There will be lots of articles in the coming weeks that try to tell us exactly what was in the stimulus package that just passed and what it all really means, but here’s the coverage from the Associated Press published today. Supposedly the 7 billion in grants for rural broadband are intended for small town telecommunications firms, and not the big dogs, so we’ll see. While we’re waiting, at least we can see which rural areas across the country have broadband or don’t, and how much.
Becky McCray of Small Business Survival suggests ways we can constructively use any slower time we might have when our sales are down.
In Strengthening Rural Communities A Critical Issue In Need of Action Amy Rochkes of the Journal Gazette/Times Courier in Illinois looks at needed areas of improvement for rural communities, from schools to healthcare, and infrastructure including broadband. As Ms. Rochkes correctly points out, it’s pretty difficult for our rural small businesses to adapt in the high-tech information age without broadband internet access. She also highlights how difficult it can be getting our problems solved because of the way they are administered:
According to the Congressional Research Service, 88 rural development programs are operated by 16 different federal agencies. This broad reach makes developing a cohesive rural development strategy difficult. USDA Rural Development manages more than half the rural development programs and is authorized through the Farm Bill.
Between politics and loss of funding, some of the organizations that advocate for rural America announced this week that they are cancelling events or closing their doors for good. REWRITE$: Main Street, Media and the Recovery a conference on rural economic development scheduled for March in Alabama at Jacksonville State University has been cancelled for lack of registrants. The Southern Rural Development Initiative (headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina) and its efforts to promote racial and economic justice in the rural South will shut down February 20th.
Here are a few interesting blogs and online articles published this week that relate to Rural Small Business, ending February 7, 2009:
What The New York Times has to say this week may not be news to most of us in rural America. But odds are, it’s new information to most Americans and their fantasy of rural living being like the old “Green Acres’ television show. In “Farm Living (Subsidized by a Job Elsewhere),” the Times says that more people than ever are getting away from it all and moving to the country, but if they do, they have a lot of driving to do because most need to find employment off the farm to make ends meet.
An interesting statistic shared in that same article was that the number of organic farms rose by more than 50% from 2002 to 2007.
While farmers are just leaving the county for work, apparently rural pastors are leaving their churches for good. Rural pastors are disappearing even faster than the general rural population. According to Time Magazine in “Rural Churches Grapple with a Pastor Exodus,” fewer than half of rural churches have a full time pastor, creating a crisis of community throughout rural America. It’s no laughing matter. But I have to admit I chuckled at the quote attributed to Shannon Jung, a rural-church expert who said that one of the reasons rural areas can’t attract young pastors is, “A town without a Starbucks scares them.”
From initial reports of the compromise reached on the stimulus package in the Senate, it appears that at least 2 billion has been cut from the 9 Billion originally slotted for rural broadband. You can read more at The Back Forty. Getting rural broadband access is just half the battle, as the Daily Yonder rightfully points out. Once broadband is installed, what does Rural America do with it? Take a look at some of their ideas here.
For a market driven strategy that suggests ways to make headway with fewer Congressional dollars, review the suggestions about The Best Billion We Can Spend On Rural Broadband. And if you’ve got 90 seconds for a tutoring session on what the Stimulus is and how it works, make a quick visit over to The Center for American Progress.
In case you’re curious about how much your area and state need broadband in order to access the internet more quickly and easily, PC Magazine has a handy-dandy, clickable state map on its site. You can click on your state and find out the average internet speed in your state and compare your region of the country to others. In my case, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and Charlotte have definitely skewed the numbers for North Carolina and provided a much higher ‘average’ than we experience here in Appalachia.
The Thinking Home Business blog in Australia provides an international perspective on how internet marketing efforts to make rural businesses findable online can help them thrive and survive in How Blogging can help rural and small town business.
And My Rural America provides a good run down on NON-Broadband accomplishments by President Obama and the new Congress over the last couple weeks.
Hope you have a great week!
You can read a one-page summary of President Obama’s’ agenda for Rural America now posted on the White House website. The agenda addresses three areas: economic opportunities for family farmers, rural economic development and rural quality of life.
“Rural communities face numerous challenges but also economic opportunities unlike anything we have witnessed in modern history. President Obama and Vice President Biden believe that together we can ensure a bright future for rural America. They will help family famers and rural small businesses find profitability in the marketplace and success in the global economy.”
Leading with the need to ensure economic opportunity for family farmers, the Rural Agenda addresses the need to support family farms, preserve private lands, and promote local and organic agriculture.
To foster rural economic development, the plan includes capital to create value-added products as well as cooperative marketing, small business, and micro-enterprise initiatives. Building rural connectivity for phone service that promotes affordable broadband has been in the news over the last week. Upgrades in rural infrastructure - roads, bridges, water systems and air access - are also stated goals.
Rural small businesses may be affected by postal delivery changes in the future.
The Postmaster General told Congress today that massive deficits could force the post office to eliminate one day of mail delivery each week. The most likely day to be skipped is Tuesday, which is apparently the lightest mail day.
The Post Office delivered 202 billion items last year, 9 billion less than in 2007. The Postmaster General says, “A revolution in the way people communicate has structurally changed the way America uses the mail.” More people now use email and the Internet for personal communication, paying bills or viewing business statements online, and business correspondence. Junk mail filled in for a while, and allowed the Post Office to make more money, but the economy has even negatively affected junk mail. I knew we’d find a pony in this economic mess somewhere.
Once again, rural communities will be disproportionately affected. According to a Pew Research poll, half of all adult Americans who live in non-rural areas can get online with a fast internet connection at home or work. But only about one third of rural Americans can. Rural Americans who rely on traditional mail delivery will be at a disadvantage.
But many rural areas across the country don’t get postal delivery on a daily basis even now. Local adaptation to the uniqueness of each geographical community has always been allowed. When we moved to the mountains 19 years ago, the local post offices were closed on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings. But with broadband limited in many rural areas, traditional mail delivery is still something we depend on.
Dan G. Blair, chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission, suggested in his testimony that Congress review both delivery and restrictions it imposed on the closing of small and rural post offices. So postal delivery is not the only area of mail operations being evaluated, and odds are not the only change to be made.
Obviously, many questions will have to be answered as to how rural small business owners might be affected by these changes. Sales taxes, income taxes, and payroll all have to be filed or postmarked by certain dates. Small business owners will need to plan differently and plan ahead, or close our businesses to allow us to make trips down to the Post Office. We don’t even have a mail drop-off point in our part of the county anymore. If you want to mail something and don’t have it ready for your mail carrier, you have to bring it directly to the Post Office.
Many rural small businesses use US Postal Priority Mail for shipping (rather than UPS or FedEx) because the post office doesn’t charge a pick-up fee for packages and even provides free boxes, tape and labels. We use Postal Priority Mail for customer orders whenever possible, because having our mail carrier pick up our packages daily when he delivers our mail, saves us forty minutes each day. That time savings adds up for a small business owner, and we don’t miss making the round trip downtown every day.
I wonder what the effect on our business will be if we can’t ship orders every day of the week…unless we close our retail shop to walk-in customers and drive our web customer packages downtown. This is not a small issue for us because we are fortunate to ship several hundred orders a month. We may be located in a rural area, but we ship our handmade craft worldwide.
With one postal price increase just put into effect last week, and another one due again in May, I have to wonder how long ‘free’ postal priority mail pickup service for rural small businesses wil be provided.
