Who should pay for car charging infrastructure in rural America?

Sarah Vogelsong for the Virginia Mercury reports under the headline "Democrats push electric car infrastructure bill as a solution to rural gaps."  The subhead is "Proposal picks up limited Republican support in both chambers but comes with a high price tag."  The lede follows:

Democratic proposals for a statewide program to speed up the buildout of electric vehicle charging stations are picking up some Republican support in both chambers of Virginia’s General Assembly. But backers will have to convince the state’s powerful money committees that the plans are worth millions in new spending.

Widespread electric vehicle adoption “is going to happen, frankly whether we like it or not,” Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, told the House Natural Resources Subcommittee Wednesday. “And what we need to do is make sure we’re prepared.”

Sullivan and Sen. Dave Marsden, D-Fairfax, are carrying legislation to establish the Driving Decarbonization Program and a related fund this year. Both lawmakers are also asking that $40 million spread over the next two years be added to the state’s biennial budget.

Under the program, which would be administered by the Virginia Department of Energy, private developers could apply for grants to install charging stations throughout Virginia. Developers proposing projects in “historically economically disadvantaged communities” would be eligible for funding to cover 70 percent of their non-utility costs, while developers with projects elsewhere could receive grants covering 50 percent of such costs.

The program would be capped at $20 million annually, with a quarter of that earmarked for historically economically disadvantaged communities, a designation borrowed from the Virginia Clean Economy Act that refers to low-income communities and those in which a majority of the population are people of color.

This reminds me of a report I heard last week about a Republican law maker from some jurisdiction--was it California?--that the private sector should be responsible for the electric car charging infrastructure.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CLXXV): COVID aid spending trends from urban to rural

Bella DiMarco and Phyllis W. Jordan share this report on K-12 COVID federal aid spending trends with FutureEd:  

The Covid pandemic can look different in a small rural school district than in a big city or suburb. Transportation challenges are often magnified with fewer students spread across wide areas. Internet access is frequently harder to find, and so are mental-health professionals to support students and staff. Such challenges —and shared priorities—are reflected in a new FutureEd analysis of how local education agencies are planning to spend the latest round of federal Covid-relief spending aid.

We used the National Center for Education Statistics’ four classifications of school district settings—city, suburban, towns, and rural—to analyze the spending plans of nearly 2,500 school districts and charter organizations educating some 53 percent of the nation’s public-school students. The information company Burbio collected the local agencies’ plans, which represent about $60 billion of the $122 billion in the third round of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding (ESSER III).

We found that staffing has emerged as a pandemic priority for local leaders nationally. Regardless of classification, more than half of all school districts and charter entities in the sample intend to spend relief funds on hiring and paying teachers and academic staff, and about 40 percent in each category expect to invest in teacher training. Similarly, at least half the local education agencies in every category plan to invest ESSER III funds in summer learning and upgrading ventilation systems.

Mental Health:

* * * 

By contrast, Powhatan County Public Schools, a rural district in Virginia with 4,300 students, plans to set aside less than 1 percent of Covid-relief funds for mental-health first-aid training. Most rural districts have designated less than 10 percent of their funds for social-emotional learning and mental-health-related items. A notable exception is Bartow County, Georgia, which plans to spend $13.3 million, nearly 60 percent of its allotment, on mental-health services and supports, in some cases through full-service community schools.

Similarly, rural districts are the least likely to prioritize hiring or paying mental-health staff. About 42 percent of city districts and charter organizations plan to spend on mental-health professionals or psychologists, compared to 29 percent in towns and 25 percent in rural areas.

The pandemic has certainly affected students’ mental health in small, rural communities and intensified opioid addiction and other rural problems. But as Allen Pratt, executive director of the National Rural Education Association, points out, there’s a dearth of mental health counselors in many rural areas, leaving districts unable to hire as many of the specialists as they might like.

Transportation:

A greater share of rural districts remained open during the 2020-21 school year than in other settings, and there's less support for going back to remote schooling in these communities, RAND Corporation researchers found. But getting students to school every day can be complicated by the long distances to school in some sparsely populated areas. Our analysis showed that rural districts are more likely to propose spending on transportation than education agencies elsewhere. About 38 percent of rural districts in the sample are earmarking ESSER III funds for transportation, compared to 21 percent in the suburbs, 28 percent in cities, and 32 percent in towns. The shortage of school bus drivers affecting schools across the country may lead to more spending in this category in the months ahead than is reflected in agencies’ current plans.

