For the past year, Donald Trump has promised that he will “put our miners back to work” and pull coal country out a decades-long decline. Appalachian voters clearly believed him—they showed up for rally after rally, and on Election day nearly 95 percent of Appalachian counties went red for Trump.
It was never a secret that Trump’s promises would be hard to keep, but it’s still stunning that his first budget actively attacked the region. Along with a laundry list of other programs slated for elimination, Trump proposed nixing the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), which was created to spur economic development in the 420 counties that make up Appalachia. Since it was founded in 1962, ARC has helped cut Appalachian poverty in half, and has brought more than 300,000 jobs to the region. In the past year alone, its grants have created or retained 23,760 jobs, and provided training or education to nearly 50,000 students and workers.
While Trump is billing himself as coal country’s savior, he is gutting the agency that’s doing the saving.
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I’ve seen what ARC can do for communities. Take, for instance, the town of Mentone, Alabama: nestled in the heart of Appalachia atop Lookout Mountain, and home to an estimated 390 people. It’s where my cousins grew up, and where I spent the better part of every summer from elementary school to high school. Mentone is where I learned to love the outdoors, where I learned to canoe, and where I learned to target shoot with bow and arrow and a .22.
Admittedly, Mentone was never a titan of industry. But nearby Fort Payne, Alabama, was the “Sock Capital of the World” for decades. In the 1990s, an estimated 1 in every 8 socks worldwide—and half of the socks in the United States—came from Fort Payne. Even now, there’s a good chance you own Fort Payne socks. But in the mid-2000s, under President George W. Bush’s free-trade agreements, many of Alabama’s sock manufacturers closed shop and moved overseas for cheaper labor. Over the next decade, the number of people working at the sock mills fell from 8,000 to just 600.
Entire communities were left without their livelihoods. And that’s when the Appalachian Regional Commission stepped in.
As the industry left, ARC invested resources into Fort Payne and the surrounding communities to support transitioning workers and their families. In 2007, it provided $200,000 for access roads to bring new businesses to Fort Payne, and $175,000 for a job training program in Jackson County, Tennessee—just on the other side of Lookout Mountain. In 2009 and 2010, the commission contributed $100,000 to a joint effort between Jackson and DeKalb Counties to enable the counties to update their water systems, along with an additional $400,000 for Fort Payne’s sewer system. From 2009 to 2016, the commission invested almost $1 million in Fort Payne’s education system, so that northeast Alabama’s kids had access to educational and technological resources—buoying the system instead of allowing the shrinking tax base to gut it.
Just last year, the commission funded the bulk of a project to expand Fort Payne’s visitor center for Little River Canyon—the gorge that runs atop Lookout Mountain. The Canyon attracts more than 460,000 visitors each year, along with an estimated $16 million in local economic activity. An expansion could mean more tourists, more jobs, and more income for the surrounding communities.
For towns like Mentone and cities like Fort Payne, a grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission is the difference between moving ahead and falling behind. By attacking the commission, President Trump has turned his back on the communities that trusted him to represent them.