Britain's rural reaches as places of "profound inequality"

Rebecca Smith, author of Rural:  The Lives of the Working Class Countryside (Harper Collins 2023), published an essay/excerpt in the New York Times this weekend titled "The English Countryside is a Place of Profound Inequality."  Graythwaite is an English manor in Cumbria, in the Lake District, where Smith grew up in a cottage that Here's the gist of it: 

[F]or the landless who work and belong to the British countryside but do not own a piece of it, it’s a place of profound inequality. Damp, cold and underresourced but beautiful.

When I was growing up on Graythwaite, it was still possible to live, work and raise a family in some of the most beautiful parts of England on a working-class wage. That’s less true now. Rural Britain, long a scenic playground for the rich, is in danger of becoming only that, for tourists, second-homers and wealthy retirees.

Hawkshead, about five miles from Graythwaite, is one of the prettiest villages in the Lake District. It used to have two banks, a police station, four pubs, cafes and businesses.

* * *

These days, there are still lots of cafes, but now the police station is apartments, one bank is a gallery, and the other one is a ticket office for a Beatrix Potter attraction. Many of the village homes are vacation rentals or second homes, empty for most of the year, pushing the prices higher for the few homes that do go up for sale. There were always bus trippers, but the streams of tourists at this time of year, its busiest, make it feel a bit like a rural Disneyland.

* * *

In some of the villages around where I grew up, as many as 80 percent of the houses are second homes, according to housing advocates.

Over and over again, people who grew up or made a life there have been forced to make way for others. (In Dinorwig, a former slate-mining town in Wales that is popular with visitors, a schoolteacher told The Guardian that her family was evicted by a landlady who admitted that she could make four times as much by renting their home to tourists.) These visitors spend money in the local shops, but they don’t put children in the school. They don’t become part of the church congregation. A way of life slowly suffocates.

In part, Smith's British story is one of rural gentrification like we're seeing throughout the United States of late.  

Richard Benson's review of Rural in The Guardian last month includes this passage about her book: 

Its strength is Smith’s sharp eye for new examples of urban money breaking up the relationships between local people and their landscapes. Corporations who offset their pollution by planting thousands of trees in inappropriate locations where the saplings will die off anyway; absentee landlords who shorten tenancy agreements so farmers can’t plan long-term improvements of the land; the gentry sacking estate workers and hawking their heritage to the leisure industry. For the roughly 20% of Britons who live in rural areas, such trends debilitate in the same way that gentrification does in cities. 

Chronicle of Higher Education again turns to rural, this time with a "Farm-to-Table" frame on agricultural education

I've noticed the Chronicle of Higher Education paying a great deal of attention lately to rural students and rural colleges and universities.  Then this past week, they posted a video "The Science and the Beauty:  A Farm-to-Table Story."  Here's the text accompanying the video: 

How much do Americans understand about the land on which we depend for food? How does education contribute to an appreciation of agriculture? The farm-to-table movement, which promotes direct sourcing of fresh, locally grown ingredients for communities, has helped foster greater interest in learning about and valuing where our food comes from. Colleges play a key role in developing, supporting, and appreciating that movement, and, through agricultural programs and cooperative extension services, farming in general. This short film explores how ancestral knowledge, education and awareness, research, innovation, community engagement, and entrepreneurship foster food production and distribution, through the stories of several Louisianans with ties to Southern University and A&M College, in Baton Rouge.

Nicholas Victorian, from 4Vics Farms LLC, in New Roads, La., began his career by attending free agriculture workshops at Southern U. “It’s all about the knowledge,” he observes about sustainable farming.

Lanie Vernon, a Southern U. alumnus, stresses the importance of educating younger generations about self-sustainability and growing food. A master gardener, he notes, “We live on this planet, so we try to be good stewards of the planet.”

L’Asia George, who hails from a farm family, recently graduated from Southern U. Her studies brought her closer to her agricultural roots and inspired her to help organize a campus farmers’ market. Today, she teaches her community about nutrition and health. “My world opened up through research with agriculture, and it brought me back here. And I was able just to see the science and the beauty,” she says.

The Chronicle presents this as part of a yearlong "visual series that highlights the challenges facing first-generation students and others. The series is part of the Different Voices of Student Success project."

This post is about another recent Chronicle feature in the same vein:  rural and first gen. 