In one instance, Marietta Public Schools in Oklahoma, a remote rural district serving about 1,100 students, is planning to spend roughly 21 percent of its allotment on transportation-related items. This includes $540,000 to purchase additional buses and $25,000 to purchase a van to transport food to a new building for middle and high school students. The district also plans to spend an additional $140,000 on new camera systems for its buses.

Academic Spending:

Rural educators appear less inclined than educators in other settings to spend ESSER III dollars on extended-day programs and more likely to spend the money on instructional materials and student assessments, the FutureEd analysis found.

Pratt from the National Rural Education Association says that transportation challenges can sometimes limit the ability of rural school districts to offer afterschool programs, because it’s harder to arrange bus transportation after hours. He wasn’t surprised to see the proposed investments in instructional materials and software, and observes that with earlier rounds of federal funding putting mobile devices in the hands of more students and broadening internet access, rural educators now have more ways to reach their students.

For example, Hennessey Public Schools in Oklahoma, a remote rural district serving 833 students, is planning to spend almost $400,000 on classroom curriculum materials and textbooks, or about 13 percent of its ESSER III funds. In the town of Russellville, Arkansas, the 5,400-student school district intends to invest $1.4 million, also about 13 percent of its allocation in instructional materials.

Having grown up about 60 miles from Russellville, I will go on the record as saying i certainly do not consider it rural. By contrast, the 450-student district where I was educated is dwarfed by comparison.

* * *

HVAC:

At least half of the local education agencies in each category are planning to spend ESSER funds on updating and upgrading heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. RSU 25, a small rural school district in Maine, plans to spend half its ESSER III allotment, about $1.3 million, to install a mechanical HVAC system in one of its four schools that previously did not have a system throughout the building.

In the town of Ukiah, California, the school district intends to devote about half its ESSER funding, $6 million, to upgrade and replace aging systems. Similarly, the Newport News Public Schools in Virginia plans to spend $40 million, or nearly half its allotment, to replace HVAC systems in several the city’s schools and add air purifiers and filters. Suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, by contrast, has earmarked $6.6 million of its $262 million in ESSER funds for improving and upgrading ventilation systems.

Rural school districts and charter organizations plan to spend $559 per pupil on HVAC systems, compared to $495 for towns, $378 for cities, and $340 for suburbs. The cost differences could reflect the economies of scale for education agencies in less-populous communities

Rural legal scholarship: Federal Land Conservation in Rural Areas

The article by Jessica Owley and Jess Phelps is available in the Brooklyn Law Review.  Here's the abstract:

Rural land has an important role to play in environmental protection. This Article examines how the federal government works to further the goals of land conservation in rural areas—ranging from farmland to forests and wetlands; from working landscapes to national parks; and from private to public landownership. We note three approaches. The federal government mandates conservation through laws like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. The federal government incentivizes conservation through Farm Bill programs and tax incentives. Finally, the federal government facilitates conservation through noncoercive funding, review, and technical assistance programs under the Farm Bill, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund. This examination of federal land conservation programs gives insight into the different tools and strategies available to protect rural lands and examines the potential benefits of a stronger federal role. The greatest obstacle to successful environmental protection in rural areas is a lack of active environmental management and the conversion of land to other uses, chiefly residential and energy development. Current land conservation programs do not appear to be addressing these issues directly, and action on some level is necessary to achieve more optimal environmental outcomes in the rural countryside.  (emphasis mine).  

Small Oregon city sued by church it restricts to serving free food two days a week

Here's the story by Joe Hernandez for NPR, out of Brookings, Oregon, population 6,336, on the state's southern coast.  

An Oregon church has sued the town where it's located over a new local ordinance that restricts the number of times the church can dole out free meals each week to those in need.

St. Timothy's Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon say in a federal lawsuit against the city of Brookings that the ordinance limiting them to two free meal giveaways per week violates their constitutional right to free religious expression.

