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RCAP shares the importance of its work with members of Congress

WASHINGTON—It has been an unusually mild winter in the nation’s capital, but congressional business is nearly frozen in an election-year standstill. Despite this, RCAP field staff and other representatives from around the country received a warm welcome in the offices of their states’ legislators when they came Feb. 13-16 for RCAP’s annual week of visits to Capitol Hill.

More than 50 people participated in the visits, known as the fly-in, and participants visited more than 150 offices. Most were field staff from RCAP’s six regions, and several were members of the board of directors of some of the regions.

The main purpose of the visits every year is to educate members of Congress and their staffs about the importance of RCAP’s work in developing local leadership capacity in small, rural communities and to ask for their continued support for the programs that sustain the organization. RCAP staff spoke about the technical, managerial and financial assistance they have provided to communities’ drinking water and wastewater systems.

It’s personal and professional

The week after he came to Washington for visits to his state’s congressional delegation, Tommy Ricks reflected in an email to fellow RCAP staff about the importance of playing a role, no matter how small, in addressing poverty. Ricks is the Mississippi State Coordinator for Community Resource Group, the Southern RCAP.

For Ricks, the visits to the nation’s lawmakers in the capital have a direct connection both to his current work on the ground in Mississippi and to his past.

Ricks cited a Feb. 22 editorial by contributing columnist Charlie Mitchell in The [Jackson, Miss.] Clarion-Ledger in which he resurrects a story about a neighborhood called Sugar Ditch in Tunica County, Miss. Mitchell compares poverty data in the community from a time it gained national prominence from a visit by Jesse Jackson in 1985 to now. He points out that, even with the influx of not only federal aid to the area but the millions of dollars in private financing that has poured into the county with its casino industry, the poverty of the county is not only still there but is growing. 

As a young man, Ricks attended college in the Mississippi Delta where Sugar Ditch Alley was located, and, he said, “my eyes were opened to the widespread poverty” there.

“I believe we all need to be reminded that, while we all may be discouraged sometimes” with the challenges in small, rural communities, “we must all continue to do our little part,” Ricks wrote. “Until someone invents a silver bullet that will end poverty, our work and that of others will continue to be critically necessary even long after we are all gone from this earth.”

Ricks said he had good meetings with staffers of his congressional delegation. “They were all impressed with our numbers and the fact that we assisted 291 communities last year in Mississippi, even though we were working with a smaller number of staff because of last year’s federal budget cuts,” he said.

Importance of technical assistance

Matt Donnelly came from his home in Montana to take part in the Capitol Hill visits. He visited his entire congressional delegation and said that, because most of his state is rural, his message was well-received.

“The people I talked to recognized the plight of rural communities and recognized the need for technical-assistance programs,” he said.

Donnelly, a professor of electrical engineering at Montana Tech in Butte, is a board member of the Midwest Assistance Program, the Midwest RCAP, which held a board meeting in conjunction with the visits. This was his second time visiting Capitol Hill on behalf of RCAP.

He took time away from his work and home to go to Washington because “we’re losing our rural communities,” he said. “The only way to save them is to ensure they have the proper resources to meet the demands on their infrastructure.”

Setting the stage

The evening before their visits began, visitors to Washington received an orientation from staff of the RCAP national office and Bob Rapoza, RCAP’s lobbyist. Rapoza provided the framework for the visits by explaining that the federal government is facing the prospect of a much leaner budget for the coming fiscal year. The reality of this was illustrated pointedly by President Obama’s budget proposal, which was released earlier that same day. Rapoza provided a history of federal funding in the past several years for programs that have funded RCAP’s work and noted declines, but he said that those making visits still had ways of gaining congressional support for assistance in rural areas.

“RCAP’s visits to Congress are important every year but were especially critical this year when funding for assistance to communities is threatened more than ever,” said Ari Neumann, RCAP’s Director of Policy Development and Applied Research who coordinated the visits. “As members of Congress face pressure to cut the federal budget, we hope RCAP representatives convinced them of the real need for assistance to rural communities and how RCAP can be a key player in that assistance.”

Update on federal legislation that affects RCAP

It’s election season again. As the presidential race heats up and members of Congress prepare for their own re-election campaigns, the nation’s capital is abuzz with predictions for the fall and the punditry of who’s up and who’s down and which races will be blowouts and which will be close.

Meanwhile, Congress and President Obama face a number of must-pass bills before they fully dive into their election campaigns late this summer. At the end of last year, they left a number of issues to be addressed, including reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration and keeping the nation’s airports open, along with extending the payroll tax reduction and unemployment benefits for another year.

Two other major pieces of legislation are set to expire this year: the Highway and Transit Bill and the Farm Bill. The Highway and Transit Bill is set to expire on March 31, so Congress will work to pass that reauthorization first. However, there are substantial differences between the Senate and House of Representatives proposals, which are making passage before the end of March increasingly unlikely.

