Stronger Appalachian Regional Commission Key for W.Va.
Appalachians are proud and independent, but our smarts and our skills have often been used to line the pockets of a few corporate executives, leaving our people behind. For much of our history, we measured among the worst in the country in economic prosperity, health, education, and infrastructure development.
This is especially true of West Virginia.
While our state is rich in natural resources like coal, timber, oil, and gas, most of the wealth created from these resources by local workers has left the region. As a result, much of West Virginia and Appalachia have undergone a process of “growth, without development,” resulting in large pockets of poverty, a less diverse economy, and a lack of investments in public goods.
Now, Congress has an opportunity to invest in the region through a revived Appalachian Regional Commission, improving life for families, our children, and future generations.
The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), was formed in 1965 to make substantial investments in the region, reduce dependency on natural resource extraction and enable greater prosperity for all. At the height of its funding between 1965 and 1980, the ARC had a reputation as a “can-do-agency” that improved roads, hospitals, vocational schools, and created jobs. At its peak, ARC investments created 100,000 jobs over five years in the 1970s. Its progress was curtailed when President Reagan attempted to cut all ARC funding.
Federal support for the ARC has fallen away in recent decades and the timing could not have been worse. It happened while Appalachia was seeing steep reductions in high-wage extractive industries and much of Appalachia has faced significant reductions in manufacturing employment. In West Virginia, the result has been a decline in real hourly wages for the typical worker over the last 40 years, along with a long-term decline in employment. Men have been dropping out of the labor force altogether; they’ve just given up on even looking for jobs.
But that could change in the coming years.
President Biden’s 2022 Budget proposal includes an additional $55 million for the Appalachian Regional Commission on top of last year’s investment.
On top of this request, Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Pa., and Rep. David McKinley, R-W.Va., introduced bipartisan legislation that would provide an additional $1 billion in funding for the ARC’s Partnership for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER) initiative over the next five years.
The POWER program, which provides federal resources to help communities affected by job losses in the coal industry, created 4,325 new jobs and helped create 932 new 老司机直播es for Appalachia in 2020 alone. Coalfield Development is one such job-creator supported by POWER, helping us to grow employment in solar installation, sustainable agriculture, construction, and light manufacturing. Scaling up POWER will scale up grassroots innovation across our region. This is the kind of bottom-up innovation required to build a new, diversified, and fairer economy.
Wheeling alone has benefited significantly from the POWER grants. West Virginia Northern Community College, where I graduated, is one in a consortium of community colleges that received support from ARC’s POWER initiative. Known as the Tristate Energy and Advanced Manufacturing (TEAM) Consortium, the project has served over 3,100 students and over 8,200 worker trainees. Six hundred jobs have been created and 120 participating 老司机直播es have been improved.
This is a golden opportunity to increase ARC investments to grow jobs, diversify the region’s economy, and improve social and economic outcomes. This investment can also help provide a stronger foundation for economic development over the long-term. This is especially needed in places hit hard by the loss of coal jobs and the opioid epidemic and to leverage additional private funds.
Raising ARC funding can breathe new life into Appalachia. It can unlock a future that everyone wants; where new small 老司机直播es are opening in once-derelict downtowns, communities are recovering from the ravages of the opioid crisis that has plagued the region for decades, and children who are now in Appalachia’s schools are graduating with meaningful opportunities to find good jobs nearby. In other words, it would deliver on the underlying mission that led Congress to create the ARC 60 years ago.
Let us make good on our promise to Appalachia by funding its future.
Rosemary Ketchum, of Wheeling, is a member of Wheeling City Council, representing the Third Ward.