"We've been serving our community here for decades and picking up the slack where the need exists and no one else is stepping in," the Rev. Bernie Lindley said in a statement.

* * *

St. Timothy's had been working with other churches to ensure locals could get free meals every day of the week, but some churches suspended their meal programs when the pandemic began, according to the lawsuit. St. Timothy's, in turn, began offering meals six days a week, serving up to 70 people each lunchtime.

The church also offered coronavirus testing and COVID-19 vaccination. At one point, the city asked St. Timothy's to allow people who needed to sleep in their cars to use its parking lot, and the church agreed, the filing says.

But the services for homeless people began to rankle residents living near St. Timothy's, who complained of trespassing, littering and noise in their neighborhood, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. The residents sent the city a petition in April asking for the church's homeless services to end.

In October, the City Council approved an ordinance creating a permit for "benevolent meal service" and restricting it to twice per week.

This tweet by another NPR journalist speaks volumes:  

Postscript:  The New York Times subsequently picked up this story, too.  

Recall of Shasta County, California supervisor appears successful, shifts balance of power further right

Lots of coverage of this special election, which finished yesterday, says the recall of Republican Leonard Moty, supervisor for District 2, means Shasta County's Board of Supervisors is now controlled by militia-backed politicians.  To be clear, this is a Republican v. Republican dispute--with two of those Republicans much further to the right than the other three.  With Moty's ouster, three members of the Board are now in the further right camp, with two considered by those three to be RINOs, "Republican in Name Only."  See stories here, here, here, and here.  None of these stories draws the connection between the militia and the "further right" politicians particularly clearly, but here's some more background that helps pull the puzzle pieces together.       

Rural Legal Scholarship: Power and Powerlessness in Local Government: A Reply to Professor Swan

Here are the first few paragraphs of Prof. Ann Eisenberg's article in the Harvard Law Review Forum, 135 Harv. L. Rev. F. 173 (2022): 

Are rural communities powerful or powerless? This question arises regularly in today’s national public and scholarly discourses. The collective interest in the issue of rural power stems in large part from hotly contested national and state elections in which strong, polarized political preferences play out along geographic lines. Election maps show us how consistently sparsely populated regions, in which people live in small towns or remote counties, emerge an indignant-conservative red. Big cities, by contrast, predictably materialize with the forbearing-liberal blue. Especially with ever-polarized public health measures implicated by the ongoing pandemic--which has affected matters as intimate as whether face masks are required or not and where--we are all acutely cognizant of whether we live in a red state or a blue state, or a red county or a blue municipality.

These enduring, polarized political patterns have drawn attention to an “urban-rural divide” in politics, prompting inquiries into how the nation arrived at this point and what the implications are. One central implication is the inordinate power that residents of sparsely populated regions wield in various political bodies, including the Electoral College and legislatures at the federal and state level. For instance, because of the distribution of electoral votes per population in the Electoral College, “one Wyoming voter has roughly the same vote power as four New York voters [in presidential elections].” In this sense, more sparsely populated communities are powerful to a degree that threatens representative democracy itself in a disturbing system of rule by a predominantly older, whiter, more conservative minority. Commentary focused on this aspect of the question of rural power tends to conclude that rural communities are indeed powerful--and dangerously so.

Yet, while the political urban-rural divide reveals the rural as dangerously powerful, the economic urban-rural divide reveals the rural as the underdog. Larger cities dominate the economy.

The article to which Eisenberg is responding is Prof. Sarah Swan's, "Constitutional Off-Loading at the City Limits."   

Rural volunteer fire departments under strain from population loss, COVID, other factors

Frank Morris reports today for NPR, with this vignette out of rural Paradise, Kansas, population 49, in the central part of the state: 

FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: More than 250 square miles of freshly scorched earth stretch out in three directions from tiny Paradise, Kan. In December, winds gusting up to 100 miles an hour pushed a wall of flames headlong across the rolling pasture here, torching farms and killing thousands of animals. Thick smoke, ash and dust blocked out the sun. Volunteer Fire Chief Quentin Maupin thought he'd never see his kids again when the raging blaze suddenly swept across his firetruck.

