This story was originally published by Homegrown Stories.

When storms on the Pine Ridge reservation, home of the Oglala Nation, in South Dakota begin to build, they can be seen from miles away. Above rolling hills, clouds turn into waves and bring the rain. Strong gusts of wind stir up the smell of dirt and sagebrush. Wildlife begins to move along the Badlands long before the weather hits ground and radio broadcasts from KILI radio station warn the community of what’s to come. Evidence of the storm comes slowly at first, setting the scene and then it hits all at once.

In the same way storms build power, slowly and intentionally, there’s something else gaining momentum on Pine Ridge. People that have been too long at the mercy of colonialism and industrialization have begun to gather, organize, and build the foundation for a more prosperous tomorrow. Red Cloud Renewable has been a landmark for sustainability on Pine Ridge, but there was a crucial piece missing in order for the efforts being made in renewable energy to work: housing. Solar panels on poorly insulated, mold-infested homes cannot solve the energy crisis on the reservation.

In 2015, Pine Ridge was hit with several severe storms which prompted the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to send 50 trailers to aid people during the flooding. This temporary housing is still being used today.

It is estimated that 89% of people living on the Pine Ridge reservation are in need of housing. According to the American Indian Humanitarian Foundation, at least 60% of the homes on Pine Ridge are without water, electricity, adequate insulation, or sewage systems. Summers can reach a blistering 110 degrees Fahrenheit and higher, while winters can drop to -50 degrees. It is not uncommon for monthly heating bills to reach $500 during the winter months.

With the average per capita salary of $7,000-$9,000 per year, an energy alternative is not just a means of cutting costs, it’s survival.

Solar energy goes a step further than just being a more cost effective form of energy, it also connects the old way of life for the Lakota people to a new way of living. It has the power to give Indigenous people back autonomy by giving people the option to live off-grid.

After spending six years traveling and learning about solar and all of its applications, Henry returned to Pine Ridge to put what he had learned to work. In 2002, he began doing research on thermal solar heating panels, which led him to turning an old freezer door into a solar heater. Using reclaimed materials from a landfill, some metal and an exhaust tube connected to his car battery, Henry built a heater fueled by the sun. Not long after that, he found himself volunteering to do some solar heating installations with a nonprofit. This would lead him to opening Lakota Solar Enterprises, creating jobs for two employees, and himself.

By 2003 they had started manufacturing heating panels. After meeting with the former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewert Udall, Henry secured funding to continue building what he started. With the mission of creating economic opportunities and lessening what Red Cloud calls the tribes’ “moccasin print,” he began working with other tribes.

Red Cloud Renewable became a certified training program and created over 500 jobs across those tribes. This allowed Henry to hire 12 more employees to his own operation as well. These partnerships began to grow and build on each other. “That partnership beginning from 1997, I firmed up and did everything that I could to train myself around solar electric grid-tied battery based systems, standalone systems and then brought a training facility, the first ever of its kind in Indian Country,” explained Henry. Since then, Red Cloud Renewable has added programs in food sovereignty, natural-home builds and reforestation.

Not one of these programs functions fully on its own. Without economic and job security, a community has fewer resources to focus on food sovereignty. Without well-insulated and energy-efficient housing, renewable energy cannot function at its full potential. That housing also needs to be affordable for the community that it intends to serve. Red Cloud Renewable has dabbled in various sustainable housing projects and methods but more recently has partnered with a nonprofit, InOurHands.

Founded by Jason Mackie and Aaron Resnick, InOurHands is working with the Oglala Sioux Tribes and others to address the need for proper housing on the reservation. “There’s a need here for about 20,000 homes,” explained Jason, who has been working with Red Cloud since 2018. “And it’s been common in my five years out here. In fact, every year, somebody that we know, a family member of theirs, has died of exposure, during the night, in their own home, because maybe they thought they’d wait it out, wait another night, and then it got a little bit too cold,” said Jason.

Using a material known as cellular concrete, Red Cloud Renewable and InOurHands have developed a version of a tiny home that ranges in cost from $7,500 to $9,000. The dome-shaped homes are naturally insulated, take only a few days to assemble, are fireproof, and can be heated with a small solar panel. “It’s important to me that we can give something to someone that will sustain them for a really long time and allow them to cultivate some hope and participate in their community and help heal other wounds,” said Aaron.

