades or being pro-labor. I think this is this is a crisis for the middle class, and it’s a crisis for the trades. Supporting the trades means ensuring that there are things to fix. That’s also part of being an environmentalist, ensuring that we have things to fix, that things are made to last and we don’t dispose of them. And it’s about cars and tractors, but also electronic waste. This is about home medical equipment. It’s this creeping, metastasizing problem, and it’s taking away a fundamentally American part of our identity. DIY is in our DNA. And I really believe that we’re being turned into a permanent class of renters who don’t really own their stuff.

Despite the language used in this story, it's worth noting that Washington's third district is not very rural--at least not depending on one's definition.  Matt Barron, a rural-focused political consultant, points out: 

"Why do you and other writers keep calling WA-3 a 'mostly rural district' when it is only 19% rural.  Perez only won one rural county (Pacific) by 2 points, while losing the other five.  I'm glad she won but this district is urban and suburban."  

Gotta say I agree with Barron on this one--at least I don't think it's helpful to call this area rural when its proximity to Greater Portland is what it is.  In fact, much of the district is metropolitan Portland.  

Other recent coverage of the rural vote in the midterm election includes these stories:   

Josh Kraushaar writes for Axios under the headline, "Democrats show signs of life in rural America." It features this visual of Democrats from the recent midterms who out-performed Biden's 2020 performance.

Here are some key rural datapoints:

• The four Black Senate and gubernatorial nominees in the biggest battlegrounds (Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin) all underperformed Biden in their states' rural counties. Only one other Democrat in the analysis (defeated Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak) did worse than Biden in rural counties.
• In the Georgia runoff, Sen. Raphael Warnock underperformed Biden by 1.8% in the state's rural counties, even as he overperformed the president by 5.3% in the urban counties.
• Among Senate candidates, the party's top overperformer in the suburbs was Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, who ran 4.7% ahead of Biden.

Here's a piece from Newsweek titled, "How these Democrats bucked the trend and won over rural voters."  Erica Etelson, who works for the Rural-Urban Bridge Initiative, writes:

The GOP's lackluster performance in the midterms came as an enormous relief to most Democrats. But in rural America, with a few notable exceptions, Democrats sunk to a twelve-year low water mark. If Democrats are to regain ground with rural voters, an absolute necessity given the Electoral College map, they will need to up their game.

Luckily, we have just the playbook. For the past year, the non-profit Rural Urban Bridge Initiative has interviewed 50 Democratic candidates who ran in rural races in 2016, 2018, and 2020. Most of these candidates significantly outperformed the partisan lean of their district, and we wanted to know what they did right.

What we learned from Democratic "over performers" in previous electoral cycles is that they did a lot of the things that helped propel 2022 midterms candidates like John ("every county, every vote") Fetterman (D-PA) and Marie ("not your typical candidate") Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) to victory.

For starters, they and their campaign staff have deep roots in and knowledge of their communities' values, history, and problems. Local fluency engenders trust even across lines of ideological difference and enables candidates to find islands of common ground in a sea of disagreement. An elderly Iowan family farm couple might not be keen to cancel student debt, but they may want to break up Big Ag monopolies, make sure their local hospital stays open, and regain the right to repair their John Deere tractor. They may appreciate if their state created a public bank like the beloved Bank of North Dakota that would extend them a non-usurious line of credit.

When it comes to personality, Democratic over performers in rural areas are typically humble, plainspoken problem-solvers, not dogmatic or grandstanding ideologues. They come across like ordinary people who care about the well-being of the places they seek to represent. They do not see their constituents as "deplorables," nor do they seek to "school them" on where their self-interest lies.

There's a lot of wisdom here, including that last bit that echoes Gluesenkamp Perez, so don't miss this piece in its entirety.  

Finally, here's the Daily Yonder on how the gap between the rural and urban Congressional vote has been widening over the last 16 years.  

More on the rural-urban rift in Peru, as protests erupt over ouster of President Castillo

I wrote last week about the ouster and arrest of Peru's president Castillo, who is associated with the country's rural reaches.  Now, protests have erupted in those areas, with many traveling to where the former president is imprisoned to protest.  Here are some excerpts from the New York Times coverage. 

Now, Dina Boluarte is the sixth president in five years in a country reeling from a long history of high-level scandals and deep divisions between its rural poor and urban elite.

* * *

Ms. Boluarte, a former ally of Mr. Castillo, has found herself increasingly at odds with the rural Peruvians who voted the two of them into office last year. On Thursday, her government expanded the state of emergency, imposing a curfew in 15 provinces.

