North, central, southern, western. There is more than one rural Illinois, and this distinction is important in government's attempt to help solve their problems.

Franklin County Board Chairman Glenn Snider knows first hand the havoc the rural economic crisis can wreak. "In our little area three coal mines are closed down and the dress factory burned," he says. Nor are farmers in his southern Illinois county faring much better. Several went broke last year and more are in trouble because of low prices for corn and soybeans. "What we've got are coal, oil and farming and they're all going to [pot]," he says. "The biggest employer we've got is the university at Carbondale." Snider expects the county's assessed valuation to drop $10 million this year, to $167 million. Some of the reduction reflects plummeting farmland values, but some indicates the economic impact on rural downtowns, where he says "people are barely making enough to pay the light bills.

Franklin County is caught in rural crisis. Low prices for farm products reverberate through the local economy, boost demands for services and trim government revenues. It is a heavy burden on local governments. For the first time in Snider's 15 years on the county board, employees are going without a pay raise. The exception is the sheriff, whose salary must be increased from $25,000 to $37,000 because of a new state law that displeases Snider. Franklin County's loss of $150,000 in federal revenue sharing money caused elimination of $6,000 given senior citizens organizations and a summer program that put nine college students to work on highways.

A new quarter percent county sales tax authorized by the General Assembly last year would help Franklin County, but much of it will be used to build a new jail ordered by the state. County ofiicials are looking for some state help on the $2 million project, but have been unable to find another county willing to share a regional jail and further reduce local costs, the board chairman says.

As supervisor of Six Mile Township, Snider sees hard times for the smaller government, too. Five years ago 13 people drew relief in the township. Today 130 receive aid, most of it state money. The township had used its revenue sharing money to provide a driver for a Rotary Club-donated station wagon to ferry the elderly to doctors, grocery stores and banks. With no taxi service available, the service was well used in a town where half are retired and many lack cars. But Snider fears the township will have to give up the service.

Relief for Franklin County will begin when farmers start to grow something besides corn and soybeans, says Snider, a former farmer who now rents out his land. "The farmer's going to have to get back in the farming business. He's got to get diversified back into hogs and livestock." A new vegetable growing operation holds some promise for farmers in his area, the board chairman thinks. Californians have moved onto land just east of Ziegler and last year successfully raised and sold to supermarkets 120 acres of broccoli. Gary Teixeira, who manages T&R Farms with his bother Mark, sees a potential for a return on land which he says will not support row crops. "We're trying something new because they can't make it the other way," he says. Teixeira stresses that there is no certainty they will be successful, although they see the potential. Still, the first year went well and T&R Farms will grow more broccoli and add sweet corn and bell peppers this year, he says.

To date the boost to Franklin County has been modest, Snider says, with some low paying and a few better paying jobs. The real boom will come if the vegetable farm can build a plant to refrigerate and ship vegetables grown by other farmers to markets in the area. That, Snider says, will provided a needed diversification from the corn and soybean farming.

The problems of Franklin County, compounded by similar difficulties across rural Illinois and rural America, comprise the rural crisis. Farmers are going broke or struggling to make ends meet. People are moving away from small towns, and stores on Main Streets are closing. Industries that shut their doors create local economic disasters.

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No less staid a body than the U.S. Senate has turned its attention to the farm crisis and its rural impact. A report by the Senate Committee on Intergovernmental Affairs entitled "Governing the Heartland: Can Rural Communities Survive the Farm Crisis?" details how declines in farmland values reduce revenues to local governments. At the same time, the deteriorating farm economy reduces retailers' income and the taxes they pay. Moreover, the Senate report says, current federal policies offer little relief, and states with revenues crippled by the farm crisis can not make up the difference.

The question of rural survival has come in for plenty of attention in Illinois, too. As in Franklin County, the crisis is exacerbated by the simultaneous problems in two other rural industries — coal mining and oil. Within the last year two initiatives were launched to prop up rural communities. A Senate Democratic effort, Rural Revival, was passed by the General Assembly in June. It provides help for agribusinesses that want to diversify and for farmers who need to restructure debt, as well as funds for construction of county jails. It also allocates a portion of Build Illinois money to rural areas.

Meanwhile, Gov. James R. Thompson promised in his 1986 State of the State to find ways to preserve the values of small town and rural life. To that end he put Lt. Gov. George H. Ryan in charge of a task force which held 22 hearings and toured another 119 communities. The Governor's Task Force on the Future of Rural Illinois was to make its final report in January. However, Thompson seized on some of its findings before the election to recommend creation of centers for academic research. He ordered that rural areas receive 25 percent of funding from state programs and created a Rural Affairs Council to coordinate rural programs.

Out of the studies have come a pair of buzzwords — diversification and value-added agriculture — heralded by many as the salvation of Illinois agriculture and rural communities. Diversification is a break from reliance on the now staple crops of corn and soybeans into new markets like vegetable farming in Franklin County. Value-added agriculture consists of growing and processing crops into final products in Illinois, instead of shipping raw products to other states.