The first phase of the partnership was focused on training, building warming shelters, and providing one home per each of the nine districts on the reservation. They are also laying the groundwork so that this project can continue to grow beyond addressing housing insecurity. In the future, they hope to train more Lakota people in building the domes, so that others can start their own businesses. InOurHands was granted $700,000 from the Turner Foundation, Kind World, and the Minnie Miracle Foundation to continue this work, and the organizations will continue to build on a charitable basis for families with the greatest need. In the future, these homes will be built by Lakota-owned businesses. Families will be able to purchase the homes with a mortgage that the Lakota Federal Credit Union has agreed to underwrite.

“It’s at that point, we need to be coming together. Our native history with a non-native history has been a terrible time,” said Henry. “But we’re still in that history book. We’re just in a new chapter and we know now what we can do and what we should be doing. And then we can close the book, bring it to a better ending.”

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Homegrown Stories is a storytelling project from the advocacy group Western Organization of Resource Councils. It celebrates the hardworking people across the West doing things right. The people of these stories are creating community-based food systems, investing in clean energy economies and jobs, supporting just transition work, and fighting for a sustainable future.

The post Renewable Energy Meets Affordable Housing on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

For nearly 30 years, a little radio station started in the cornfields of rural Ohio made a name for itself. Now, more than a decade after it played its last song, it’s doing that again.

At the end of May, WOXY, known to legions of fans as 97X, will resurrect its “Modern Rock 500” one last time. It’s a tribute, organizers said, to a small-town station that rocked the radio world, first locally, then nationally and beyond. 

Back to the Future 

Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, 97X was the modern rock radio station in southwestern Ohio. And it was my radio station from my first days on campus at Miami University. From its first song — U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” — until its last internet broadcast in 2010, the station was the center of the new music universe for a generation of young people, like me, who lived for something different.

Essentially, 97X and I were both freshmen at Miami then. The radio station had previously been WOXR, playing Top 40 hits, and uncensored versions of Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher,” and Neil Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand” to appeal to Miami’s college crowd. When Doug and Linda Balogh bought the station in 1981, they asked Miami students what they wanted to hear. The answer was modern rock. So the Baloghs delivered, playing music no one else in the area was giving airtime to.

According to music historian Robin James, WOXY was the sixth modern rock station in the U.S. In her book, “The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence,” she says FCC regulations kept the station small, but what it lacked in strength it made up for in individuality.

“The station started off in ‘83 basically copying L.A.’s KROQ (pronounced Kay-rock) playlist,” James said. “By the ‘90s though, 97X was sort of the place for new and different music.”

I spent my first semester at Miami that year trying to figure out who I was and where I fit in. In my world, you smiled at people you met on the street and “punk” was something you dressed up as on Spirit Day if you wanted to be really edgy. My roommates thought I was a rube. But when I heard 97X for the first time, I realized there was more to life than Journey. 97X didn’t play the big hair bands and southern rock my roommates were listening to. They listened to “Faithfully.” I started listening to “Burning Down the House.”

Listening to 97X set me apart. Suddenly, I had this sense I belonged to a new club of shared interests and ideals that were different from most of the rest on campus.

Behind the Music

Oxford back then was just a jumble of concrete amidst miles of cornfields between Dayton and Cincinnati. It was a primarily Republican college in a primarily Republican area in a primarily Republican state.

But 97X was a ministry of liberal ideology in the midst of a campus full of trust fund babies and future country club members. Transmitting to Dayton, Cincinnati, and Northern Kentucky, it broadcast a new sound.

“In high school, I lived in Northern Kentucky at what must have been the very outer edge of their broadcasting radius,” recalled Chris Eddie, now one of the owners of Smiley Pete Publications in Lexington, Kentucky. “I’d have to say my most memorable experience happened at 97Xtra Beats … an all-ages, monthly event held at Bogart’s in Cincinnati … (It) was right as Nirvana‘s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ‘Give it Away’ had recently come out. The usual, gothy/mopey alterna-girls exploded into dance like it was a New Kids on the Block concert. I knew something had changed in the world of music.”

In 1988, the station rose to fame in the Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman film “Rain Man.” Filmed in Cincinnati, the movie featured Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond Babbitt repeating the station’s tagline “97X, BAM! The Future of Rock and Roll.”

From there its notoriety grew.

“They grew to have a national reputation,” James said. “’Rolling Stone,’ for several years in the ‘90s, named them one of the top radio stations in the country. Then later on, ‘Rolling Stone’ named them the last great independent radio station.”

And it was too. Until it wasn’t.

By ‘88, I had left school and was living in Cincinnati, a single girl listening to alternative tunes, hitting raves and pub crawls when I could. I worked as a reporter for the alternative newsweekly “Cincinnati CityBeat,” and 97X was our media partner. As time went on, though, I moved into more corporate jobs and listened to the station less. Then the ‘90s came, replacing concerts and clubbing with marriage and kids.

