Take on a project like “Trouble in God’s Country” and you inevitably spend way too much time plowing through government documents that most people don’t even know about, let alone actually read. One such document is the 2023 Overview and Recommendations report from the House Rural Development Council (HRDC).
The HRDC is a body that was created in 2017 by the late David Ralston, then speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, to try to figure out what to do about rural Georgia. Eight years later, they’re still at it. According to the Council’s 2023 report, more than $245 million in state funds have been poured into various initiatives designed “to improve rural communities as a direct result of RDC budget and policy recommendations.”
Exactly how much good that money has done for rural Georgians is unclear, but at least they’re trying.
The HRDC report is loaded with at least a halfdozen revelations that would support individual columns (and I’ll do my best to get to them). For my money, though, the most important part of the report was a proposal to create a Joint Office of Rural Affairs. The report was a little vague about how the Joint Office of Rural Affairs would be set up and how it would operate, but it would apparently be a new agency attached to the General Assembly.
“The State of Georgia desperately needs agencies, committees and initiatives focused on the sustainability of rural Georgia,” the report stated, “but the State of Georgia desperately needs legislative focus on these matters. Engendering executive branch agencies and legislative committees to work collectively with purpose on behalf rural Georgia has proven very challenging.”
That last sentence is worth putting in bold face and italics: “Engendering executive branch agencies and legislative committees to work collectively with purpose on behalf of rural Georgia has proven very challenging.”
This is one of those tortured sentences that probably a half-dozen House members labored over for hours in an effort to be diplomatic, but it translates roughly to: “We can’t get the (multiple expletives deleted) state agencies to work with us.”
Your humble TIGC scribe won’t take sides in that particular feud, but I will say that a lack of confidence in the state’s existing bureaucracies is what prompted me to suggest in a column several weeks ago that the state should create a new Georgia Department of Rural Crisis Management.
I was less diplomatic than the HRDC. “The one thing we know for sure,” I wrote, “is that the existing state bureaucracies – Economic Development, Community Affairs, Education, etc. – are failing miserably. Huge swaths of rural Georgia, especially south of the gnat line, are mired in the nation’s bottom ranks for just about every economic, education and health metric you can imagine. It’s time to try something new.”
About this the HRDC and I agree: The magnitude and complexity of the crises in rural Georgia have outstripped the ability of the state’s existing state agencies to solve them. They operate in silos and are hamstrung by crippling bureaucratic carbuncles. It really is time to try something new.
As it happens, state government over the past quarter of a century has created building blocks that might be put together to make a fresh start at rural Georgia’s problems. One was the creation in 2000 by then-Gov. Roy Barnes of the OneGeorgia Authority, which set aside hundreds of millions of tobacco settlement dollars for rural Georgia projects. (Rural Georgia was apparently unimpressed; two years later it went overwhelmingly for Barnes’s Republican opponent, Sonny Perdue, and voted Barnes out of office.)
More recently, the HRDC in 2017 sponsored legislation creating the Center for Rural Prosperity and Innovation. The Center was tucked into the University System of Georgia (USG) and housed at the Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC) in Tifton. The Center has already done some important work documenting a wide range of problems afflicting rural Georgia municipalities and counties. Importantly, it’s a young organization unburdened by onerous rules and regulations and able to respond fairly nimbly to challenges as they arise.
My suggestion: Promote the Center for Rural Prosperity and Innovation to departmental status. Pull the OneGeorgia funds out of the Department of Community Affairs and deposit them with the upgraded Center. Give that organization the staff and resources it needs to function effectively. Give it the flexibility and latitude to make some hard decisions that won’t be politically popular.
I know that proposal is light on details and will need to be m ore fully fleshed out. But it really is time to try something new.
