In the News: Joe fighting to protect rural aid to region

From the Journal Inquirer:

Courtney, Farm Bureau seek new definition of ‘rural’ to aid state farms
Journal Inquirer

May 30, 2011

The U.S. Department of Agriculture offers millions of dollars in loans and grants to rural communities to support businesses and farms.

But some communities — including many in Connecticut — may miss out because of unclear standards of what constitues “rural.”

Henry Talmage, executive director of the Connecticut Farm Bureau in Windsor, says The USDA’s existing guidelines can be overly restrictive, or as he puts it, an “iron gate.”

Some grants and loans are available to communities with a population of up to 10,000, others to those with populations of up to 20,000, and still others to communities of up to 50,000, Talmage says.

And the cutoff points are so rigid, he says, “if you’re one (resident) over, you’re ineligible.”

Because eastern Connecticut in particular is made up of many communities that are highly rural but exceed the USDA threshold, it’s been difficult to win aid for those towns.

“I’ve seen situations in which a farm has land on two sides of a road, and one side qualified while the other side didn’t,” he says.

So the farm bureau is working with U.S. Rep. Joseph D. Courtney, D-2nd District, to write a more flexible definition of rural into the next congressional Farm Bill. They are looking for a definition broad enough to apply to rural areas in wide open spaces in the West and to the more compact rural areas like those in Connecticut.

There are literally “millions of dollars at stake that can either make or break developments in rural Connecticut,” Talmadge says.

Although the next Farm Bill won’t be voted on until 2012, Courtney, who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, says the groundwork is being laid for changes.

“We want to see a system based on the merit of a particular program and not solely on population estimates,” he says. That would be more in line with the USDA grant and loan program’s goal of promoting deserving rural and agricultural developments, Courtney says.

The USDA’s rural development financial programs support “essential public facilities and services,” such as water and sewer systems, housing, health clinics, emergency service facilities, and electric and telephone service, Courtney says. They promote economic development by supporting loans to businesses through banks, credit unions, and community-managed lending pools.

They also offer technical assistance and information to help farmers and cooperatives get started and improve the effectiveness of their operations.

In addition, they provide technical assistance to help rural communities undertake community empowerment programs through a $115 billion portfolio of loans.

Courtney’s work on the standards goes back to 2009. At that time, Congress passed, and President Obama signed, an amendment to that year’s Farm Bill that that would have dealyed the then-new policy that would have restricted towns in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts from applying for funding.

The moratorium temporarily stopped a policy change proposed by the USDA that would have made unincorporated “villages” located within larger communities ineligible for Rural Development funds. That “would have had a significant impact in eastern Connecticut,” Courtney says.

Two key projects that had been in development for years — a health center in Windham and a Vernon-Bolton water infrastructure improvement project — could have lost promised funding under the new interpretation, he says.

The USDA has dropped the proposed restrictive policy. But Courtney says inserting a more workable definition of rural into the upcoming Farm Bill is necessary to make sure that funding keeps flowing into the state’s rural areas.

“It’s a new effort every year,” he says of the movement to build a better system of qualifying for USDA loans and grants.