But during that time, 97X kept its own unique sound and purpose, even as other stations all started to sound the same, James said.

“Basically, everyone was buying up radio stations then syndicating content nationally,” she said. “It was kind of like the ‘Walmart-ification’ of radio.”

WOXY maintained its modern music focus and its independence. It may have even been the radio station that broke Coldplay into American markets, she said.

Former program director Mike Taylor isn’t too sure about that. But he does know it became harder and harder for independent radio stations like WOXY to compete with the corporate big boys. In 2004, Taylor said, the Baloghs sold the license to 97.7 FM, but kept the WOXY name and the station’s music library. The station went online as WOXY.com, one of the first radio stations in the country to have a primarily online presence. Taylor said the station’s reach was suddenly the world.

“I was looking to try and reach people in New York, L.A., San Francisco, and London,” he said. “If we would get an internet request from somebody from some far reaching location, that’s what really primed my pump.”

Online, the station’s reach was international. 

“In the early 2000s, a music critic in Brazil was a really strong advocate for 97X,” James said. “The station had a huge Brazilian audience to the point that when (WOXY) had a Brazilian band called The Mosquitoes in for a lounge act, they had them record [the tagline] ‘97X, The Future of Rock and Roll’ in Brazilian Portuguese.”

The station moved to Austin, Texas, Taylor said, and new investors helped keep it afloat. The station couldn’t sustain itself, though, and in 2010 Taylor played the station’s last song, “Answer to Yourself” by The Soft Pack.

Fans of the station, however, continued to talk about it. A podcast sprung up, Rumblings from the Big Bush, hosted by former WOXY DJs Dave Tellmann and Damian Dotterweich, that recounted the days of 97X. In other online spaces, fans put together 97X Reddit threads, blogs, Facebook groups, and Spotify playlists. Some fans say they continue to listen when they can.

“My first memory of 97X was walking into a store in Tri-County Mall that (was playing) these fun, different tunes that I had never heard before,” Jo Ivey, a former ad rep for “Cincinnati CityBeat” said. “To this day, Morphine’s ‘Cure for Pain’ will stop me in my tracks. Concrete Blonde’s ‘God is a Bullet’ reminds me how little time has changed, and I still find time over the Memorial Day weekend to find the Modern Rock 500 online.”

Reunion Tour

In recognition of that lasting impact, during this year’s Memorial Day week, WOXY will stream the “97X Modern Rock 500 Countdown” online on Inhailer Radio. The broadcast will be a 40th Anniversary “chef’s kiss” to the station’s beginnings, Taylor said. Featuring five 100-song sets led-in by former WOXY disc jockeys, the countdown will air on Inhailer’s website and apps from May 22 to 26, and will re-air over the Memorial Day weekend, with an archived version available after May 29. 

Taylor said it’s like getting the band back together.

“I had over 30 people, myself included, that responded with wild enthusiasm to do this,” he said. “We crafted kind of an all-time 500 if you will. We had to kind of limit things a little bit, so the only songs that would be eligible were songs that had previously appeared on the Modern Rock 500 at least once.”

The result will be a mash-up of 20th century “modern rock” songs put together with 21st century technology, he said.  

Times have changed since WOXY was at its prime. Radio isn’t the same now that everyone has the opportunity to be their own DJ, he said. But he hopes, like the original, this 500 will have an impact.

Now that I’m older — much older — I can see the impact the station had on me. I still listen to alternative rock, and routinely share new music with my kids. I introduced them to K-Flay and Shakey Graves. They told me about The Bahamas and Twenty One Pilots. They tell me I’m not like other moms. Apparently, other moms my age are still listening to Journey.

Taylor said he doesn’t know if the station will continue to affect listeners. 

“I know once this finally hits there’s going to be some outlet out there that’s going to label this as the most pathetically boomer thing ever,” he said. “But my take away from doing this is that it’s just like anything else — how can you tell the impact of something as it’s happening?”

For many, WOXY was an introduction to a world of music we never would have heard otherwise. And it left indelible memories.

This last Modern Rock 500 may be the last memory 97X creates, Taylor said.

A memory of the future of rock and roll.

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The post The Future of Rock ‘n’ Roll – from the middle of rural farmlands appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

At just 5 weeks old, Waylon Williams is a trailblazer. He’s the first baby born in Primary Care Centers of Eastern Kentucky’s new women’s residential center. The facility, called Beacons of Hope, offers temporary housing for women confronting substance use disorder.