The Farm Bill is currently set to expire on Sept. 30. It authorizes most of the programs administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development agency (USDA-RD). Other than the housing programs RD oversees, nearly all of its work is authorized by the Rural Development Title of the Farm Bill. However, with the deadline fast approaching and a lot of legislative work left to do this year—including the budget for the fiscal year beginning on Oct. 1—Congress may pass a short-term extension to allow them time to look at the Farm Bill next year.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.), the top Republican on the committee, have said they are committed to getting a Farm Bill through their committee this spring, but it is uncertain if it will have sufficient support to pass the full Senate and if their counterparts in the House will be able to shepherd a bill through their chamber on time.

Recently, a group of more than 80 organizations, including RCAP and nearly all the major commodity groups, sent a letter to the House and Senate Agriculture Committees asking them to pass the Farm Bill this year to give farmers and rural residents certainty about the future (the text of the letter is at www.rcap.org/node/790). RCAP is also actively working with more than 30 other rural development-focused organizations through the Campaign for Renewed Rural Development. Two of the four panelists at the Feb. 15 Farm Bill hearing before the Senate Agriculture Committee (see related article below) represented members of the campaign.

In general, RCAP expects Congress to stay busy through the end of July with the Highway Bill, the budget and appropriations for fiscal year 2013, and possibly a Farm Bill. Once they head home for the August recess, they will be in full-time campaign mode, and little legislation is expected to pass. Any pressing legislation that is not finished before the August recess is likely to be put off until a lame-duck session that will likely convene in December to wrap up legislative business regardless of the outcome of the elections.

RCAP testifies at Senate committee hearing on Capitol Hill

A former small-town mayor from Colorado testified Feb. 15 at a Senate hearing on behalf of RCAP. Her appearance before the committee occurred during the same week that representatives of RCAP from around the country came to Washington, D.C., to educate their congressional delegations on RCAP’s work in rural communities (see related article, the first one, above).

Dr. Florine Raitano, a board member of the Rural Community Assistance Corporation, the Western RCAP, testified at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. She spoke about the importance of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development (RD) programs to rural America. Her testimony drew from her experience as the mayor of Dillon, Colo., the former executive director of the Colorado Rural Development Council and as the current chairman of the board for the Colorado Association for Manufacturing and Technology, Colorado’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Center.

RCAP receives funding from USDA RD to provide technical, managerial and financial assistance to small, rural communities with their drinking water and wastewater systems. Communities themselves are also recipients of funding from RD programs for their water infrastructure and other community facilities.

Raitano was introduced with praise for her work by a member of the committee and a legislator from her home state, Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo.). Testifying with Raitano were Mathias McCauley of the Northwest Michigan Council of Governments, Mark Rembert of Energize Clinton County [Ohio], and Charles Fluharty of the Rural Policy Research Institute.

“Without the help of technical assistance providers like the RCAP network, many small, low-income towns and counties have difficulty accessing RD programs,” Raitano explained in her remarks. “The application process and eligibility requirements for each program are slightly different, and each poses unique challenges. Local leaders are most often volunteers who lack professional staff and the resources to find out what funding sources are available or the requirements for funding eligibility.”

In their testimony, Raitano and the other panelists offered suggestions for improvement to development programs in rural communities. They emphasized the importance of regional collaboration and the need for flexibility within USDA programs to support regionalized development.

The panel also stressed the importance of technical assistance to small-town leaders and the opportunity presented by the Farm Bill to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of USDA RD programs by offering comprehensive technical assistance through RD’s nonprofit partners, such as RCAP. A robust technical assistance program would enable local leaders—especially volunteer mayors and city council members—to more effectively access the resources that are available to them for infrastructure and economic development.

The committee’s chairwoman, Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), and Ranking Member Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) questioned the panel members about barriers to regional collaboration and ways to leverage RD’s limited resources to maximize the economic opportunities they create and their impact on job creation. Due to a scheduled vote on the Senate floor, other committee members were unable to ask their questions during the hearing, but planned to submit them to RCAP in writing for inclusion in the record.

Raitano’s panel was preceded by testimony from Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. He noted the importance of USDA’s rural development and energy programs and the strategies USDA is pursuing to improve the quality of life in rural America. Many of the questions he faced from the committee related to the release earlier in the week of President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget recommendations, but some committee members took the time to ask specifically about USDA’s rural development programs. Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.) questioned the secretary about the need for infrastructure to accompany the boom in oil and gas drilling in eastern Montana and western North Dakota.

Read the full text of Raitano’s testimony at www.rcap.org/raitanotestimony.

Other articles in this issue:

• Director's Letter
• Rural Developments (news briefs)
• USDA and EPA encourage partnerships among water systems
• Five things you can do to save on energy in your utility
• RCAP produces new publications and other resources for small communities