Ohio counties to get slice of poverty funding

An Oct. 9 measure makes 32 of Ohio’s 88 counties part of the Appalachian region.

CARLISLE, Ky. (AP) — Tabbatha Tubbs laughs at the thought of Washington politicians decreeing her hometown Appalachian. After all, there’s not a mountain in sight from this gently rolling countryside best known for its thoroughbred horse farms.

This is picturesque Bluegrass country: Black wooden fences surround grazing thoroughbreds. Golden stalks of tobacco hang from tiered barns. And herds of fat beef cattle mow their way across fields of green grass.

It’s hardly the heart of Appalachia, the rugged hills where President Lyndon B. Johnson declared war on poverty some 44 years ago. But like it or not, Tubbs and her neighbors are now residents of the impoverished region, at least in the eyes of the federal government.

“It’s funny, I think,” Tubbs said last week, glimpsing out at the landscape from the window of her Carlisle beauty salon.

Folks in the heart of Appalachia aren’t amused that President Bush, with the stroke of his pen, has redrawn Appalachia’s geographic boundaries in a way that could take federal money away from some of the poorest communities in the United States.

Bush signed a measure Oct. 9 that gives 10 additional counties in Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia a cut of about $87 million in federal money set aside this year for poor mountain communities to pay for economic improvements.

The money will be distributed by the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal agency that has been fighting poverty in the mountain region for more than 40 years.

The new Ohio counties are Ashtabula, Mahoning and Trumbull. Adding those three counties extends Appalachian Ohio all the way north to Lake Erie and means 32 of Ohio’s 88 counties are now designated as part of the Appalachian region.

Ashtabula, Mahoning and Trumbull counties each has unemployment rates of about 8 percent. Mahoning includes Youngstown, which has been struggling for decades because of the loss of steelmaking jobs.

Dee Davis, head of the Kentucky-based advocacy group Center for Rural Strategies, said the ailing national economy has spread financial misery beyond Appalachia, and political leaders are looking for help from the ARC.

“Given the current state of affairs, they may want to stretch Appalachia all the way to Chicago,” Davis said.

When Congress created the ARC in 1965, its territory stretched across 360 counties from Alabama to Pennsylvania with its core in the remote and rugged region where Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia converge. Political leaders in other states quickly recognized the benefits.

Later that year, Sen. Robert Kennedy added 13 New York counties to the ARC’s territory. In 1967, 20 mostly hilly Mississippi counties were included. Since then, it has been expanded to include 420 counties spanning 200,000 square miles, portions of which, like the horse-farm dotted Carlisle, aren’t traditionally or geographically Appalachian.

Poverty indicators show the contrast between counties in the heart of Appalachia and the new additions. For example, the federal government sent more than $12 million worth of food stamps in 2006 to Kentucky’s Harlan County, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Nicholas County, where Carlisle is located, received just $1.1 million.

Annual jobless rates in Harlan County ranged from 13 percent in 1997 to 9.1 percent last year. In Nicholas County, the range was 4.4 percent to 6.4 percent for the same periods.

The redrawn map upsets Karen Phillips, a teacher in a community where 75 percent of children qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches because their families are considered poor. Other areas of the country face economic hardships, Phillips conceded, but not like central Appalachia.

“The poverty here is so much worse than anywhere else,” Phillips said. “You see that in the housing, in the age of cars people drive, in the clothing that kids wear to school.”

U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, defended the expansion, saying the additional 10 counties face similar economic problems and therefore “meet the criteria” to receive more financial support.

The Appalachia served by the ARC is political, not geographical, said Ron Eller said, an Appalachian scholar and former director of the University of Kentucky’s Appalachian Center.

Eller said Johnson recognized that when in 1965 he agreed to add portions of New York to get enough votes to push the Appalachian Regional Development Act through Congress. The geographical expansions have helped the ARC politically by increasing its clout in Washington.

The legislation signed this month not only expands Appalachia’s boundaries but also calls for $510 million to be spent in the region over the next five years to build roads, install waterlines, fund educational improvement projects, encourage economic development, even purchase computers for poor children. The proposed spending total is a $64 million increase over the last five-year allotment.

That could have meant more money for core Appalachian counties, Eller said, if politicians hadn’t opted to spread it across a larger area. “When you continue to expand the counties, ultimately it creates a smaller pool of resources for use in the most severely distressed areas of the region,” he said.

Nicholas County’s top elected administrative official, Judge-Executive Larry Tincher, has been lobbying for the past seven years to get the communities he represents declared part of Appalachia so that they can tap into the funding source. He said job losses in Kentucky’s textile industry have hit Carlisle hard over the past decade. The state has lost more than 7,000 jobs since 2001 in apparel manufacturing.

“We’re not trying to take money away from anybody,” Tincher said. “We’re not in it to take anything away from anybody. We’re just trying to improve the lifestyles of our families.”

Herbie Smith, a Kentucky filmmaker who has documented the lives of Appalachian residents for more than 40 years, said the region has “some deep and serious problems” and federal funding needs to be targeted there. Smith said splitting available federal funding with counties outside the mountain region harms Appalachian communities that have struggled through decades of poverty.