Range of speakers address conference attendees

#NACoAnn speakers include @SecretarySonny, @dagdetter, @Piper, @EViesturs, @LouDobbs

Officials from the Department of Agriculture, Fox Business commentator Lou Dobbs, author and justice reform advocate Piper Kerman and mountaineer Ed Viesturs, a Bryan Desloge hero, spoke to conference attendees during general sessions and committee meetings.

 

USDA official talks broadband, opioids 

It was a baptism by fire July 22 for Anne Hazlett, six weeks into her new position as assistant to the secretary for rural development at the Department of Agriculture. After she finished her speech to members of NACo’s Rural Action Caucus (RAC), she asked for input and she got it.

Pender County, N.C. Commissioner Jackie Newton and several other county commissioners couldn’t help but bring up the topic of broadband. “I think it is patently absurd that federal government licenses the entities that provide internet service but cannot somehow partner one way or the other with the agencies that impact the rural areas,” Newton said.

Newton said she watches families drive miles to pull up to her office and use her Wi-Fi so kids can do their homework. “Is this who we are? Is this what we’ve come to?” Newton asked. “Something’s got to be done. We’re at crisis mode. It’s no more ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’”

Lynn Padgett, director, government affairs/natural resources for San Miguel County, Colo., was applauded by the RAC audience when she suggested that companies that provide broadband ought to be defined as utilities.

Hazlett acknowledged the importance of broadband in her speech, noting that it is “no longer an amenity,” noting its importance to jobs, education and healthcare. She said the administration is hoping Congress funds a new Rural Economic Infrastructure Fund that could partly be used to fund broadband.

For counties struggling with opioid abuse problems, a presidential commission formed in March to combat drugs will be out with its report in October, Hazlett noted.

“This group has been meeting regularly and will be releasing a report this fall with specific recommendations as to how the federal government can help best address this issue with our state and local partners,” she said.

Until then, she told RAC members, USDA “has several existing tools for your community to use including programs for the construction of treatment facilities, telemedicine and transition housing.” 

For example, in the Community Facilities Direct Loan and Grant Program, she said, USDA has invested resources in more than 150 mental health facilities in rural areas during the past three years. Of those 152 clinics, 51 are specifically designed to treat rural patients struggling with substance abuse, including opioid addiction.

Also at the RAC meeting at NACo’s Annual Conference, faith-based organizations got a shout-out. RAC members, whose counties represent a population of 60 million, said that faith-based and non-profits are what they turn to outside of county government, when they are looking to combat poverty in their communities.

Blue Earth County, Minn. Commissioner Drew Campbell touted a group called Faith in Action for its role in helping everyone from the elderly to the disabled. “They help with childcare, doing taxes for the community, getting people to work,” he said, noting the group has 100 volunteer drivers. The group gets some of its funding from the county, he said. “The faith-based initiatives need our support.”

In all, 63 percent of those who took part in an instant poll at the RAC meeting, said they turn to faith-based groups or non-profits for help when looking to solve poverty problems.

Swedish banker decries public asset sales 

Inefficient management of publicly-owned assets is leaving untold amounts of wealth on the table that could otherwise be used to invest in counties’ futures.

That’s the thesis that Swedish banker Dag Detter delivered to the Large Urban County Caucus. 

“(U.S. local governments) generally sell off properties to the private sector, or they manage assets through slew of public authorities,” he said.  

But rarely does a county have a comprehensive accounting of its real (real estate) and operational assets (revenue generating services). Those assets generally account for two-thirds and one-third of local government total assets, respectively.

“You find that generally speaking, we know what the government owes, but we don’t know what the government owns, and we don’t know the value of the assets that they own.  We don’t manage the assets in a systematic way.”

On top of the lack of a comprehensive public asset inventory, Brookings Institution Fellow Bruce Katz pointed out that the recent demographic trends have completely revalued urban cores.

Detter suggested counties form publicly-owned holding companies to manage their assets ,aiming to use that new-found wealth would finance, public transparency and a long-term focus that would be insulated from short-term political pressures.

But, Detter said, county elected officials had to be the ones to sell it to the people.

