Essays From West of 98: Rural Priorities

A look at the top rural policy priorities for state government

A new session of the Texas Legislature has dawned. The 89th edition opened earlier this week and for the remainder of the spring, our elected state representatives and state senators will debate and vote on a wide-ranging variety of bills, many of which will become laws. Some of it will be very important and it will immediately affect our day-to-day lives. Some of that legislation will impact the long-term future of Texas. Some of it will be ceremonial. Much of it will be nonsense that is more intended to bolster re-elections than help people.

Back in late 2021, I had the opportunity to discuss my ideas for state government with a handful of party leaders and candidates for statewide office in Texas. Some of them listened to me and took my ideas to heart. Others quit listening once it became obvious that I was uninterested in the red team/blue team battles that fuel much of our political discourse. I talked anyway. As part of those discussions, I established what I called Five Rural Priorities for State Government.

These are nonpartisan issues. You probably will not find them on cable news. They do not make for exciting social media fodder. They would be rather boring for the campaign mailers that get stuffed in your mailbox day after day during election season. And yet, they are vital. They do not require special treatment for rural voters or rural communities. They run to the heart of a community’s ability to prosper and thrive independently in the future, whether that community is rural, suburban, or urban. As the 89th Texas Legislature begins, I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit these priorities. I have several readers in state politics who have looked at this list in the past. I hope they look at it again. I have a host of readers who are Texas voters, so if you are one of those voters, I encourage you to contact your elected officials and let them know your thoughts.

I do not profess to have a corner on rural policy wisdom, but I care deeply about the future of rural Texas. My ideas are not generated at a think tank’s office by technocrats who live in a tony ZIP code. They are not strategized by a billionaire’s coterie of consultants. These ideas are lived firsthand, every day, in the life of a rural mayor, as a rural business and property owner, and as a parent of schoolchildren in rural public schools.

Priority #1: Rural broadband

In the past, rural broadband has been compared to the rural electrification project of the 1930s. A more accurate comparison is the modern day railroad. Access to broadband internet connects a community to the outside world. Its availability picks economic winners and losers. To much of the world, its availability makes a community livable or not. Without accessible broadband internet, a rural community will wither and die like a community bypassed by the railroad a century ago.

Priority #2: Economic development

Texas leaders have professed to champion “economic development” for rural communities for many years. Unfortunately, too many of these “opportunities” have been thinly-veiled efforts to cast unsavory projects and facilities onto desperate rural communities, knowing that the proverbial starving dog will accept any bone tossed his way. Instead of filling rural places with the junk that suburban and urban places would prefer to not see for themselves, we need to create opportunities for good jobs, emphasizing remote work opportunities that make rural communities more attractive to more people, and prioritize good stewardship of our natural resources.

Priority #3: Healthcare

Rural healthcare has been in crisis for many years. Stamford is a textbook example for that crisis, with its own hospital closure in 2018. State and federal stakeholders need to prioritize making rural healthcare financially viable, or at a minimum, not actively work against rural healthcare. Top priorities should be to attract more primary care providers to rural places and to ensure the financial sustainability of rural EMS providers, who are the first line of healthcare for the vast majority of rural citizens.

Priority #4: Education

Education is a lightning rod topic in Texas today, but the rural priorities for education differ sharply from the conversations that occupy campaign discourse. State leaders should not make life unduly hard on rural schools and teachers with unfunded mandates, unproductive testing regimes, and other obstacles that drive good teachers out of the business and make it difficult for children to actually learn in meaningful ways. State leaders should encourage and facilitate more opportunities for locally-centered vocational training that helps local students find local careers, so that the rural brain drain can be reversed and rural youth can begin to see a future for themselves in their hometowns.

Priority #5: Infrastructure

The State of Texas has prioritized water and wastewater funding, which is critical to growing communities in need of new infrastructure and to older communities in need of massive infrastructure repairs. State agencies should continue their good work on these projects and find new ways for rural communities to access both state and federal funds for local needs that have enormous impacts on quality of life. This includes basic necessities like water/wastewater and emergency services, but it also includes “quality of life” projects like parks and local streets that are difficult to fully fund without outside assistance but make existing communities more appealing to Texans. State leaders should prioritize accessibility for local leaders to discover resources that are available and how to realistically access these resources. Rural communities often have limited managerial staff who may lack the technical training of their peers in larger cities that can be required to navigate complicated funding applications.

Conclusion

As the legislative session continues, I plan to refine and expand these topics. I may add to them or change them substantially. In the four years since I first created this list, I have become (slightly?) wiser and gained better perspective about the issues facing rural Texas. These items were always intended to be a working list for the future of our rural communities. If we do things correctly, some of the priorities will eventually be fixed and replaced by something else. After all, good public policy should provide solutions to problems, rather than keep the problem alive so everyone has something to fight about.

I encourage others to help shape this conversation, expand and refine these priorities, and take these issues to our leaders. If you’d like to discuss more—whether you are an interested voter, a candidate, a party leader, a member of the media, or otherwise—please contact me here.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the “Rural Church and State” and “West of 98” podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.