That recovery housing for women is available in a rural, financially challenged community is noteworthy. That it’s available for women with babies is remarkable. Equally so is the fact that Primary Care Centers of Eastern Kentucky (PCCEK) is a rural health clinic (RHC), and recovery housing is not among the services rural health clinics typically offer. A men’s residential center is soon to open.

Beacons of Hope is an extension of PCCEK’s Pregnancy & Beyond, an addiction-treatment program that offers obstetrical services, medication for substance use disorder, prenatal education, pediatrics, and counseling – services that in so many rural communities nationwide are in critically short supply or entirely absent.

The town of Hazard, where the largest of PCCEK’s four clinics is located, is in Perry County. Perry County ranks 117th among Kentucky’s 120 counties in health outcomes. Life expectancy is 67, as compared with 78.5 for the country.

Addressing such challenges requires the full force of a health care ecosystem that includes hospitals, clinics, private practices, public health agencies, and a range of support services. Rural health clinics play a critical role in this ecosystem. “They’re an important part of the primary care landscape,” said John Gale of the Maine Rural Health Research Center.

RHCs are safety net providers whose original mandate was primarily to increase access to care for those on Medicaid or Medicare. They provided primary care and perhaps a few other services. But the Rural Health Clinic program has evolved over the years, and some clinics, like Primary Care Centers of Eastern Kentucky, have expanded their roles quite considerably.

Among the health care services, PCCEK offers are dentistry, a diabetes center, a women’s health center, extensive radiology and imaging, a range of behavioral health services, a pharmacy, and a hospice care center. It offers a sliding scale for fees.

PCCEK has nurses in each school in the county system. It has an event space where it hosts maternity fairs and Easter, Halloween, and Christmas gatherings, and which in the wake of the region’s catastrophic flooding last July served as a distribution center for food and supplies.

And with such a wide array of services, CEO Barry Martin contends, PCCEK is addressing arguably the greatest challenge to rural health care: a shortage of health care professionals.

Gale said the projection is that there’ll be a shortage of 50,000 or more primary care providers nationwide by 2032, and that the majority of those available aren’t likely to want to practice in rural areas.

It’s taken some time, Martin said, to impress upon newly minted health care professionals that Perry County is a promising place to build a career, but his message appears to be resonating. He’s especially focused on enticing young people from the region to head back home and hang a shingle at PCCEK.

“Come back here,” Martin urges them. “Look at what we’ve built. It’s not a double-wide on the side of the road.”

Meeting Needs, Steady Growth

The Rural Health Clinic program was launched in 1977 as a Carter administration initiative. The impetus was to make it more viable for rural providers to stay in business with a relatively heavy load of Medicaid and Medicare recipients and few patients with private insurance by offering higher reimbursement for those federal programs.

RHCs must be in a health professional shortage area. They must take a team approach to care: physicians working with a staff of nurse practitioners, physician assistants, certified nurse midwives, and others.

The number of RHCs has grown significantly over the past decade or so. In 2010, there were fewer than 4,000; today, there are 5,270. They’re in every state except Alaska.

RHCs differ from federally qualified health clinics (FQHC) in that FQHCs can’t be for-profit providers and must be governed by a board of directors of which the majority of members must be patients of the clinic and demographically representative of the community. FQHCs must offer primary care and preventive and enabling (such as case management and transportation) services. In meeting these stipulations, they receive higher reimbursement from the federal government.

PCCEK is a for-profit entity. It launched in October of 2003 in a 6,700-square-foot facility with 15 employees offering family medicine, pediatrics, simple X-rays, ultrasounds, and a lab. In 2008, it expanded into a 30,000-square-foot building, and in 2015 into its present Hazard location, a 60,000-square-foot complex, formerly a Kmart. It also has clinics in the nearby towns of Hindman, Hyden, and Vicco.

More than 39,000 unique patients came through PCCEK’s doors last year, Martin said, for a total of 180,000 encounters. The clinic employs more than 400 people.

‘Ease a Little Bit of the Burden’

“I like to say that we provide services from the head to the toe and the womb to the tomb,” Martin said. “And that is true.”

Care for diabetics is an urgent need in this region. In 2021, Kentucky had the sixth highest diabetes death rate in the country. The Kentucky Department for Public Health reports that between 2000 and 2018, the number of diabetes diagnoses had doubled. Perry County has among the highest incidence rates in the state.