QUENTIN MAUPIN: That wall of fire was - I don't know - probably 60, 80 feet high - and both hands on the steering wheel, just holding on, thinking, this is probably it because you could hear the plastic melting and cracking. The stickers, the reflectors, the plastic flashing lights - it melted all that stuff on that truck.

MORRIS: Maupin was alone in the 18,000-pound pumper truck because, like many rural fire departments, his is chronically short-staffed.

MAUPIN: It's tough. You know, it's rural Kansas, and there just isn't that many people out here anymore. And young people - that's the other thing. Normally, our policy is you need two people on a truck. But that day, there wasn't anybody here, and I knew we just got to get a truck out there right now.

Morris also mentions rural Mississippi, and the struggle for volunteer fire departments to balance budgets and buy new equipment when typical fundraisers like spaghetti feeds or crab feeds can't be held in the era of COVID.  

Stories with similar themes out of the rural mountain west are here and here, though these focus on ambulance and EMT services.  Prior posts mentioning volunteer fire departments are here.  This one, in particular, features lots of photos of volunteer fire departments from around the country.  

U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio, Tim Ryan (D) pleads with the white working class to trust Democrats, again

Here's the lede for today's Washington Post story by Michael Scherer, as candidate Tim Ryan campaigns in Ironton, Ohio, population 11, 129, in the Ohio River Valley:  

Congressman Tim Ryan has been traveling the foothills of western Appalachia with a joke about marriage he hopes will make him Ohio’s next U.S. Senator.

The voters he needs to turn his way — the forgotten, the struggling, in communities with hollow factories, Trump flags and fentanyl epidemics — don’t agree with everything he stands for as a Democrat. But then, he asks his small crowds, who does?

“If my wife and I have 10 conversations in one day and we agree on six or seven of them, we crack a bottle of wine and celebrate how great our marriage is,” he said at a recent stop here along the Ohio River, just a few blocks from an empty brownfield where furnaces once burned. “So why would you think you are going to agree with someone 100 percent of the time?”

Ryan’s bet — and the national Democratic dream — is that a few issues still just might matter more than his party label. He lists three whenever he speaks, after talking up his small-town upbringing and all of his union relatives who once worked at steel plants or auto suppliers: rebuilding the country with major public works spending, new government investing in manufacturing industries and beating China.

“They have a 10-year plan, a 50-year plan, a 100-year plan,” he said of the Asian superpower. “We are living in a 24-hour news cycle talking about really dumb stuff, like Big Bird and Dr. Seuss.”

The pitch has made Ryan one of the most consequential Democratic candidates of the 2022 cycle, a test case on whether his party has any hope of reclaiming its erstwhile White working-class voting base, as former president Donald Trump, who sped their flight, waits in the wings. The struggle is, by any measure, uphill.

* * * 

With less than 10 months to go before the general election, Ryan has already visited 72 of the state’s 88 counties in a full-press effort to try to persuade the hinterlands, a handful at a time, that Democrats like him are human beings who breathe the same air.

Love that Ryan is using the whole state approach in his campaign, leaving no county behind.  Also bemused by the journalist's use of the word "hinterlands."   

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law.  

Post script:  NPR's All Things Considered is doing a story on Tim Ryan on the afternoon of February 1, 2022.  Another one ran on February 4, 2022.  

Rural-Urban Differences in Adverse and Positive Childhood Experiences: Results from the National Survey of Children's Health

Here is the abstract for a paper published by the Rural Health Research Gateway at the University of North Dakota:  

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are events of abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction occurring between birth and 17 years of age. Studies have found a direct correlation between ACEs and risky behaviors, poor physical health, and poor mental health outcomes in childhood. Positive childhood experiences (PCEs) include a nurturing, safe, and supportive environment allowing for health development and overall wellness. In prior research, rural-urban differences in PCEs have not been examined using all 50 states. This brief examines the types and counts of ACEs and PCEs for rural and urban children. The study also reports on the differences between rural and urban ACEs and PCEs across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Powerful story out of Colorado: ranchers v wolves, and what that battle reveals about rural v. urban

This Colorado Sun story "Wolves, ranchers, and the law," is a doozie, any way you slice or dice it.  Jennifer Brown reports out of Walden, population 609, in the North Park region of the state.  Wolves are killing cattle there, and ranchers are furious, not least because the state voted in 2020 to re-introduce wolves.  