* * *

Mr. Castillo is a leftist from an indigent farming family in the Andean highlands who had never held office before becoming president last year.

While Peru enjoyed a long stretch of commodities-driven economic success that pulled millions of people from poverty earlier this century, that wealth failed to reach much of the country’s poor, especially in rural areas that bear the brunt of Peru’s chronic inequality.

The protests over Mr. Castillo’s removal grew so quickly, many demonstrators said, because, whatever his misdeeds, he represented the voice of a swath of the population that has long felt marginalized by the elite.

“I am against the fact that my children don’t have the same opportunities as the upper class,” said Delia Minaya, 49, who had traveled an hour by car to the camp growing outside the prison complex, bringing with her breakfast for dozens of strangers.

She said she had spent years working at a clothing factory — pulling regular 20-hour shifts — to send her two children to private school.

It wasn’t that she was a die-hard Castillo supporter, she said. But he should have had the chance to govern for people like her. “It pains me to see my brothers fighting every day for this damn system we have in Peru,” she said.

Might the State of California subsidize flagging rural law enforcement? and a deep dive on other issues implicated by the rural law enforcement staffing shortage

Tehama County Jail
September 2021
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2021

I wrote about this topic last month based on this Los Angeles Times story out of Tehama County, California.  Now, CalMatters is expanding on the reasons for the shortage.  Nigel Duara's deeply reported story also discusses the possibility--which I assume is a very slim one--that the State of California might subsidize counties like Tehama that are unable to hire sufficient deputies to afford daytime patrols.  Here's an excerpt on the big picture, with a nod to rural self-sufficiency: 

This is a county where people are expected to take care of themselves, and in the last month, Tehama County itself has been operating without its own guardrail: Outgoing Sheriff Dave Hencratt said last month that deputies would no longer patrol during the day.

Next, here's a terrific excerpt on how the shortage--which has attracted attention from tabloids as far away as London and New York--has landed locally:  

On a recent December morning, lots of people’s faces hung low and heavy as the clouds.

The sheriff frowned when he met a reporter at midday on the edge of his property, dressed in barn clothes, declining to comment. The county administrator frowned because the sheriff’s abrupt decision threw his office into chaos. The tavern owner frowned because he works 23 miles outside of town and hasn’t seen a patrol car in weeks. The elected leaders, the motel owners, the rural residents left to their own devices — everyone, it seems, in this stretch of land between national forests, is unhappy with the circumstances, and they each have a different idea for how to solve it.

There's lots of colorful language from the retiring sheriff about how his department loses officers to neighboring agencies, like the Redding Police Department in neighboring Shasta County:  

The state, meanwhile, isn’t making it any easier to hire police officers — particularly those who leave larger departments with shoddy disciplinary or criminal records and find employment at smaller organizations. New laws have raised the minimum hiring age of law enforcement officers to 21 and require the community college system to create a “modern policing” degree program by 2025, laying the groundwork for a statewide officer education minimum.

In Tehama County, tensions had been building for months, if not years. Hencratt told the Red Bluff Daily News in February that other law enforcement departments were treating his office like a “supermarket of employees.”

“When (the) Redding Police Department says, ‘You know what chief, we’re down officers,’ ‘Well go down to Tehama County, go down the officer aisle and pick some,’ and that’s what they do. They’re cherry picking our people,” Hencratt told the newspaper.

Tehama County usually makes its hires from newly graduated applicants, said Tehama County Administrator Gabriel Hydrick. Since the county pays so poorly — about 22% below market rate, according to a county-commissioned compensation study from August — the new recruits don’t stay long. The police department in the county seat of Red Bluff pays better, and law enforcement in the nearby city of Redding and surrounding Shasta County both offer higher salaries and hiring bonuses of several thousand dollars.

Since 2012, the Commission on Police Officer Standards and Training, or POST, has certified on average about 3,200 officers each year. A basic certificate means that the applicant passed both the POST academy and a field training program, then completed a probationary period at the agency that employs them. The entire process takes about two years.

In 2022, however, the agency issued just 2,424 basic certificates as of Dec. 13, the lowest number of basic certificates issued since 2013, and well below the 10-year high of 4,530 issued in 2020.

“I would agree that it’s harder to be a police officer now than (in years past),” said Hydrick, the county administrator. “There’s a lot of disincentives to being an officer. The culture isn’t behind you anymore. We have more laws about policing and being a police officer than other states.”

