The agency created five decades ago to fight poverty in Appalachia has helped county economies grow with nearly $4 billion in spending, but the region still lags in key measures of educational, economic and physical well-being, according to a new study.
The exhaustive report ordered up by the Appalachian Regional Commission cites progress in some categories - poverty rates have fallen by about half, for instance - though the research didn't quantify the ARC's role in many of the individual demographic trends. And researchers noted other problems persist, including disproportionately high mortality rates and dependency on government checks.
The commission's leaders acknowledge even after half a century, the need for aid is as great as ever, a sentiment echoed by heads of charities in the region.
"We have serious work to do," Earl Gohl, the commission's federal co-chair, said Friday in a phone interview with the Associated Press, which obtained a copy of the study ahead of its release. "The report is more about helping us and helping our partners look at the future and understand what we've accomplished and what we've not accomplished, and we work from there. So it doesn't do agencies any good to be self-promoters."
The report was being presented to the region's governors in Washington on Sunday afternoon and released on the ARC's website the next day.
Researchers from West Virginia University and a D.C.-area consultancy analyzed demographic data dating back to 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed a federal law creating the commission as a state-federal partnership. The agency's sprawling 420-county territory includes 25 million residents and pieces of 12 states stretching from New York to Mississippi.
The question of how much Appalachian residents have caught up financially yielded a complicated answer. The authors found the region narrowed the gap slightly in per capita income, for example. But that's at least partly because safety net programs such as social security and unemployment make up about 24 percent of personal income in the region, compared to 17 nationally.
While infant mortality rate for the region has dropped significantly, mortality rates overall are close to where they were at the end of the 1960s, while they've dropped for the U.S. as a whole. The report cites higher rates of obesity and diabetes in Appalachia as possible contributors.
Researchers did find that county employment and income levels in the region grew faster than a control group of similar counties elsewhere in the country. Over the 50-year period, counties that received ARC investment averaged 4.2 percent higher employment growth and 5.5 percent higher per capita income growth than the control group counties.
The report's authors estimate more jobs were created by the ARC in its early years when it received higher funding from the government. The commission's funding level dropped significantly in the 1980s and hasn't returned to where it was in the 1970s, when measured in inflation-adjusted dollars.
"The funding levels changed dramatically, and with that the commission changed dramatically as well. We moved from large approprations funding big public works projects," said Gohl, who leads the agency with Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear.