Rural revitalization project a good-faith effort that could have been easier

As noted previously in these pages, Georgia lawmakers have been making good-faith proposals for energizing the stubbornly underdeveloped and economically depressed rural areas of Georgia.

Some of those areas — nearby southwest Georgia in particular — are among the poorest regions not just in the state but in the nation, and they continue to stagnate.

The prevailing legislative effort, discussed in this space before, is a House panel appointed by Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, called the Rural Development Council. Its recommendations, to be presented to the General Assembly when the 2018 legislature convenes next month, include incentives for people and businesses to move to (or not move away from) rural Georgia.

As described last week in Tom Crawford’s Georgia Report, an online journal of state news and politics, the major proposals include income tax deductions of up to $6,000 a year for people who move to rural areas; legislative modification of the state’s Certificate of Need (CON) requirements (rural hospitals have been closing their doors at an alarming rate); and major subsidies and incentives for providing high-speed broadband access to underserved areas.

That last is a major issue for business growth and recruitment. The House panel suggests a standardized tax rate for service providers, standard fees that rural electric cooperatives would charge for use of their poles, and direct government subsidy of some rural internet service.

(As Crawford points out, bipartisan broadband legislation is still pending from the 2017 session.)

But in a column published Tuesday in the Thomasville Times-Enterprise, Crawford also notes that while it is “commendable to extend a helping hand to the state’s more impoverished rural areas … the same legislators who are trying to do this also allowed something to happen a few years ago that undercuts their efforts.”

Namely, refusing to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, which, Crawford writes, cost the state some $9 billion in federal money, much of which “would have gone to hard-pressed rural hospitals that treat large numbers of Medicaid patients.”

At least six of those hospitals are now closed, and “[if] there is no hospital in a rural county to provide reasonable access to health care, there isn’t much chance that businesses are going to locate there.”

The state can’t go back and retroactively plant the tree it didn’t plant when it had the chance. The idea of altering the CON requirements, which will no doubt raise a major political hue and cry from health care organizations and hospital groups that benefit from the status quo, at least shows a recognition on the part of the panel that access to health care is critical to the task they’ve undertaken.

And truth be told, health care considerations aside, rural Georgia, like rural areas across the United States, have been in economic decline for years. Reversing, even stopping or just slowing that trend is a Herculean task. But it’s one well worth the undertaking.

This story was originally published December 19, 2017 at 4:50 PM with the headline "Rural revitalization project a good-faith effort that could have been easier."