Main Street, Small Town, Rural Illinois

Working to promote both is the Illinois Farm Development Authority, which since January 1 has been able to offer loan guarantees to agribusinesses. "We really need to get into diversification," says Ron Bailey, executive director of the farm development group. "Through the 1970s the easiest way to make profits was with corn and beans,'' says Bailey since planting row crops takes less time than either raising livestock or dairying. One project being considered by his agency is a loan guarantee to help reopen a hog slaughtering plant in Monmouth which closed May 1. When Illinois Pork Corp. begins operation later this year, it will put 450 individuals to work and reopen a market for farmers. A local facility would trim both shipping costs and deaths which occur when animals are trucked as far away as Ohio, Bailey says. He sees a market, too, for diversification into eggs and poultry in a state that imports 95 percent of its eggs and broilers and 90 percent of its turkeys.

Sen. Glenn Poshard (D-59, Carterville), a mover in the Rural Revival package, lays much of the blame for the rural malaise on President Reagan. "The day Reagan was sworn in corn was $3.46 a bushel. Today it is $1.36." The representative from some of the state's poorest counties in southern Illinois says cuts in federal farm aid and in social service programs hurt his constituents. "The conservative agenda of Reagan may be true in terms of social service agencies, but in fact is the most expensive agenda ever," Poshard says.

Poshard thinks Rural Revival has begun to address problems with agriculture and small towns. It has, he says, boosted the share of Build Illinois money flowing to non-urban areas and helped financially strapped small towns rebuild roads and sewers. "In its first year, Build Illinois had primarily an urban agenda," he says. A more significant benefit may be the Farm Development Authority's loan guarantees. If state guaranteed loans can spur vegetable farming, raising of poultry and horse farming, farmers will have new products to sell and the oversupply of corn and beans will drop, Poshard says.

But Poshard argues that Rural Revival must now be extended beyond farms and public works projects. He says downstsate legislators must come up with ways to address the crisis in rural health care, to boost small business in rural areas and to prop up local governments hit hard by loss of federal revenue sharing. Poshard has been trying to find ways to maintain medical service in Cairo after the closing of the hospital there. He predicts the situation — spurred by loss of patients who pay their own bills to larger medical centers in Paducah, Ky., and Cape Girardeau, Mo. — will be repeated elsewhere in Illinois. From the Cairo experience should come a model, and state money, to guarantee medical service in the community, Poshard says.

Although state money is needed for health care, local governments could do without state-imposed demands, Poshard says. For instance, a state law requiring that all polling places be open for school district elections boosted Johnson County's costs from $800 to $18,000, he says. The laudable goal of increased voter participation does not justify the hike, he says.

22/February 1987/Illinois Issues

They're getting half the money to provide twice the services." The southern Illinois senator has no plan to approach his other goal of promoting small business development, but believes the same measures that would work in urban areas could help in southern Illinois. The difference is that closing a small plant in the rural area has a greater impact because other employment is not readily available.

Five months' travel through the rural areas of Illinois convinced Don Norton, executive director of the governor's task force, that rural residents feel overlooked. Although Norton finds notable the fact that no one testifying before the group was angry or confrontational, he says, "There was the feeling out there that rural Illinois had not ranked very high on the importance chart."

Notion characterizes himself as an economic determinist and says what he heard most was concern over a depressed rural economy. During the "golden days of the 1970s" farmers in Illinois got out of producing anything but corn and soybeans, he says. They stopped raising hay and livestock, milking a few cows and running small sawmills. The two-crop specialization was encouragedby federal policies, bankers and seminars, but made farmers captive to a market that has since fallen apart. Norton says that production agriculture, large farms raising corn and soybeans, will remain profitable on the state's best farmland located in central and east central Illinois. But more marginal and in western and southern Illinois that was converted from other use when prices were high in the 1970s, is no longer able to turn a profit. It is there that Norton thinks diversification, or rediversification as he calls it, is most needed.

An alfalfa processing plant which will open near the western Illinois community of Liberty this spring illustrates one approach. The Adams Pride plant will process coarse, chopped alfalfa into small cubes for sale by the bag as horse and dairy feed. The $2.5 million plant will provide jobs for about 40 and use 8,000 acres of alfalfa grown by 80 or so area farmers. And it will return to Illinois a crop which moved to Nebraska 40 to 50 years ago. "It's not going to revolutionize rural Illinois, but for that area it will make a nice little dent," Norton says. Similar benefits can be gained from revitalized poultry and foresty industries, says Norton. He contends that a strengthened rural economy would provide the money to address other questions raised before the task force. A more robust economy would provide jobs for young persons and end the "aging" of the rural population caused when the younger residents move out. Similarly, a stronger economy would provide funds to keep open hospitals and schools, Norton says. He is less sure what will happen with small towns, which once existed to serve the farms. The farmer who once bought machinery and sold his livestock in town will now drive miles for a new tractor or send his hogs to Ohio, if that is where he can get the best price. And the willingness to travel extends to everyday purchases, a practice Norton dubs the "Walmart Syndrome."

More certain of the death of Main Street in rural Illinois is Samuel Goldman, a professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and a consultant to the task force. "The small town is disappearing and dying and can never be restored," Goldman says. He attributes its demise to better transportation and a change in habits. "You can't find a farmer in rural Illinois who buys anything in his own community. Except for the schools, churches and maybe the hospital, the communities are gone," he adds.