“You have to be the judge of this, not the professionals,” he said. “You have to stand up and defend it, and it must be done with the sensitivities of the political realities.”

Pa. county goes it alone to speed up bridge work 

Facing an inventory of 115 bridges, Northampton County, Pa. Executive John Brown didn’t like the options for repairing them. 

“Traditionally, we’d follow the transportation improvement program, we’d have to apply to the state department of transportation for federal and state money,” he told the Transportation Steering Committee at its meeting July 22. “But we’d be competing with PennDOT and other 66 counties for projects. 

There were limitations for federal funding that would limit us, and that timeline was roughly 46 years from start to finish with a bridge.”

Over that time, material and labor costs increase, and he saw, at best, a chance to do one or two bridge projects each year.

“It’s not a very cost-effective process for keeping bridges current,” he said. 

Consequently, the county struck out on its own, forming a public-private partnership through its general purpose authority (necessary under a state law to contract with private companies) to which contractors submit bids directly, as a group, rather than the county individually hiring architects, engineers and other professionals, and those contractor groups assume risk for project delays, once the burden of the county.  

“By not going for state funding through the TIF program, it un-handcuffed us,” Brown said. “We saved about 30 percent on 28 bridge rehabilitations and five replacements, and we didn’t have to jump through hoops with the federal and state regulations.”

Opening General Session

Space may be the final frontier, but right now, NASA is busy in counties across the country building its biggest rocket ever.

Dubbed Space Launch System or “SLS,” the rocket now under development is the most powerful rocket ever built, able to carry astronauts in NASA’s Orion spacecraft on deep space missions, including to an asteroid and ultimately on a journey to Mars.

NACo members heard more about NASA’s rocket from Todd May, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., at the association’s annual conference in Franklin County, Ohio. May spoke to NACo members Saturday afternoon at the Opening General Session.

Before the discussion on stage, the lights were dimmed and NACo members watched a short video about the rocket; the rumbling sound from the video made the room feel like it might lift off at any moment. “Counties do great with sound, I can almost drop the mike and walk away,” May said.

May and Marla E. Pérez-Davis, who serves as the deputy director of NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, talked about the rocket and how parts of it are being built all over the country, in a discussion moderated by Mobile County, Ala. Commissioner Merceria Ludgood. May said he’s enjoyed meeting county officials from all over the country and said there are about 800 contracts with “Mom ’n Pop” businesses around the country that are helping build parts of the rocket.

“I met a gentleman, Larry Phillips from North Carolina,” May said. “He pointed at the rocket and said ‘I built a phone for that.’ He said it was really good for North Carolina and that they are good paying jobs. When we solve these really hard problems we push the innovation economy forward.”

“Those things push our economy forward,” he said. “I want you to be jazzed about NASA and learn how it impacts you and your county.”

“We can’t accomplish this without your support,” Ludgood said.

SLS is expected to see its first unmanned launch in 2019 and its first manned launched sometime between 2021 and 2023. NASA will have spent $23 billion on the rocket by Sept. 30.

Sonny Perdue 

Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue touted Trump’s formation of the Interagency Task Force for Rural Prosperity, a collection of 22 different agencies, that USDA will lead.

“He gave us 180 days to bring back concrete suggestions for action plans, not studies for a binder that will sit on a bookshelf somewhere,” he said. 

He said his administration of the Agriculture Department would focus, like much of Trump’s, on eliminating regulations, but also on quality of life issues in rural America, involving housing, water quality, health care — both in terms of access to care and treatment of opioid addiction, and broadband internet access. 

“Folks, we’re not going to keep kids out here in these rural areas if they don’t have connectivity,” he said. “They’re not going to go visit cousin Susie in the city and get (good service) playing those games and be satisfied at home. Nor can our farmers do the precision agriculture they want to do if we don’t have the connectivity out so they can use data with less resources, less cost and better productivity as they really learn how to inculcate, incorporate and assimilate precision agriculture into their production. 

Maintaining a reliable workforce through a legal guest worker program is also a priority for him, he said.

So, too, is success that can reinvigorate passion for rural America.

“Momentum is important in a community,” he said. “There’s enthusiasm, passion goes viral across the U.S. to know we have a succeeding generation,” in rural areas.

