A new approach to aiding rural Georgia

Forty-five years ago, then-President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order creating the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).  This was done at least partly in response to a request from the National Governors Association (NGA).  The NGA had gone to Carter and said, basically, when we have a natural disaster that requires federal support, we need a single point of contact with the federal government.  We don’t have time to deal with the half-dozen or so federal agencies that show up in such situations.

I am sure this suggestion will be met with much derision – and possibly gales of laughter – but I suggest that state and national leaders trying to figure out what to do about the rural crisis in Georgia and the rest of the country consider the FEMA model: a government agency charged solely with tackling the socio-economic superstorms now ravaging rural parts of Georgia and the nation.

The one thing we know for sure 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.

By the FEMA model, I mean an agency that would have the authority and bureaucratic muscle to muster the resources of other state agencies to support counties (or larger multi-county regions) once they have been declared rural crisis areas by the governor.

Creating such an agency would be no mean feat.  Existing state agencies would no doubt do their best to strangle it in its crib.  Greg Schneiders, the Carter White House official who ramrodded creation of FEMA, wrote in 2006 that the effort faced “fierce” opposition from the 30-plus federal agencies whose turf was threatened by the new agency, including the Departments of Defense (DOD) and Health and Human Services (HHS) – and that was before they had to fight their way through Congress to give FEMA departmental status.

My proposed Georgia Department of Rural Crisis Management would no doubt face the same kind of resistance – indeed, outright opposition – and the sitting governor would have to be firmly behind it and willing to keep his other bureaucracies in line and slap down the inevitable legislative opposition.

Once created – if created – job one for the DRCM would be to figure out what constitutes crisis status for a county.  The state took a very preliminary stab at this in the late 1980s when it created a new Job Tax Credit (JTC) program.  That program was aimed at encouraging job creation in the state’s 40 poorest counties by granting tax credits to companies that created at least 10 jobs in one of those counties and maintained them for five years.  

Membership in that Bottom 40 club was determined by a ranking system based on county-level per capita income (PCI), poverty rates, and unemployment rates.    Over time the JTC program devolved into a very bad – and very expensive – joke.  Now, businesses creating certain types of jobs in all 159 counties can claim job tax credits, and there’s really no way of knowing which companies received how much in tax credits or whether the jobs claimed were really created and maintained.

Based on an analysis of Georgia Department of Revenue (DOR) data I conducted and blogged about last year,  the State of Georgia in 2022 granted approximately $390 million in tax credits for the creation of about 130,000 jobs.  Only 9,269 of those jobs – barely 7% of the total – went to Bottom 40 counties.  Fulton County alone got 38,930 of those JTC-supported jobs, more than four times as many as the Bottom 40 counties.

So, if Job One for the new DRCM is to figure out how to define a county in crisis, Job Two is to kill the Job Tax Credit program and convert that $400 million a year in what amount to secret tax credits to better use.

But I digress.  Back to my original suggestion: creating a Georgia Department of Rural Crisis Management based conceptually on the FEMA model.  I know FEMA has its critics, and I’m sure my suggestion will inherit most if not all of them.  But it’s worth keeping in mind that FEMA has reshaped the way the nation responds to big natural disasters and spawned an emergency management culture that now permeates state and local governments.  

In time – and it will take time – the Georgia Department of Rural Crisis Management might have a similar effect. 

Charles Hayslett is the author of the long-running troubleingodscountry.com blog.  He is also the Scholar in Residence at the Center for Middle Georgia Studies at Middle Georgia State University.  The views expressed in his columns are his own and are not necessarily those of the Center or the University.