Brookings recommendations for this year's Farm Bill

Tony Pipa wrote this week on a Brookings Institute blog under the headline, "5 recommendations from Reimagine Rural for the 2023 Farm Bill and federal implementation."  "Reimagine Rural" is Brookings' rural podcast, which was new this year.  Here's an excerpt from Pipa's post, the second in a two-part series of takeaways from the podcast: 

The stories captured in the first season of the Reimagine Rural podcast offer important lessons at a pivotal policy moment for equitable rural development in the U.S. The current Congress is negotiating a new Farm Bill, the legislation agreed upon every five years that sets agricultural subsidies and authorizes the rural development programs managed by USDA (United States Department of Agriculture). Implementation is also underway for some of the most consequential place-based federal resources approved this century through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the CHIPs and Science Act (CHIPS), and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). All these pieces of legislation implicate rural places to a significant degree, either through programs exclusively focused on rural—or through programs that will necessarily include rural to a large degree.

To enable policy solutions that maximize the public benefit of these federal resources, the lessons from Reimagine Rural suggest a multi-pronged strategy that could be effective in the immediate term.

Here are the five items listed.  You'll have to look to the blog itself to learn more of the details on each.

1. Shift the mindset from decline to opportunity

2. Invest in readiness

3. Improve coherence

4. Invest at a meaningful scale

5. Increase transparency

The first post in this two-part series on takeaways from the Reimagine Rural podcast is here. 

Shasta County, California declares itself a 2d amendment sanctuary

Jessica Garrison reported a few days ago for the Los Angeles Times under the headline, "Shasta supervisors declare county a 2nd Amendment fortress in ‘war on guns.’"  Here's the lede:  

After gaining national attention for dumping Dominion Voting Systems and becoming the largest entity in the United States to resort to hand-counting ballots, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday waded into another issue roiling right-wing America: an unwavering defense of gun rights.

By a 4-0 vote, the board approved a resolution declaring that the county would “use all lawful means at its disposal to support and defend the Second Amendment.”

Supervisor Patrick Jones, whose day job is managing his family’s gun store in Redding, said the largely symbolic measure was necessary because the 2nd Amendment in California has been treated as a “second-class right,” with Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and other lawmakers in Sacramento making frequent efforts at stricter gun control.

The resolution had come before the board earlier this year in a more dramatic form. Jones introduced a measure in February that had been drafted by the California Rifle and Pistol Assn.

As originally drafted, the resolution called for county employees to review the county’s support for the 2nd Amendment every year. It also gave the Board of Supervisors, and county staff, “the right not to enforce” any state or federal laws that they deemed a violation of the 2nd Amendment “as originally written and intended.”

Here's a quote from Supervisor Mary Rickert, who runs a ranch and who voted against the measure, noting that her husband "has a shotgun by the door tonight.  That shotgun is going to be there tomorrow."  In other words, she doesn't believe anyone is coming for Shasta County's guns. 

And here's more from the story on the resolution itself: 

The measure that came before supervisors Tuesday had been significantly reworked with the input of the county’s lawyers. ...

The new resolution clarifies that the county intends to adhere to state and federal laws. But it also takes sharp aim at the whole concept of gun control and questions the motivations behind persistent calls from Newsom and fellow Democrats for stricter regulation for firearms.

“The Board of Supervisors believes that the California Legislature has passed laws that will be determined to be unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, and continues to pass laws that will be determined to infringe, unconstitutionally, upon people’s rights under the Second Amendment,” reads one article in the lengthy resolution.

You'll find many more posts about Shasta County on this blog. 

Postscript:  Here's Susanne Baremore's essay in the Los Angeles Times commented on the Shasta County move. Baremore, a resident of Redding, the county seat, and "concerned citizen" writes: 

In any other county, a resolution proclaiming a 2nd Amendment sanctuary might have been interpreted as a routine symbolic gesture allowing veterans, gun owners and sundry other “patriots” a public moment of pride in their heritage and rural lifestyle. In Shasta County, which passed such a resolution this week, there is a lot more to it.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shasta County’s Board of Supervisors has made global headlines for strange happenings and curious decisions.

* * *

The Board of Supervisors is currently led by a 3-2 majority that is ideologically further right than anything that used to be called Republican. Its members are also extreme examples of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, whereby a lack of knowledge leads to an overestimation of one’s competence.

* * *

The collective dysfunction of this governing board has led to an effort to recall one narrowly elected member of the far-right majority, Kevin Crye, as well as an exodus of the county’s top leaders and talent.

* * *

We can’t know what effect the supervisors’ latest questionable decision will have for the people they ostensibly represent, but we do know that it’s promoting the lawless use of firearms in a community primed for extremism and violence.

