Appalachia
Appalachian Regional Commission Announces Nearly $2 Million in Additional POWER Investments in Central Appalachia
Trump slashes Appalachian agency funding that helps Eastern Ky.
"An agency that pumps millions of dollars each year into economic development in Eastern Kentucky and other Appalachian states would lose federal funding if President Donald Trumpβs proposed budget prevails."
"Trump would help pay for increased military spending and a U.S.-Mexico wall by eliminating money set aside for several independent agencies financed by the government, including the Appalachian Regional Commission."
"The agency, which covers all or parts of 13 Appalachian states, has been a conduit for hundreds of millions in aid to Eastern Kentucky since it was founded in 1965, when poverty rates exceeded 50 percent in some counties and much of the region lacked adequate water, highways and health care."
"The ARC has spent more than $23 billion in Appalachia since then on a wide range of programs and projects to tackle the regionβs woes."
"Between October 2015 and January 2017 alone, the ARC supported 63 projects in Kentucky totaling $31.9 million, the agency said Thursday. That spending, which has been matched by more than $65 million in other aid, is projected to create or retain more than 1,200 jobs and provide education or workforce training to more than 2,300 people in the stateβs 54 ARC counties, the agency said."
Applachian Region Commission
The Appalachian Region includes all of West Virginia and parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The Region is home to more than 25 million people and covers 420 counties and almost 205,000 square miles.
A Report by the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission, 1964
Excerpt from Appalachia: A Report by the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission, 1964:Β
“In the future, Appalachia’s potential of timberland, fossil energy and recreational water and wilderness will be required for the satisfaction of our national goals. But further resource activity in the region if uncoordinated in its timing or its relationship to human and social capital could repeat the pattern and make little more than a piecemeal improvement of the Appalachian social and economic infrastructure.”
“Appalachia’s millions of people, whose material and social betterment the focus and end of all development effort, are also the region’s prime resource. Their individual distress is today a national liability: but their pooled personal hopes, talents and resourcefulness is a reservoir of creative energy the Nation can no longer afford to ignore.”
“The Appalachian people have no desire to abandon their traditional home, but whether they leave or stay, their continuing distress compounds a double loss for both the region and the Nation — the cost of welfare maintenance and the loss of productive vigor.”