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Life on Frontier is Tough; Policies Make it Tougher ------------------------------------------------------------------------ by Thomas D. Rowley, RUPRI Fellow 6/20/2003 A lot of the challenges in rural America stem from the very things
that make rural, rural. When you're few in number and living far from the city,
you've got a tougher row to hoe. It's tougher to get jobs (let alone good
jobs), tougher to get health care, tougher to get government services, tougher
to get... well, just about everything. When you can get them, many things
cost more simply because there are more miles to cover and fewer people to foot
the bill. Now multiply those challenges ten-, twenty-, a hundredfold, and
you can picture what it's like on the frontier, 814 counties stretching across
half of the Nation's land that constitute the ruralest part of rural America. Unfortunately, the picture gets worse. First, the frontier's major economic activities - farming, ranching,
mining, forestry, and oil and gas exploration - are prone to boom and bust.
Second, its other mainstay occupations in recreation, tourism, and migrant
farming are seasonal. Finally, enormous swaths of frontier land are owned by
the federal government, and therefore off the property tax rolls and subject to
use restrictions. (Frontier land not owned by the government bears its stamp
just the same because of federal policy's heavy influence on frontier
industries.) To say that life on the frontier is tough is an understatement.
Information from the Frontier Education Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
illustrates. According to the Center, the 50 poorest counties in the U.S. are
frontier counties - not because the people don't work, but because their jobs pay
so little. Nearly a quarter of all frontier counties are what USDA calls
"persistent poverty counties" - places with poverty levels of 20 percent or more
for the last four decades. In addition, as many as 78 frontier counties across 21 states - home
to a quarter of a million or so people - have no health care services. Zero. The
majority of frontier counties have two or fewer health care services of any
kind. On much of the frontier, the nearest medical help can be an hour or more
away. As for help, many federal programs offer little at all. In
communities where population density is sometimes measured in square miles per
person, not the other way around, meeting eligibility requirements can border
on the impossible. Serve at least 100 people to get funding? Not where there
are only 200 people, period. Cough up $50,000 in matching contributions to get
a grant? How, in a community of 500 dependent on low-wage jobs and surrounded
by federal land that pays no property tax? Carol Miller, the Center's director, knows firsthand about
frontier living, residing in tiny Ojo Sarco, a village of almost 200 in Rio
Arriba County, midway between Taos and Santa Fe. "We say 200 people, because
that's how many we need to have a volunteer fire department. Really, it's only
that many on Mother's Day and Christmas." According to Miller, the federal government owns 87 percent of the
land in her county and last year gave the county $600,000 in payments in lieu
of taxes (PILT) - compensation that supposedly takes the place of property tax. The key word is "supposedly". Nationwide this year, the PILT
program will pay local governments $218 million on 614 million acres, a paltry
36 cents an acre. As in years past, that dollar amount is but a fraction of the
$345 million Congress authorized - a figure that is probably too low to begin
with. Miller says that with such a small amount of private, and taxable,
land in Rio Arriba, there is no way to raise property taxes enough to afford the
services that residents need. The problem is exacerbated by the county's high
rate of poverty. "It is unethical," says Miller, "for there to be persistent
poverty in federal lands counties." Through land ownership, policies, and programs, the federal
government drives the economy on the frontier. In places--by omission,
commission, or both--it's driving it straight into the ground. The eight
million people who live there and provide the Nation with food, fuel, and a
whole lot more deserve a whole lot better. About Thomas Rowley: Thomas D. Rowley is a RUPRI Fellow, the editor of The Rural
Monitor, and a freelance researcher, writer, and editor. Previously, Tom served as a project manager at the TVA Rural
Studies Program at the University of Kentucky, an editor of Forum for Applied
Research and Public Policy, and a rural development analyst at the Economic
Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. While there, he also worked
with the National Rural Development Partnership and its State Rural Development
Councils, the National Commission on Agriculture and Rural Development Policy,
the President's Council on Sustainable Development, and the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development. Tom has a master's degree in Community and Regional Planning and a
bachelor's degree in Architectural Studies from the University of Texas at
Austin. RUPRI
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