NPR considers rural youth vote

Elena Moore and Ximena Bustillo reported this segment week before last for All Things Considered.  I wouldn't call it a deep dive into the rural youth vote, but at least the intersection of rurality and young people is on the radar screen--indeed, a focus of the national media in this instance.  

The headline is, "Rural voters lean red, young voters lean blue. So what's a young, rural voter to do?"  The transcript (which is different from how I recall the podcast) leads with Anderson Clayton who, at 25, is the youngest state party chair in the nation and has been featured in earlier posts here and in my academic article (with Kacyelee Klein) here:  

"My own people are the ones that I've got to figure out a way to motivate and mobilize and get energized around building this thing up from the bottom," said Anderson Clayton...

"I want to go out there and fight for everybody — and young people especially," she said.

Clayton, who is from Roxboro, N.C., about an hour northwest of Raleigh, is honest about the party's flaws in her state. Following a handful of federal and state losses in the 2022 midterms, she acknowledged Democrats dropped the ball when connecting with young voters, as well as rural and Black voters — three key parts of the state's voting base.

* * *

Biden's popularity is low among rural, independent and young voters. According to the latest NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist polling, 38% of both young voters and independents approve of his job in office. Among rural voters, that number stands at just 28%.

But within those groups, Democrats may have an in. While rural voters nationwide typically vote Republican, young rural voters are more evenly split. In 2020, 50% of rural voters under 30 voted for Donald Trump, while 47% voted for Biden.

NPR sat down with with six young voters who grew up in rural, small towns across North Carolina to discuss what politicians need to do to win their votes in 2024.

Many were critical of how politicians on both sides see their communities.

Listen to the podcast to hear what these six rural young people had to say.  

Postscript from NPR on Sept. 11, 2023:  Meet the New Bosses:  Younger than the Old Bosses. 

Literary Ruralism (Part XXXIX): Monica Potts' The Forgotten Girls

Monica Potts published her memoir, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, in late May, 2023 (Penguin Random House).  It is set in her hometown, Clinton, Arkansas, within her home county, Van Buren.  Potts tells the parallel stories of herself and her childhood friend, Darci.  Potts went off to a posh college, while Darci didn't even finish high school. Potts tries to explain the divergent paths of two children who were once so close. 

The book is chock full of references--implicit or explicit--to the patriarchy that thrives in rural America.  (That's a topic I wrote about here).  She also talks a lot about the links between the patriarchy and religion.  What follows is an excerpt from Potts' book that illustrates the phenomenon, with implicit reference to what I've written about as "white trash" (also here): 

Children and teenagers were sorted into another binary as well: the upstanding citizens and the ne’er-do-wells. The “good” kids were those bound for college. They avoided partying or did it only discreetly, played sports, spent nights and weekends at ballgames and church events, and formed monogamous relationships early. Parents encouraged their teenage relationships, chaperoning and ushering them on dates and folding them into family events. Their families went to church every Sunday, nicely dressed in church clothes, and went to lunch afterward at the Ozark Café or some other restaurant in town, or to a grandmother’s house for a pot roast. Those students were destined to enter adult life early, marry at a young age, and move seamlessly into roles their parents fulfilled: teachers, doctors, dentists. Their social spots seemed almost inherited.

My friend April, who moved back to Clinton to raise her two children, saw this clearly as an adult. “Like, Kid A: ‘We’re thinking you’ll go to college and make something out of yourself, so we’ll put more effort into you.’ ” Her own kids benefited from the reputation she’d had as a good student. The teachers, who were her peers and sometimes friends from her own school days, automatically trusted her.

By contrast, the “bad” kids were those who sneaked out of their homes and partied on weekends. It was an unspoken assumption that they wouldn’t make it to college. They got into trouble at school. We kids gossiped about them, and so did some of the adults. As April put it, “Kid B: ‘Well, you come from a line of poverty and living off the system, so we’ll just hope you don’t get knocked up.’ ” It could be hard, living in a small town like ours, to escape family history. “I don’t think it’s spoken,” April said, “but it’s kind of hard not to pass that history on in a lot of ways.”

She told me that two boys from her class—rowdy, athletic, good-natured class clowns and troublemakers—now had young sons of their own in the same class at school. A teacher looked at the young pair and joked, “Here we go again!” Everyone laughed, as if the sons would inevitably be the same as the fathers—the same story would play over and over with each new generation. Seeing this cycle helped me understand why my mom had felt strongly about cutting off my dad’s family, and why I had been so careful not to follow in what I thought were his footsteps. People who tried to break the pattern were often alone, set against the larger forces of small-town thinking and small-town gossip.