PCCEK operates the Mary E. Martin Diabetes Center for Excellent (named in honor of Martin’s mother). It’s the only diabetes facility affiliated with the University of Kentucky’s Barnstable Brown Diabetes Center. It offers comprehensive case management.

“We try to ease a little bit of the burden,” said Martha Bailey, a registered nurse and licensed diabetic educator from nearby Letcher County. “We’re doing preventive maintenance. We’re talking to them about their diabetes.”

Before PCCEK opened its diabetes center, people routinely drove 250 miles roundtrip to Lexington to see a doctor. Many simply went unexamined, undiagnosed.

“They may come in here and have an ulcer they didn’t even know they had,” Bailey said. “We’ve had patients come in that had tacks in their feet. They didn’t know it until we did the exam.”

PCCEK is the only place in Eastern Kentucky offering pedicures specifically for diabetics. “When they do the foot care here,” she said, “That’s their time to be pampered.”

The center also provides $10 vouchers for the local farmers’ market. “With the people on fixed incomes, that helps them eat a little bit healthier,” Martin said.

Immersion in a Community

John Jones serves as PCCEK’s medical director and oversees the diabetes center and Beacons of Hope. He’s a Hazard native, and while he believes that being homegrown certainly helps in most effectively reaching his patients – “We just know each other. The trust is there.” – he hastens to add that trust can likewise be built in those who come from elsewhere, assuming you’re willing to make yourself known in the community.

“I think it’s a little different than the stereotype,” Jones said. “They’ll accept you with open arms. It’s just about being out there.”

Trust was of the essence after the July flooding. Jones tells of a father, mother, and daughter who were swept from their home, strapped themselves to a power pole, and hung on. The family now lives with relatives.

When it rains, Jones said, the child is terrified; she has nightmares and flashbacks. When he talks to the dad about exploring counseling, “I think he doesn’t hear that from me as a doctor; he hears it from me as a friend.”

Dealing with such issues – or dealing, on a day-to-day basis, with a patient who’s homeless with no way to refrigerate their insulin, or one with no transportation to make an appointment – such things aren’t taught in medical school. You learn through immersion in a community.

Martin trusts he’s creating an environment that will draw young professionals into his community.

A Continuum of Care

Nathan Baugh, executive director of the National Association of Rural Health Clinics, believes the RHC program isn’t well understood among decision-makers in Washington. FQHCs, he suggests, get more attention and are thus more likely to receive grant funding and be recipients of favorable policy decisions.

“It’s been a long-term struggle for us,” Baugh said, though he feels some progress has been made in the pandemic, with the two programs being treated more equitably for federal allocations and resources. “We were happy to see that. But we still have a massive granting and understanding deficit relative to the FQHC program.”

In Eastern Kentucky, Barry Martin believes the benefits of a comprehensive rural health clinic to a region and state are clear. Nearly 200,000 annual health care visits speaks volumes. Moreover, “The governor is looking for people like us to help develop a second-chance workforce,” Martin said, “and that’s what we’ll be doing with Beacons of Hope.”

The big-picture objective for all stakeholders is a continuum of care: health, housing, employment, well-being.

“I got lucky,” Brittany Williams said of finding a temporary home at Beacons of Hope for herself and her son Waylon. “They’ve taught me self-control,” she said, “and structure. They’ve helped me structure my life.” She’s hopeful about the future.

The post Rural Health Clinics with ‘Head-to-Toe and Womb-to-Tomb’ Care appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Students and staff in rural Maine are using teletherapy to help access much-needed behavioral health services. 

Baileyville, Maine (pop. 1,318), was experiencing a youth mental health crisis in their community and a severe shortage of mental health providers. The problem reached a precipice in 2021 and 2022, said Kate Perkins, deputy director for U.S. program development at MCD Global Health. Of the more than 4,500 fully or conditionally registered clinical social workers in Maine, fewer than 4,000 live in the state, and fewer than 50 in Washington County, the easternmost county in Maine where Baileyville is located. 

“One of the things that we were seeing is the result of Covid,” Patricia Metta, superintendent of AOS 90 school district, which includes the Woodland Elementary and Woodland Junior-Senior High School, told the Daily Yonder. “We saw kids not returning back to school, many of them had gotten so used to being in their homes for at least a year, that their social issues, they couldn’t handle being social. They didn’t know how to deal with social issues.”

There were also several suicides, both within the school system and the community at large, she said. 

The country as a whole is grappling with a lack of physicians, but it is more acute in rural areas. A 2021 Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) study found that the U.S. could see a shortage of between 37,800 and 124,000 physicians by 2034. 