But Hydrick also blames the working attitudes of the new generation making up the youngest ranks of law enforcement — or, in this case, not making up that new generation.

“We can keep throwing money at it, but if there’s a generation that’s not willing to work or apply for jobs, the money’s not going to fix that,” Hydrick said. “The younger generation wants to be gamers and YouTubers; maybe they cobble an income together from being an Uber driver.

“We’re not seeing people want to become professionals anymore.”

And here's more on the question whether too much state regulation is the problem--or at least part of it.  

One of the architects of California’s push for tougher regulations on police and policing is Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a Los Angeles Democrat and chair of the Assembly Public Safety Committee. He said he doesn’t see a conflict between police hiring problems and the state’s stronger hand in hiring officers and the practice of policing.

“It’s almost like, if you’re saying the regulations are too stringent, you’re saying we can’t get people who are not racist, who do not want to brutalize people of color,” Jones-Sawyer said. “We’re not the ones making police officers look bad. It’s the bad police officers who are discouraging the good ones from applying.”

But Sawyer-Jones said it may be time to consider having the state send money to the smallest departments, like the one in Tehama County, to make sure they can afford to pay competitive rates.

“We probably do need to look at subsidizing smaller police departments so they can level the playing field,” he said.

* * * 

Police departments nationwide are calling for more officers, but in the smallest offices covering the largest geographic areas, the situation is more dire. In Shasta County, north of Tehama County, the sheriff’s office closed one level of the jail and blamed a lack of deputies. Sacramento has had a police officer shortage since the Great Recession 15 years ago, and in Los Angeles, the police department has no staffing problem, and is instead requesting more helicopters.

It’s not like policing pays badly in California — sometimes the opposite. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a Beverly Hills assistant police chief earned $716,284 in total compensation in 2021, making him the highest-paid municipal employee in the state. But Tehama County is no Beverly Hills: The entire county drew less than one-half the revenue that Beverly Hills did in the 2020-21 fiscal year, the latest year for which numbers were available

One recruiter who works with police departments said that law enforcement has been slow to change its recruiting practices, and that’s reflected in the smaller number of people joining the profession.

“This isn’t 1997,” said Epic Recruiting CEO Sam Blonder. “You’re not going to get 1,000 people signing up for the (policing exam).”

The issue isn’t just pay, Blonder said, citing research showing that the newest generation of recruits looks for work-life balance ahead of pure compensation. But policing’s issues also extend to intransigence among the old guard. His work to recruit new officers, Blonder said, is as much about convincing police brass to do the recruiting.

“Among command staff there’s this attitude that I shouldn’t have to do this,” Blonder said. “Ask 150 high school kids who wants to be a police officer — you won’t get one that will raise their hand. It’s not for me to say why that’s happened, but sometimes an industry needs a shakeup like that.”

That shakeup is happening in real time in Tehama County.

“People have expressed to me fear and concern based on the lack of the daytime sheriff’s office patrol,” said Tehama County District Attorney Matt Rogers. “Simply put, if they pick up the phone and dial 911, is someone going to come?”

Any Tehama County officials wishing for tax hikes to generate more county revenue watched those hopes fizzle in March 2020, when voters rejected the county’s 1-cent sales tax increase. And it didn’t just fail, it was crushed, 84% to 16%.

Tehama County is also setting aside money for about 30 vacant sheriff’s office jobs, eight of them for deputies and 13 for deputies in the county jail. Hydrick, the county administrator, said the sheriff’s hope was to eventually fill those positions and restore the sheriff’s office to its 2017 size of approximately 84 deputies.

But in the meantime, all of those vacant positions “encumber,” or put a hold on, the salaries those positions would be paid. That, Hydrick said, amounts to about $3 million each year in unused money by the sheriff’s office, which then reverts to the county’s general fund.

In place of the absent deputies will be the California Highway Patrol, which has 14 officers for the 15-county region that encompasses Tehama County.

“Since Nov. 20, the CHP has received numerous requests for assistance (from residents) to calls in Tehama County that don’t include their usual duties,” California Highway Patrol spokesperson John Crouch said in an email.

Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea, whose county borders Tehama and whose office pays more, said background checks are as much an obstacle to making new hires as the recruiting process is.

“It’s a challenge to find people you would want to entrust with the authority to carry firearms,” said Honea, who is also president of the California State Sheriffs’ Association.

Honea said his office tries to focus on retaining the people they already have by offering free gym memberships and yoga classes.

For some longtime residents like Tehama County Supervisor Bill Moule, the end of daytime patrols is a return to the county’s past.