Darci was getting a reputation as a partier, and hanging out with her became increasingly fraught. During Darci’s fourteenth birthday slumber party, half the girls sneaked out and half didn’t. After that, the “good” girls stopped going to Darci’s house. They also avoided Thriftway parking lot parties, where teenagers sat in cars and got drunk and hooked up. Instead, the “good” kids had serious boyfriends and wore promise rings. Their lives were already revolving around their futures as wives and mothers, regardless of any potential career.

As a child, I felt trapped by this system. I didn’t want to be judged by those around me, but I didn’t have the power to ignore their judgments, so I became judgmental too. And though I never really fit in with either the “good” kids or the partiers, I decided to align with the “good” kids. Today it’s sometimes painful, or laughable, to look back at how severe I was. I didn’t believe in the religious prohibitions on sex before marriage, but I did see the social consequences in Clinton that those who failed to follow them suffered. I can see now that I had few options as a teenager. I was still close to Darci, but in order to make sure others saw the differences between us, I was more judgmental than I might have been. I also felt that in a town where people married and had children young, teenagers’ missteps carried a lot of weight.

I'll write more about Potts' book--and include more excerpts--in a future post.  

Here is an earlier post about the book, when it was excerpted in The Atlantic.  And here is the New York Times review of the book, by Rachel Louise Snyder, who questions the ethics of what Potts' reveals about Darci in relation to what Potts told Darci she was going to reveal. 

Here is a post about a 2019 NYT op-ed by Potts about Clinton and Van Buren County politics in relation to national trends. 

Small-town America, a country music video, and racism

Justin Jones is one of the members of the Tennessee state legislature who was controversially expelled from that body for alleged failure to comply with decorum norms when he stood up for victims of mass shootings earlier this year.  Jones tweeted a few days ago, "Don't let the same politicians tell you that a racist song is about supporting 'small towns' while they allow rural hospitals to close without Medicaid expansion, defund public education in rural counties, and keep small-town folks trapped in poverty with starvation wages."

The sentiment about politicians standing up for "small town" values while undermining them and the wellbeing of rural folks generally was one I was on board with.  That sentiment is reflected in many posts to this blog.  But I had no idea what song lyrics Jones was speaking of--and who was standing up for the song and for small towns.

I went looking for more and found this from the Republican speaker of the Tennessee House, "@CMT [Country Music Television] caved to the radical left.  Mainstream media call songs about 'killing police' powerful, exposing-voices that speak the truth, but @jason_aldean speaks his truth--the media can't handle it, so they attempt to silence him and the #1 iTunes downloaded country song." 

I still didn't know what song was being referenced until I heard this NPR segment on Thursday evening about Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town."  Here's the lede:  

Country Music Television (CMT) says it will no longer air the music video "Try That In a Small Town" by Jason Aldean after critics of the video said it contained lyrics that glorified gun violence and conveyed traditionally racist ideas.

A CMT spokesperson confirmed the move to NPR on Thursday, but offered no comment on the reasoning.

Since the video's release on Friday, it's emerged as a familiar kind of political litmus test, with interpretations of its message often falling along voting divides.

* * *

In a statement released alongside the video, Aldean said the song represents an "unspoken rule" for those raised in small towns: "We all have each other's backs and we look out for each other."

* * * 

But much of the criticism around the video has less to do with these clips than its setting: The Maury County Courthouse building in Columbia, Tenn., which serves as an American-flag-draped backdrop for Aldean and his band.

The landmark was the site of race riots in 1946 as well as a 1927 lynching.

* * * 

Threats to outsiders (and the implication those outsiders are from cities) are present throughout the song's lyrics, which begin with a list of crimes that might happen in urban settings ("Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk / carjack an old lady at a red light") then crescendo into the titular chorus:

Well, try that in a small town / See how far you make it down the road / Around here we take care of our own / You cross that line, it won't take long / For you to find out, I recommend you don't.

Aldean ups the vigilante ante by bridging the second chorus with a reference to gun rights, singing:

I've got a gun that my granddad gave me / they say one day they're gonna round up. / Well that s*** might fly in the city / good luck / Try that in a small town.

A journalist who writes about country music for The Tennessean was interviewed for the NPR segment that aired Thursday evening, and he suggested that CMT's removal of the video shows a newfound sensitivity to racial issues within the country music community.   

You can watch the video here.  

