House panel tackles rural stagnation

Doug Bachtel, the late University of Georgia rural sociologist and editor of the invaluable Georgia County Guide, became the state’s most familiar, trusted and sought-after demographer. One of the indicators Bachtel consistently pointed to as a demographic and economic warning sign was when any area’s population growth is strictly a matter of natural increase — births over deaths — rather than “net in-migration.”

By that metric (and of course, as Bachtel himself would have been the first to point out, there are countless others), metro Atlanta would seem to be prospering. So would the state’s other “hub cities,” including this one, that according to a 2016 Georgia State University study saw 90 percent of the state’s job growth between 2007 and 2014.

Those areas, of course, have most of the population. But not 90 percent of it.

Now, as demographer Matt Hauer at the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government notes, as reported in a Tuesday story by the Atlanta Business Chronicle, almost 100 of Georgia’s 159 counties have more people moving out than moving in, and 30 are seeing more deaths than births. A combination of net out-migration and natural decrease isn’t a warning sign; it’s a crisis — what Hauer called “a very strong headwind.”

The woes of rural Georgia, especially rural southwest Georgia, are nothing new; the problem was the subject of the familiar “two Georgias” quandary of years past. As columnist Charlie Harper details in his current series, there are now several distinctive “Georgias” — but struggling rural Georgia remains a stubborn constant.

A new legislative committee, the House Rural Development Council, held its first meeting Monday in Tifton, the “heartland” of Georgia’s chronic rural development problem, with this statement of principle from House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge: "Moving to the big city should not, cannot be the only way to get ahead."

Some of the problems are drearily familiar, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution story on the meeting ticked off a few: poor schools, crumbling infrastructure, sparse access to health care — especially emergency and trauma care — and an overall lack of opportunity. Ralston’s right: Moving away shouldn’t be the only way to get ahead, but for too many and for too long, it has been and is.

“We are going to make a very concerted effort to deal with a lot of issues,” Jay Powell, R-Camilla, House Ways and Means Committee chairman and co-chair of the new panel, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This is a two-year task.”

That is, the committee’s study is a two-year task. No matter how thorough, diligent and well-conceived the final plan turns out to be, the greater task of implementing it, and alleviating a problem that has plagued Georgia since long before the recession and has been virtually untouched by recovery since, will take a lot longer.

This story was originally published May 23, 2017 at 5:03 PM with the headline "House panel tackles rural stagnation."