To combat the negative health effects, a collaborative effort coordinated by MCD Global Health now gives students and staff at Woodland Elementary and Woodland Junior-Senior High School in Baileyville, and across the county’s AOS 90 school district, access to virtual behavioral health services and other needed resources. A $500,000 matching grant from Point32Health Foundation helped the community get started on the initiative. Additional funding helped the program reach a total of $1.5 million in resources. 

Since the program began, 30 students have been matched with behavioral health providers in person and virtually. The program is on track to serve a total of 80 students by July 31, 2023. The school district has 380 students across four schools.

“We do see kids reaching out for help. They’re asking to see their provider. They’re asking for their teletherapy sessions,” Metta said. “We see them talking to people. And we do believe that eventually that will lessen their anxiety. And we are seeing kids come to school more. Attendance has really improved.”

The program started through a community assessment in August 2021 that found access to behavioral health resources as an urgent need, Metta said. Initially, officials put teletherapy equipment in both schools and weren’t sure what the result would be, she added. 

“We thought, there’s a couple of kids that will take advantage of it,” she said. “Well, since then, we’ve lost our full-time provider. And every day we’re picking up more and more kids on teletherapy…And if they can’t relate well with the in-house provider, then they have the option of teletherapy as well. So it’s a win-win for everybody.”

Jessica Melhiser, children’s program manager at Aroostook Mental Health Services Inc. and care navigator for the program, said in a statement that the program has transformed health and well-being for students and families in the communities. 

“Students are getting the support they need and sharing the benefits with their classmates, their families, and others who need help. It brings hope to the hallways,” she said. 

Perkins said they haven’t solved all the problems, nor are they trying to. 

“What we have done is rebuild confidence and re-ignite belief that it can get better,” she said. “The early work was really slow. It took a long time to build trust. It took the local leaders seeing us deliver, in terms of getting matching funds or equipment, for them to believe us when we said that this or that was viable and could get funded.”

Metta said the program had initiated other positive movements, like creating a food pantry and a garden for students. 

“I think as a result of the teletherapy program, and the community, the rural community getting involved, that’s what it took, in order for this to be successful.”

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Last week’s monthly job report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was better than expected, but another recent report from the bureau shows rural America still has a way to go to get back to pre-pandemic employment levels.

In April the bureau released its annual average employment report for 2022. As the name implies, this report takes jobs data for the entire year and produces a single average employment number for each county in the U.S. This data provides a longer-term view than monthly reports of how the American economy is performing for working people.

The good news is that rural America added nearly 738,000 jobs in the last two years. The bad news is that these gains didn’t completely offset the 953,000 jobs rural America lost during the first year of the pandemic.

In 2022, there were 1.1% fewer jobs in rural counties than there were in 2019. Metropolitan counties had on average about 1% more jobs last year than before the pandemic.

There are important regional variations on these general trends. But on average, job prospects were more limited in rural counties.

• Rural counties had 215,00 fewer jobs in 2022 than in 2019.
• Six out of every 10 rural counties had fewer jobs in 2022 than in 2019.
• A majority of metropolitan counties (56%) had more jobs last year than three years ago.

Regional Variation

• States in the Northeast, Great Lakes region, and the Great Plains had a higher percentage of rural counties that lost jobs.
• Other regions with a larger proportion of counties with job losses were along the Texas border and gulf, the Black Belt South, coastal California, and parts of the Rocky Mountain West.
• Fourteen states saw gains in metropolitan employment while losing jobs in rural counties.
• States with the biggest negative gap between metro and rural employment change were Colorado (metropolitan employment grew 3.6% while rural employment fell 4.2% for a gap of 7.8 points) North Dakota (metropolitan employment grew 3.8% while rural employment fell 3.6 points, for a gap of 7.4 percentage points), and Texas (metropolitan employment grew 5.5% while rural employment remained flat, for a gap of 5.5 points).

Variation by County Types

• Counties in medium-sized metropolitan areas (250,000 to 999,999 residents) had the biggest growth in jobs, at 1.3% for 2022 compared to 2019.
• The suburbs of major metropolitan areas (1 million or more residents) were a close second with a 1.1% gain in employment.
• The core counties of major metropolitan areas and small metropolitan counties (under 250,000 residents) had growth in jobs since the pandemic, but just barely. The core counties of major metros saw job growth of 0.6% while small metros employment grew 0.3%

Monthly Job Gains

The most recent county-level monthly job reinforces the prospects of slow job recovery in rural counties. Rural counties added about 85,000 jobs in February 2023 compared to the previous February, a gain of 0.4%.