What is absolutely undisputed is that the song pits rural against urban, suggesting that the former is more virtuous.  There's an openly nostalgic bit at the end of the video where the singing stops and a video vignette about farmers dropping work on their own crops to help a neighbor in more urgent need.  One of the presumptively rural residents comments on the practice, "it's what this community stands for ... if you need some help, you'll get it."  There's also an image of a farm tractor with a golden glow, in contrast to the images of urban violence that dominate the early portions of the video.  

I was struck in listening to the lyrics of Aldean's "Try that in a Small Town" that the sentiments echo Merle Haggard's "Okie form Muskogee," released in 1969.  

We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee
We don't take our trips on LSD
We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street
We like livin' right, and bein' free

We don't make a party out of lovin'
We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo
We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do 

I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,
A place where even squares can have a ball
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,
And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all

"Okie from Muskogee," of course, was released back before every reference to urban was presumptively raced Black or brown and every reference to rural or small town was heard as an obvious and irrefutable association with whiteness.  

You'll find lots of posts on this blog about the pitting of rural against urban in this era of polarization.  Here's just one of them.  

Here is a Washington Post analysis of the music video, and here is a very thoughtful essay about it in the Daily Yonder.  

Postscript:  New York Times conservative columnist David French published "Try Tolerance in a Small Town" on July 27, 2023.  He calls out small-tow racism based on his own experiences and that of his family's in Columbia, Tennessee, where the Aldean video was shot.  

Latina Deputy USDA Secretary sworn in

NPR reported yesterday here on Xochitl Torres Small's swearing in as the first Latina Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  Torres Small is from New Mexico, where she served one term as a congresswoman from the sparsely populated district that includes Las Cruces and vast portions of the southern part of the Land of Enchantment.  Here's an excerpt from the NPR story about Torres Small, with Ximena Bustillo reporting: 

The former New Mexico congresswoman was tapped in by President Biden in 2021 to serve as undersecretary for rural development at USDA, the branch of the department that oversees infrastructure, utilities and healthcare across rural communities. Now in a higher ranking position, she takes on the role as the administration and Democrats are looking to strengthen their footprints in rural areas.

* * *  

Torres Small has been promoted at a time when the department is undergoing changes to address historical discrimination across its lending and other programs. Late last year the department began making payments on loan cancellations for some farmers and providing $2.2 billion for farmers who experienced discrimination prior to Jan. 2021.

As for new challenges facing Torres Small, they include "looming department staffing shortages. Torres Small has previously raised concerns that nearly half of the employees she oversaw in rural development were eligible to retire, even as demands for the agency have increased."   

The story includes several long quotes from Torres Small: 

To get to be deputy secretary and in charge of the backend of the shop is really exciting because we impact people's lives in so many ways.  I'm the granddaughter of farm workers, and of course, that's a way that it has impacted my life. But my parents were educators. And when it comes to thinking about the kids that they're teaching, making sure that those kids have healthy, nutritious food to help them learn is crucial.

And here's an excerpt where Torres Small highlights the racial and ethnic diversity of rural America, a reality often overlooked (but highlighted in my recent article here and recently on several occasions on this blog):   

One of my favorite things about serving as undersecretary at rural development was that rural America is a lot of different things and a lot of different places, and it's incredibly diverse. Yes, it's a farmer on a tractor, and it's also a rural [fishing village] in Alaska and it's also Indian country.

While cast in a negative light here, an aging USDA staff can also be seen as a positive--opening opportunities for younger rural sociologists and economists in government service. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story closes with this quote from Durst:  

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

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

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

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

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

Rural people among most disadvantaged when it comes to food security

Ximena Bustillo reported a few days ago on negotiation of the Farm Bill and its implications for SNAP--that's the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, a major safety net program aimed at preventing families from going hungry.  SNAP, which is re-authorized and re-negotiated every five years as part of the so-called Farm Bill, has become a political football.  One of the issues is that of work requirements, which Bustillo reports was resolved earlier this year when legislators agreed to changes in those requirements.  Bustillo does not specify what those changes are. 

Here's the part that surprised me in its recognition of the particular burden rural residents face in relation to

Perhaps at most disadvantage are people in rural areas. Parts of the state lack jobs, transportation, broadband and grocery stories, Kraft said, which increases reliance on SNAP and food banks.

Now lawmakers and advocates have a new vehicle for expanded benefits: the 2023 farm bill.

Though it is not linked explicitly to rural populations, Bustillo also reports a "move[ ] to reform the way personal vehicles are taken into consideration for the purposes of SNAP eligibility."