“I moved to this county in 1978, and the first question I asked was, ‘What kind of service do you have in the rural areas?’” Moule said. “The sheriff was kinda this big guy, been sheriff a long time. He looked at me and said, ‘Son, get yourself a shotgun and a dog.’

“It’s no different today than it was in 1978.”

Grateful to be able to quote liberally from this CalMatters story, since this is a non-profit news website offering Creative Commons licensing.  

On the rural implications of Democrats' abandoning Iowa caucus as first state presidential race

Art Cullen, Pulitzer-Prize winning editor of the Storm Lake Times (Iowa) writes for the New York Times on Democrats' decision to move away from Iowa being the first presidential contest, "Want to Know Why Democrats Lose Rural America?"  Some pithy excerpts follow:  

We get it. Let someone else take a turn up front. But discarding Iowa is not a great way to mend fences in rural America — where the Democratic brand has become virtually unmarketable.

The Democratic big shots hated Iowa’s pride of place since the caucuses rose to prominence a half-century ago because money couldn’t control the outcome. Jimmy Carter broke through from Plains, Ga., with nothing but a toothy smile and an honest streak. Candidates were forced to meet actual voters in village diners across the state. We took our vetting role seriously — you had better be ready to analyze Social Security’s actuarial prospects.

* * * 

Iowa has its problems. We are too white. The caucuses are complicated, confusing and clunky. The evening gatherings in homes, school gyms and libraries are not fully accessible and not as convenient as a primary for people with jobs and kids at home.

But diversity did have a chance here. Barack Obama was vaulted to the White House. Iowa actively encouraged Black candidates to challenge the white establishment. Mr. Obama beat Hillary Clinton here. Iowa had no problem giving a gay man, Pete Buttigieg, and a Jewish democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, the two top tickets out to New Hampshire last cycle. Black, white or Latino, it’s organization that matters in Iowa. You have to herd your people to the caucus and keep them in your pen for an hour while other campaigns try to poach them. It’s town hall democracy. Mr. Obama won with it. Candidates who ran feeble campaigns have to blame something. Latinos in Storm Lake overwhelmingly caucused for Mr. Sanders. Julián Castro can complain all he wants.

* * * 

Despite all the attention, nothing really happened to stop the long decline as the state's Main Streets withered, farmers disappeared and the undocumented dwell in the shadows.  Republican or Democrat, the outcome was pretty much the same.  At least the Republicans will cut your taxes.  

So it's OK that South Carolina goes first.  Iowa can do without the bother.  The Republicans are sticking with Iowa; the Democrats consider it a lost cause.... Democrats are barely trying.  The results show it. 

* * *  

Donald Trump landed in Sioux City on the eve of the midterm elections to claim his stake before a large crowd buffeted by the gales out of Nebraska. “The Iowa way of life is under siege,” Mr. Trump bellowed. “We are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation.”

They loved him. The Democrats view the crowd as deplorable and told Iowa to get lost.

More on Democrats' recent failure to reach out to rural America is here and here.

Rural America growing after a decade of population loss

Ken Johnson, University of New Hampshire demographer, has published a policy brief with UNH's Carsey School of Public Policy.  Here's the summary: 

Recent research suggests that the turbulent economic, social, and epidemiological conditions of recent years altered traditional demographic trends in non-metropolitan America. Between 2010 and 2020, nonmetropolitan (rural) America lost population for the first time in history because more people left rural areas than moved to them and because the excess of births over deaths dwindled. Yet, the latest Census Bureau population estimates document renewed population gains in nonmetropolitan America between April 2020 and July 2021. In fact, the rural population gain exceeded that in metropolitan areas, something that is rare in American history (Figure 1). This recent nonmetropolitan population increase occurred because a substantial net migration gain offset the growing excess of deaths over births fostered by COVID-19. In contrast, recent metropolitan population gains were smaller because of less natural increase and smaller net migration gains than between 2010 and 2020. Most of the recent nonmetropolitan population increase accrued to high amenity recreational and retirement areas because net migration gains to these counties accelerated early in the pandemic. Elsewhere in rural America, many areas continued to lose population, but a sizable number of counties had population increases because modest migration gains offset deaths from COVID-19. In many counties with histories of population loss, only sustained net migration gains can provide the demographic lifeline these communities need to stave off depopulation. Whether these nonmetropolitan migration gains will continue in this turbulent era remains to be seen.

This policy brief is based on an article by Johnson in the journal Rural Sociology.