Of course, at its core, this is an old story--the conflict between ranchers who wish to protect their cattle and conservationists who wish to protect the wolves.  The Colorado Sun piece features the Gittleson family, in particular, who've recently lost three head of cattle and had another cow injured in a wolf attack.  The whole story is very much worth a read, but I'm just going to highlight the part about how ranchers feel they are treated--by urbanites and the law--reflected mostly in quotes from Gittleson family members:

North Park is ground zero in Colorado’s wolf controversy. Almost no one here supported the 2020 ballot measure to reintroduce wolves to the state. And now that the wolves have arrived on their own, wandering across the Wyoming state line and helping themselves to cattle, residents here are wondering whether the city dwellers who voted to bring back wolves will finally understand what they’ve been saying.

“I don’t think they care, no matter what we say to them,” said Kim Gittleson, sitting at her kitchen table with tired eyes after another night on wolf watch. “These cows are our living. We don’t want to see that happen to our cows, not just because it’s our livelihood. It’s just sad to see any animal tortured that way that you cared for.”

 
It would be easier, many locals say, to “shoot, shovel and shut up” when wolves prey on their livestock, although getting caught shooting a protected species could mean a $100,000 fine and a year in jail. The Gittlesons, though, said they are reporting every wolf sighting and attack to their local Colorado Parks and Wildlife agents, seeking government compensation for their dead cows, and asking for help to scare the pack away from the ranch.

* * *

“If we wanted to shoot the wolves, we could have stopped this day one,” Dave Gittleson said. “We could’ve gone out there and wiped out the pack. Done. But that’s not a long-term solution. Don’t shoot the wolves. Everything we just lost would be for nothing.”

Instead, North Parkers are working together to protect their cattle — and to make a point.

Don Gittleson, who runs the ranch alone on weekdays while his wife and son work other jobs more than an hour away in Steamboat Springs, is exhausted from staying up most of the night for weeks. They’re hoping Colorado Parks and Wildlife will come through on hiring a range rider, someone to patrol the ranch in the dark, but they have their doubts.

It makes the Gittlesons chuckle that the state would require the range rider to have a COVID vaccination. It’s just one more example, they say, of how urban Colorado and its government does not “get” them, seeing as how the range rider would sit alone on a four-wheeler or in a truck on a ranch in the middle of nowhere.

Like the infamous “MeatOut Day” controversy of last spring and the proposed ballot measure that would have defined artificial insemination of cows as a criminal sex act, the wolf debate has widened the cultural divide. Ranchers feel their way of life is under attack, or at the least, misunderstood.

“It’s not just a Democrat-versus-Republican divide. It’s urban versus rural,” said Coby Corkle, who grew up in Walden and is a Jackson County commissioner. “Rural Colorado is really just trying to hold on.”

Gov. Jared Polis is not popular here. Neither is First Gentleman Marlon Reis, an animal rights advocate. North Park ranchers were fuming last week after governor-appointed State Board of Veterinary Medicine member Ellen Kessler called ranchers “lazy and nasty” and accused them of using a cow to bait wolves in a comment on Reis’ Facebook page. They cheered when she apologized and resigned from the board a few days later.

The sentiment up here, in the “Moose Viewing Capital of Colorado,” is made clear by a sign east of Walden. “If you voted for reintroduction of wolves,” it says, “Do not recreate here. You are not welcome!”

The rancher's talk about "shoot, shovel and shut up," reminds me of this post from a student more than a decade ago.  That student had grown up in rural Idaho and was a former law enforcement officer there, which gave him a distinct perspective I was glad he shared on the blog.   

On rural communities and schools hanging on to Native American mascots

The New York Times reported today from Cambridge, New York, under the headline, "Facing a Ban, a School District Fights to Keep ‘Indian’ Nickname."  The gist of the story is in the subhead: 

Residents in a divided predominantly white town in upstate New York are fighting a state ruling to remove the Native American mascot.

Cambridge, about an hour north of Albany, on the Vermont state line, has a population of  2,152.  The following excerpt focuses on the community members who want to keep the mascot, the Indians--and in particular the divide between them and relative newcomers to the area, as well as those with more formal education who have returned there. 

