Rural Georgia Struggles Without Focused Economic Support

Even as Georgia’s metropolitan areas are experiencing unprecedented economic growth, rural areas of the state remain poor and face a bleak future.

Many of the problems are structural in nature, Georgia’s Rural Center Director David Bridges said, and proposed some bold ideas to fix them.

The first is to change how the state invests in rural communities. The way to create growth in declining areas is to enact a funding strategy that creates regional growth by investing in regional hubs, rather than in each of the state’s 159 counties.

“The problem with our rural investment strategy now is that we’re spreading the jelly so thin that no one can taste it,” Bridges told members of Georgia’s House Rural Development Council on Thursday at Berry College.

“We believe that the hub-city model is the right way for investment in rural Georgia,” Bridges said. “And as you grow the hub, the spoke-cities will also grow.”

The hub-city model is pragmatic, he said, because it focuses economic support in a single area that will provide economic lift for the region and can ideally capitalize on existing infrastructure and investment.

A hub city must provide many benefits to the region, most importantly healthcare, education and infrastructure. Bridges called for a three to five-year pilot project to focus on building hub cities in several communities, which would then positively lift the spoke communities.

Focused investment will yield measurable results, he said, and reduce the cost of delivering key services such as public safety, healthcare and education.

Education And Healthcare Linked

“Twenty-five percent of children in poor communities have not seen a doctor in more than five years,” Georgia’s Deputy Superintendent for Rural Education and Innovation Bronwyn Ragan-Martin said. “It’s hard to pay attention in class when you have a toothache.”

Some counties don’t have a single physician, she said, which brings a whole host of challenges to economic development, and so does access to technology.

“If students don’t have broadband access,” Ragan-Martin said. “Then they will be behind everyone else and have real trouble entering the workforce.”

Rural communities without much economic activity face problems with bringing in talented professionals such as doctors, police officers and teachers.

“If they are young and single,” Ragan-Martin said, “they might not want to come to rural Georgia in a town that might not even have a Walmart.”

Rural areas also struggle with keeping their youngest and brightest from leaving for better and more plentiful opportunities in the growing metro areas.

Cooperation

Addressing the decline of rural communities can also be tackled through service consolidation, Association County Commissioners of Georgia Executive Director Dave Willis said. Many core functions may be more affordable to rural communities if the cost is spread across multiple counties.

Rural counties should band together and enter into intergovernmental agreements to cover things like E911 centers, human resources and other areas such as management, he said.

“Regionalizing some functions is a good idea,” Willis said. “I don’t see why two or three counties can’t band together and hire a county manager, which will help them make better decisions.”

Helping rural communities make good decisions comes down to training and education, especially for elected officials, he said.

“Education is an investment,” Willis said. “Why don’t county commissioners need to be educated?”

Unsurprisingly, he believes that a relatively small investment in education can lead to better decisions which can have huge impact across a multi-county community.

“The decline in rural Georgia really started in the 1920s,” Bridges said. “So these rural counties are going to have to start helping each other.”

Focusing on building up these hubs, and continually supporting them, will yield long-term results, Bridges said.

“We are all one Georgia, we rise together and we fail together,” Bridges said.