WASHINGTON - Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat from Arkansas, told a crowd of rural advocates and experts Thursday that farmers and ranchers have his ear.
Pryor and Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, both up for re-election in 2014, co-hosted a “Rural Summit” Thursday to focus attention on issues that affect residents of rural areas.
The event drew about 200 agriculture and economic development policy experts from around the country.
Washington’s “one-sizefits-all” approach puts residents of farms, ranches and small towns at a disadvantage in the race for federal dollars compared with suburban and city residents, Pryor said.
“A lot of people in Washington don’t connect with agriculture,” said Pryor, who serves as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture. “We need to make sure that when we are prioritizing funding … that we don’t leave rural Americans behind.”
For Pryor and Begich, chairman of the Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee, the gathering was an opportunity to buff their credentials among rural voters, said Bruce Oppenheimer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University.
Republicans see both seats as vulnerable. Oppenheimer said it is unclear how well Pryor and Begich will do among rural voters, but he said nationally Democrats need to gain ground among voters from farms and small towns, just as Republicans want to improve their showing among women and Hispanics.
“Both Begich and Pryor know that in their states they have to do well among rural voters because that’s a sizable part of the electorate,” he said.
As the Senate prepares to take up a farm bill update next month, Pryor warned that opponents will attempt to “divide and conquer” ruralresidents by playing regional interests of farmers off one another. He urged farmers and rural advocates to stay united.
Pryor told attendees about legislation he’s pushing this session of Congress, including the Fair Claims Act and the Farmers Undertake Environmental Land Stewardship, or FUELS, Act.
The Fair Claims Act, which Pryor sponsored during the last Congress and is currently redrafting, would require the U.S. Department of Agriculture to respond to civil-rights complains against the agency within 45 days.
In 1999, the department settled a class-action lawsuit by black farmers who said they were not provided the same level of federal assistance that whites received. More than $1 billion in claims have been paid to farmers as a result of the settlement in the case, Pigford v. Glickman (the former USDA secretary), but claims of bias persist.
Pryor’s land-stewardship act would limit Environmental Protection Agency requirements for farmers who store oil. U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., has sponsored similar legislation in the House.
Debate about what constitutes a rural community also surfaced at Thursday’s gathering.
For years, the Agriculture Department has used various definitions, based on population size and proximity to larger population centers, to determine whether a town qualifies for one of the morethan 40 rural economic development programs it runs, including programs that provide business startup grants, funds for people with disabilities and technical advice for farmers who want to start cooperatives.
For some programs, only towns with a population under 20,000 qualify. Other programs set the cutoff at 30,000. Still others limit participation to towns with a population less than 50,000.
Pryor said he was not convinced that a proposal by the USDA to allow any town with a population of fewer than 50,000 to qualify for its programs was a good idea. The department’s proposal says that setting one common population test would allow the agency to focus on the merits of a funding request.
If Congress makes the change, Pryor said, smaller communities would have to compete with larger suburban communities that already have many amenities, such as bus service and updated water systems.
“You have the same amount of resources, but suddenly you have a lot more communities that qualify,” he said. “It may spread those resources thinner than they are now.”
Charles Fluharty, the founder of the Rural Policy Research Institute urged both parties to invest more in rural communities.
“The Democrats believe that regardless of what they do, rural Americans won’t vote for them, and the Republican Party thinks they have the rural vote locked up, and they don’t have to do anything for them,” he said.
Congress has neglected rural residents, Fluharty said. The government spends between $300 and $500 less per person on rural residents than on their urban counterparts, he said.
“Both parties should be held accountable for that,” he said.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 04/26/2013