Many supporters of keeping the mascot have dismissed concerns as political correctness gone amok, a movement spearheaded by a small group of liberals, many of whom have perhaps not lived in town long enough to realize that many nearby districts have similarly themed names, including the Mechanicville Red Raiders, the Averill Park Warriors and the Lake George Warriors.

Duane Honyoust, a Cambridge resident and a member of the Onondaga Nation, said he supported the school district’s use of the nickname and logo as a tribute to Native people and a reminder to students of the importance of local Native history.

Regarding the anti-mascot movement, he said, “Once you take references to Native Americans out of the schools, you’re starting to erase us.”

* * * 

Meetings of the once-obscure school board have been packed with vocal attendees, necessitating larger spaces and, at times, a local police officer assigned to ensure order.

One recent weeknight this month in a school cafeteria, board members sat on folding chairs emblazoned with the Indians mascot. Many of the roughly 75 attendees pointedly wore orange T-shirts and other garments adorned with the Indians logo.

Most of them were vigorously cheered as they spoke in support of keeping the mascot.

An official announced that it would cost over $90,000 in supplies alone to physically change the nickname and logo on the gym floor, hallway signs, the sides of school buses and other places.

One speaker took the lectern and attributed the name opposition to “woke racism.” Another stepped up and said she was sending her children to a school 20 minutes away because “I didn’t want them to have this experience in their education.”

* * *

By last June, the five-member board voted 3-2 to adopt a resolution to retire the nickname and logo. Then came the backlash, a vote to reverse the decision, the successful appeal to state officials, and now an outright culture war.

“It’s mostly outsiders, people who aren’t originally from here, who want to get rid of it,” said Belinda Sawyer, 49, a restaurant manager in town.

A cheerleader when she attended high school in Cambridge, Ms. Sawyer dropped to the restaurant floor one recent evening and began reciting “Indians on the Warpath,” a cheer chanted over a percussive drumming beat on the bleachers. (Her great-grandmother was a Blackfoot Indian, she said.)

Greg Woodcock, a Cambridge resident in support of keeping the name and mascot, estimated in a phone interview that some 85 percent of the district’s residents are supportive.

They will raise the legal fees themselves, if necessary, he said.

Many critics have dismissed the anti-mascot campaign as being spearheaded by recent transplants to Cambridge, said Alex Dery Snider, a Cambridge resident who was a petitioner in the appeal.

“The message is that outsiders are not welcome here,” she said. “I know of people who planned to move here who changed their minds because of this issue. It just felt really unwelcoming to new people. The message has been if you aren’t from here, you don’t belong here.”

For Mr. McMillan, it was only after moving away to college and gaining more diverse friends that he began viewing certain things in a different light. He started seeing the name as an insensitive caricature that perpetuated stereotypes of Native Americans. As a teen, he did the tomahawk chop to cheer on the high school’s football team.

Several Cambridge area residents of Native American heritage support keeping the Indian mascot. And that reminds me of this similar story out of Colorado last fall, "Rural Colorado students sue to block law demanding 26 schools shed their Native American mascots."  The subhead for Sue McMillan's story is, "The plaintiffs, some of whom claim tribal membership, say the Senate Bill 116 seeks to erase cultural references to Native American heritage."  The plaintiffs in this case are from Lamar, population 7,804, and Yuma, population 3,524, both in far eastern Colorado. An excerpt follows: 

“Erasing Native American names and images from the public square and from public discussion echoes a maneuver that plaintiffs have previously seen used by the eradicators of Native American heritage,” the lawsuit says. “Colorado repeats the same mistake in its paternalistic assumption that it must protect Native Americans by erasing cultural references to them and to their heritage.”

It says the plaintiffs “oppose the use of American Indian mascot performers and caricatures that mock Native American heritage.”

The plaintiffs intend to file a motion this week seeking an injunction that they hope will immediately halt implementation because districts can’t wait for the lawsuit to be heard and risk being fined $25,000 a month if they’re not in compliance, said William Trachman, an attorney with Mountain States Legal Foundation in Lakewood.

An important and deeply reported story, worth a read in its entirety.