New leader of Appalachian Regional Commission looks for new strategies amid criticism

When the Appalachian Regional Commission was founded in 1965 one in three Appalachians lived in poverty and 223 of the 420 counties in the region were classified as distressed. Today that number has dropped to 86 but not everyone in the region believes the ARC has been the driving force behind that improvement, Travis Crayton reports for the Daily Yonder. "Too much money was being put into roads and not enough into community development of smaller communities," Helen Lewis, a sociologist and educator who has written extensively about Appalachia and who was among the ARC’s early critics, told Crayton. "I think they could’ve done more to preserve community health centers, [and] they could’ve done more on some of the health problems."

Today ARC co-chair Eric Gohl, in his fourth month on the job, maintains the ARC has a record of accomplishment but is working to develop a new strategic plan to guide funding from 2011 to 2016 and outline the agency’s priorities. Gohl said he sees himself as an "Appalachian advocate, responsible for listening to governors and local communities and monitoring emerging issues in the region," Crayton writes. "From 2000 to 2007, Appalachia lost 424,000 manufacturing jobs and 35,000 jobs in mining, forestry, and natural resources. And that was before the start of the recession," Gohl told Crayton. "We have our work cut out for us in helping to create new, well paying jobs to replace all the ones that have been lost."

"There are still a lot of infrastructure challenges," Gohl added. "There are still places that don’t have clean drinking water or sanitary sewer systems, but I think the real key to turning the region around is education, training, [and] entrepreneurship. I hope the agency will keep a focus on that." Steve Fisher, a longtime educator and activist in the region, said he doesn't see how the agency can be reformed. "It’s a top-down approach," he said. "The problem with that approach is that it doesn’t work. You’ve had an improvement in the statistics in terms of poverty, but that’s a general thing that you see throughout the country. [The ARC] will claim to have taken credit for the economic development of the region, but it has not fundamentally changed the economic situation or the policy situation. It has always stayed away from issues that are at the core of what’s the matter in the region." (Read more)