Goldman uses medical services to illustrate differences among rural areas. Those near the Quad Cities have access to hospital facilities not found in southern Illinois, he says. "There is no such thing as a rural Illinois. There are rurals. Problems vary by north, central and southern," Goldman says. The central and northern rural areas enjoy better access to services than does southern Illinois, he says. Goldman's southern Illinois solution, one he doesn't expect to live to see implemented, is the creation of a sprawling metropolitan area across seven counties. He would take a map, drawing a triangle with lines connecting Murphysboro, Mount Vernon and Harrisburg where about 175,000 people live within 950-square miles joined by three major highways. Within that triangle are 45 high schools and 19 hospitals. Goldman reasons that a regional government with a tax base not fragmented through seven county and numerous other local governments could better provide services.

Right now there is such a fragmentation of the tax base that nobody gets enough, he says. Goldman cites Johnson County as an example. Its population of 10,000 — 1,800 of whom are in jail — is outnumbered by the deer in the woods. Yet it supports seven school districts, seven school superintendents, seven superintendents' secretaries, etc.

Rural communities will have to solve their own problems, Goldman believes. Recognition of the uniqueness of rural areas is needed by a General Assembly dominated by urban interests, he says. For instance, a state regulation requiring separate men's and women's rest rooms in senior citizen centers is not appropriate for rural areas when, Goldman says, "We barely have a bathroom attached to a house." Similarly, reducing Medicare payments in rural areas — whether the cost of providing a service is lower or not — is inappropriate, he says.

Goldman does not believe the revival of the agricultural economy will offer salvation to rural communities. Increasingly, farms are owned by absentee landlords and worked by tenant farmers. The owners of the land will make money anyway, he says, and the tenant farmers who are replacing the family farmers will not gain from agricultural booms. The same is true with coal mining. Increased mechanization means that even a healthy coal industry would not produce the jobs it once did, he says.

February 1987/IIlinois Issues/23

The current economic salvation for southern Illinois is Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, he says. Its impact on nine surrounding counties is $161 million per year. "This place would be a desert without us," he says. Also propping up the area economy are state prisons and the veterans hospital.

Like Goldman, Norman Walzer, chairman of Western Illinois University's economics department, sees a loss of function for small communities. Although witnesses at the rural task force hearings bemoaned the loss of grocery, dry goods and clothing stores, Walzer says that many are not going to come back. The agricultural recession may have accelerated the demise of some businesses, but there is little likelihood of a renaissance when agriculture grows stronger. The rural area has gone through what he characterizes as "a basic economic transformation," in large measure because of reliable cars and decent highways that connect the rural areas to large cities that now are the market centers for larger regions.

Walzer cautions against over-pessimism, though. Even as some communities are hurt, others will thrive as regional shopping centers. A few will develop specialties to maintain business. For example, Alton has developed a number of antique shops. And some communities will use inexpensive housing to become bedroom communities, and for them a gas station and convenience store will provide the needed business support. Walzer says the General Assembly must understand the differences between rural and urban areas. "It's kind of hard to shape one policy for the whole state. It's better to understand the difference." He thinks establishment of the Rural Affairs Council will provide that reminder.

"Rural areas brought about their own demise by continued demands for improvement of road networks," says another task force consultant, James M. Banovetz, director of Northern Illinois University's Division of Public Administration. Echoing Walzer's comments, Banovetz says as roads got better residents traveled increasingly to regional centers to do their shopping. It follows, Banovetz says, that location of an industry in a rural community may not help the local economy. Good roads will allow workers from outside that community to drive 30-50 miles to take those new jobs. And workers who live in the community are likely to drive to a larger city to shop. "The higher the level of economic capacity of individual citizens, the less they shop in the local community. As they become better off, the community becomes worse off," he says.

Hit hard by the change are small rural governments, which lack both the financial base and the professional expertise to provide services. The days are gone when a group of farmers could run a county board by deciding who would get paid for keeping roads cleared and who would mow the cemetery grass, he says. Instead counties are going to have to assume a greater role in governing rural areas. He compares small communities to urban neighborhoods. "They are only neighborhoods separated from other neighborhoods by farms. That's the only difference between them and urban neighborhoods."

Banovetz sees possibilities for unique governmental approaches to providing service. He thinks school districts could share staff, having a specialist teach at one school in the morning and another in the afternoon. And rural governments could share administrative staff, where a circuit riding administrator could serve four local governments and spend a day in each community. Given changing shopping patterns, he recommends a big change in the state tax laws. He says the allocation of sales tax revenue to the community of sale is unfair. The distribution produces a windfall for larger regional shopping centers like Carbondale and Mount Vernon, at the expense of nearby small cities and villages, he says. "It makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, in terms of local governments."

Banovetz sees more of the same — continued gradual evolution of rural communities. "Rural communities will be just as different in 2010, as today is from 1950," he says. Down in southern Illinois Snider sees more of the same — more problems. "I don't see it turning around. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better."

24/February 1987/Illinois Issues