Definitions: Major metros have 1 million or more residents, Medium metros have 250,000 to 999,999 residents, Small metros have under 250,000 residents. Nonmetro areas are counties that are not within a metropolitan statistical areas (OMB 2013). Nonmetro is used synonymously with rural in this analysis. Core counties are the central counties of metropolitan areas, generally containing the areas' major cities. Suburbs are metro counties lying on the periphery of these metro areas.

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If rural communities aren’t proactive in providing a good quality of life to senior citizens – most of whom are Baby Boomers – they will leave the towns, and communities will be left with a sharp drop in rural populations, according to researchers who are studying how seniors can best age in place.

David Peters, professor of rural sociology at Iowa State, co-authored a paper with Ilona Matysiak, a visiting scholar at Iowa State and associate professor of sociology at Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw, Poland, that was published in Journal of Rural Studies.

“If there’s not services in those towns, for those seniors, if there’s not activities, if they don’t feel valued, they’ll leave and we’ll see a sharp drop in a lot of rural populations,” Peters told the Daily Yonder. “And that has implications for local government aid that’s based on headcount.”

He added that given the size of the Baby Boomer segment of society, and the fact they tend to be disproportionately located in rural communities, people could see double digit drops in population in the next couple of years.

“Smaller and more remote communities usually do not possess enough resources and economic base to maintain local healthcare facilities or grocery stores,” Matysiak told the Daily Yonder. “It is also more difficult to attract medical professionals or entrepreneurs to work and live in such communities, as salaries are usually lower, and a rural setting does not provide similar career development opportunities to that in larger cities.”

“In the case of local businesses and small medical practices, there is often a problem with the lack of successors,” she added. However, according to Matysiak, it is in the best interest of small towns to try and cater to the seniors, whether it’s healthcare or entertainment, to help retain them as residents.

According to the research, “rural communities can maintain a good quality of life among older residents thanks to building cooperation between relevant local institutions as well as partnerships with external organizations that facilitate aging-related service provision. Importantly, people’s community engagement and participation in decision-making is crucial for both age-friendly and intergenerational planning”

The researchers used data from the U.S. Census and Iowa Small Towns Project, which has surveyed residents from 99 small towns in Iowa every ten years since 1994 to examine “senior smart towns.” Senior smart towns are communities where seniors can live on their own “safely, independently and comfortably.”

And despite what some may think, rural America is growing. 

Over a third of rural counties experienced population growth because of a rare combination of natural decrease and net migration between April of 2020 and July of 2021. Between 2010 and 2020, only 13% of rural counties experienced population growth in this way, according to University of New Hampshire demographer Ken Johnson.

Johnson said that in counties that receive an influx of seniors—many from retirement migration, and especially to high amenity areas like recreation and retirement counties—they represent a significant amount of human capital and expertise.

The survey questions relate to quality of life, use of local services, perceptions of community leaders, social capital, civic engagement and community attachment. For this study, Matysiak and Peters focused on small towns with a higher percentage of people aged 65 and older compared to other rural communities.

In addition to keeping rural populations afloat, keeping older residents in a rural community is a good idea because they can provide guidance to the younger generations.

“Senior leaders have a lot of experience,” Peters said. “They have a lot of connections, … and they can be a resource to mentor younger leaders.”

“Many of these migrants have years of experience in big bureaucratic and professional organizations,” Johnson said. “They know how to write grants, work in complex bureaucracies and have broad professional contacts. Often that can give the communities that they move to an advantage in gaining access to grant funded federal and state programs that might expand health care and cultural opportunities. Communities must ensure that they take advantage of all this expertise among new migrants who have chosen to come to these communities.”

For younger people hoping to change the status quo in a community, seniors can also provide their social standing and their gravitas in the community to say things can change, in addition to having time and money to spend on local projects, Peters said.

“So you can really draw on seniors as a resource in the community to do all sorts of community projects,” he added. “They also give back in other ways by volunteering, providing guidance, providing their time and money, as I said, and I think that’s what makes these smart senior towns also just good communities to live in overall, even if you’re not a senior.”

In other cases, seniors remain in their communities for a variety of reasons, Johnson said.

“Many have spent decades in the community and have deep ties to the people, institutions and organizations in their communities be them religious, social, or fraternal,” he said. “It is difficult to give up these ties to migrate to a new location and have to start over building this web of relationships later in life.”

The post Research: Seniors Play Vital Role in Rural Communities appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

There’s a conflict between what weekly newspaper publishers think are the most likely ways their businesses will generate money in the future and what their readers are most willing to pay for, according to a study conducted in four states in the northern Great Plains.