Perdue recounted his time as a member of the Houston County, Ga. Planning and Zoning Commission.

“It was probably the best training ground I had from any kind of public service,” he said. “You could have black and white operating rules, you could have land use plans, people still want to talk to people about that. You cannot write enough laws and ordinances to make the situation fit.”

He also solicitied input from county leaders on what regulations USDA should eliminate. 

“We want to hear from you [about] the fly in the ointment that keeps you from doing things more efficiently, more effectively, better, more timely and getting a better deal at the end of the day.”

Piper Kerman

As Piper Kerman’s prison sentence was nearing an end, even on the last day, she could not get a confirmation that she was indeed going to be released that day.

“Nobody had said anything to me or helped me prepare for it,” she told the Opening General Session audience. 

It made Kerman, who went on to write the memoir Orange Is the New Black about her experience in the federal prison system, appreciate the detailed resources available to inmates at the jail in Franklin County, Ohio, where she now lives. That information could go a long way to easing re-entry for inmates.

“All the questions someone has about having a safe and successful return home are answered to the best of the county’s ability.  I thought this is exactly what every county can do, or should do.”

Though she spent her entire sentence in federal prison, her subsequent work as a writing instructor in Ohio state prisons and a justice reform advocate has given her plenty of experience from which to suggest policy suggestions for counties.

“Counties are the most important players when it comes to the criminal justice system,” she said. “Even though sentencing laws are set on the state level,” the state takes many of its cues from local government. 

She decried the rapid increase in the incarceration of women over the last four decades and the racial disparities in policing and sentencing, particularly the disproportionate prosecution of drug crimes against women of color.

“We should expect that everyone should be treated equally in a court of law,” she said. “A system that privileges some people’s safety and freedom over other people’s safety and freedom simply is not a justice system.”

Ed Viesturs, mountaineer

Ed Viesturs, the only American to climb all 14 of the world’s 8,000-foot mountains, said even with all of the support from his teams, Sherpas and sponsors, he could not have done it without something internal — passion. 

“If you love what you do, it doesn’t matter how long it takes or how hard it is,” he told the General Session audience. 

He drew several other universal truths from his life as a mountaineer. For instance, properly framing every goal.

“People think you get to the summit and you’ve achieved your goal, you celebrate,” he said. “I got to the summit and I had to get down. Lots of people don’t budget (their supplies) for the round trip and that’s a huge mistake in mountaineering.”

In any pursuit, you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. During his first of six successful Everest ascents, he was taking 15 breaths for every step. “Imagine that’s all you do for 12 hours,” he said. “That’s the price you pay, if you’re willing to push through those barriers.”

He stressed recognizing the value of hard work and avoiding taking shortcuts — because in his experience the consequences could be deadly on a climb.

“I saw a lot of my peers who step over the edge, break the rules,” he said. “We call this complacency; just when you think you’ve got it figured out, you don’t. I don’t want to break those rules I’ve been living by, because those rules kept me alive.

At the same time, you have to properly give credit where it is deserved.

“The sherpas do most of the work,” he admitted. 

And ultimately, along with passion and internal motivation, goal setting is the purest driver. “When I got to the top of Annapurna (the last eight-thousander), it was my dream come true,” he said. “ESPN isn’t up there to interview you, there’s no medal, no trophy, no bonus check. It’s all very personal.”

Lou Dobbs 

Donald Trump is a “billionaire populist” who is “reaching out with his heart to his fellow Americans,” conservative commentator Lou Dobbs told NACo members in remarks July 24. “Is he doing it roughly sometimes? Is he doing it rudely sometimes? Yes…but…whether you’re left wing, right wing, whatever you are, this is incontrovertible,” Dobbs said. “This country right now is a different country than it was when he was elected. The reason in large measure is because he is shining a bright hot light on similarities, not the differences, between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.”

And that gives Dobbs hope.

“I’ve never seen a time...I’ve I’ve never seen greater prospects for prosperity, for peace than we have right now. This country right now has a bright incredible future in front of it. It’s what we do with it, what our elected officials do with it, whether at the county level, the local level, state or federal.” 

Charlie Ban and Mary Ann Barton, County News senior writers, contributed to this report.