Texas Monthly takes a deep dive into the consequences of vouchers and school choice for rural schools

Forrest Wilder reports for Texas Monthly out of Fort Davis, Texas, on the way Texas' school choice legislation is hurting rural schools.  Fort Davis is the county seat of Jeff Davis County, population 1,996, on the southwest edge of the state.  The story features a "conservative, gun-toting superintendent" named Graydon Hicks III, who says that, recently, he "has never felt farther from the state's political center of gravity."  

For years Hicks ... has been watching helplessly as a slow-motion disaster has unfolded, the result of a deeply flawed and resource-starved public school–finance system. Over the past decade, funding for his little district, which serves just 184 students from pre-K through twelfth grade, has sagged even as costs, driven by inflation and ever-increasing state mandates, have soared. The math is stark. His austere budget has hovered at around $3.1 million per year for the past six years. But the notoriously complex way the state finances schools allows him to bring in only about $2.5 million per year through property taxes.

Hicks has hacked away at all but the most essential elements of his budget. More than three quarters of Fort Davis’s costs come in the form of payroll, and the starting salary for teachers is the state minimum, just $33,660 a year. There are no signing bonuses or stipends for additional teacher certifications. Fort Davis has no art teacher. No cafeteria. No librarian. No bus routes. The track team doesn’t have a track.

But Hicks can’t cut his way out of this financial crisis. This school year, Fort Davis ISD has a projected $621,500 funding gap. To make up the difference, Hicks is tapping into savings. Doug Karr, a Lubbock school-finance consultant who reviewed the district’s finances, said Fort Davis ISD was “wore down to the nub, and the nub’s all gone. And that pretty much describes small school districts.”

“I am squeezing every nickel and dime out of every budget item,” Hicks said. “I don’t have excess of anything.” When I joked that it sounded like he was holding things together with duct tape and baling wire, he didn’t laugh. He said, “I literally have baling wire holding some fences up, holding some doors up.”

The district’s crisis comes at a time when the state is flush with an unprecedented $32.7 billion budget surplus. Hicks is a self-described conservative, but he thinks the far right is trying to destroy public education. For years, the state has starved public schools of funding: Texas ranks forty-second in per-pupil spending, according to Raise Your Hand Texas, a pro–public education nonprofit founded by H-E-B chairman Charles Butt. And yet Governor Greg Abbott is spending enormous political capital on promoting a school-voucher plan, which would divert taxpayer funds to private schools. Public education, Abbott has repeatedly said, will remain “fully funded,” though public-education spending is projected to be lower this year than when he took office, in 2015, and the Legislature recently passed a $321.3 billion budget with no pay raise for teachers and very little new funding for schools. Unable to get his voucher plan through the regular legislative session, Abbott is threatening to call lawmakers back to Austin until he gets his way.

* * * 

With each passing month, his rural district inches closer to financial ruin. If nothing changes by fall of next year, Fort Davis will have depleted its savings. He doesn’t know the exact day that his schools will go broke, but he can see it coming.

Wilder, by the way, does an admirable job breaking down and describing Texas' complex school funding system.  One of the challenges of that funding formula for places like Fort Davis is that local property values are going up, which leads to a diminution in funds received from the state but not necessarily any commensurate rise in local funds to support the schools.  

Near the end of the story comes this, highlighting the tension between the state's rural reaches and decision makers in Austin: 

As we were sitting outside his office in his red pickup with the engine idling, Hicks told me that he’d given up on lobbying the Legislature. He mentioned again that [Lt. Gov] Patrick and other GOP lawmakers are trying to destroy public education by using vouchers to privatize schools, and he said that most other politicians “don’t give a s— about West Texas.” But for the time being he was still fighting: writing op-eds, firing off plaintive missives, asking concerned citizens to contact their legislators.

Toward the end of our visit, I asked Hicks what’s going to happen to his schools. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not patient enough to spend time with assholes in Austin, and I’m not rich enough to buy any votes.” TEA has suggested that Fort Davis consolidate with another district—most likely Valentine, which is 35 miles away—but Hicks said both districts would suffer for it.

And the very end of the story gives us the news that Superintendent Hicks has announced his retirement. 

An earlier New York Times story about the school funding situation in Texas--as it relates to vouchers--was more positive about the survival of rural schools-- in part because residents will fight for them.  And in places like New Home, which is economically embedded with Lubbock, those fighting for rural schools are more numerous and will perhaps have enough political clout to influence legislators in Austin.