Survival strategy

Rural Kansas certainly is worth preserving, but creative solutions may be required.

Kansas isn’t ready to give up on its small towns, but the Rural Life Task Force recently appointed by Gov. Kathleen Sebelius has its work cut out for it.

At the task force’s first meeting Tuesday, the governor said her charge to the group was “to help us figure out the best way to make sure that 20 years from now, we have thriving communities.”

To understand just how great a challenge that is, one need only look back at the last 20 years of data from the U.S. Census. From 1980 to 2000, two-thirds of the counties in Kansas lost population. Thirteen of those counties, all in western or north-central Kansas, saw population declines of 20 percent or more. During the same period, eight counties grew by 20 percent or more. Four of the growing counties are around Wichita or in the Topeka/Kansas City corridor; three others are western counties clustered around smaller population centers such as Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal.

Johnson County’s population grew a whopping 67 percent during that time. The state’s five largest counties: Johnson, Sedgwick, Shawnee, Wyandotte and Douglas account for 49 percent of the state’s total population.

What has caused this urban migration in Kansas? One of the primary factors has to be the availability of jobs. The Kansas farm economy that once fueled small towns has shifted dramatically. Not only are farm revenues down sharply, but because of technological advances, it takes far fewer Kansas to run the remaining farms.

Garden City is an interesting anomaly in the census statistics. Finney County exceeded even Johnson County in population growth between 1980 and 2000, with an increase of 70 percent. That increase has been driven by an influx of labor, including a large number of Asian and Hispanic workers, to work in the Garden City meat-packing industry.

The Finney County experience seems to confirm that jobs will draw people to a Kansas community, but the creation of low-paying jobs probably isn’t the answer for every community. Can better roads or the expansion of broadband Internet services to rural communities pave the way for the kind of job expansion that will turn population declines around?

That’s one thing the task force will be studying, but there are other important issues. Increasing the population and tax base in rural communities could save local schools and services that are so important to a family’s quality of life. In many small towns, the percentage of older, retired residents is increasing, but some towns are losing even those longtime residents because health care services no longer are easily available.

It’s a difficult puzzle that will require some creative thinking by task force members. Some rural communities may have passed the point of no return, but many others are surely worth preserving. Small towns and the people who grew up there have played a huge role in what Kansas is today. It would be great to preserve the state’s rural culture for the future as well.