The research – which focused on weekly papers in Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota – found that publishers were more likely to bank on traditional sources of revenue like advertising and subscriptions. Readers, on the other hand, were more likely than publishers to say they were willing to pay for less traditional products and services such as events, memberships, and newsletters.

The study concludes that there is “a clear disconnect between what revenue streams publishers are willing to implement and what revenue streams readers are potentially willing to endorse.”

The research, written by scholars at public universities in Kansas, Colorado, and Missouri, has implications for small-town and rural media that are negotiating major changes in the news-industry economy.

In the last 20 years more than 500 rural newspapers have closed or merged, but little of the research on the journalism economy has focused on small-market media, said the study’s lead, Teri Finneman, associate professor at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas. Dozens of papers closed during the pandemic alone, Finneman said.

“It really made me start thinking, ‘why is it that we don't yet have a solution for this business model problem?’ And frankly, I saw this as a failure of academia, like why in the last 20 years has there not been a solution found for the industry? And so this really motivated me to try to look into some solutions to this very serious problem.”

Together with two colleagues, Finneman researched the possible revenue streams, speakng with publishers and readers in the Heartland states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas.

Not surprisingly, the publishers picked the model that has been around for hundreds of years: advertising and legal notices.

“They very much pitch the current model, which is concerning, because we know that legal notices are under attack at legislatures across the country,” said Finneman, publisher of The Eudora Times, a nationally recognized news desert publication that she runs with journalism students. “And so at any point, newspapers could see that revenue disappear, which is why we are arguing why it is so important to be proactive instead of reactive, so that there are more financial resources coming in.”

For readers, however, the study found that the top response for an additional revenue stream was events.

“The most common phrase in rural areas is there's nothing to do. So it makes a lot of sense that events would be very popular because they're looking for things to do,” said Finneman, who grew up and spent a large part of her life in rural North Dakota.

Another top option for readers was memberships, which was defined as a perk beyond subscription.

“We left it simple like that, because there's different ways to do membership programs,” she said. “And this was something that readers said that they were really interested in.”

Other myths that were busted about rural America include that older adults care more about the news and consuming it. The study found that residents ages 18 to 54 were more willing to financially help their newspaper than those over age 55.

“The industry has got to get past this myth that their older readers are the only base that they have to serve because they have a lot of younger people who would be willing to support them if they were given an opportunity,” Finneman said.

Still, for all the myth busting and hardships for rural news, Finneman believes there are a lot of good things happening.

“Rural journalism has more of a stability to it, when they aren't run through Wall Street, and when they care more about their communities and not just making money for shareholders,” she said. “So there are a lot of positives for rural journalism. And I emphasize that to my students a lot about how many opportunities that there really are in this field.”

The post Small-Town Newspaper Readers Are More Open to New Revenue Ideas Than Publishers appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in Mile Markers, a twice monthly newsletter from Open Campus about the role of colleges in rural America. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.

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Growing up in a working-class family in rural Wyoming, Ty McNamee knew that there was little spare money to pursue his dream of going to college.

“Although we have a farm and ranch, it’s a family business and almost any of the money we make goes back into our operating expenses,” he says.

In order to go to college, he and his twin brother both relied on federal aid. That made all the difference for McNamee, who is now a professor studying rurality and social class in higher education at the University of Mississippi.

Despite being more likely to graduate high school than their urban or suburban peers, rural students are the least likely to attend college.

Experts are worried that rural students will become even less likely to get a college degree, due to changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) that take effect this fall.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) is expected to introduce a bill this week to restore the exemption. She and three other senators released a statement in March “raising the alarm” about how families could be negatively affected.

“These farm families, whose businesses are vital to our states’ communities and economies, need tailored guidance to respond to their unique business model,” the bipartisan group wrote in the letter addressed to the Department of Education. (Ernst was joined by fellow Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley , Michael Bennett (D-Colo.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.).

(And in case you’re curious, there are about 2.1 million family farms in the U.S., though not every one would necessarily be affected by the FAFSA change.)

It remains to be seen whether the bill will move forward in Congress. But without it, the new requirements will compound the difficulties rural students already have when pursuing higher education, potentially adding to the enrollment challenges colleges are already facing.

“You can’t sell tractors” to to pay for college.

That’s a special concern to Frank Ballman, federal relations director for the National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs. The association has lobbied for keeping the family farm and small business exemption.

Family farms may have a high net worth on paper but can’t actually sell their farm land or equipment to pay for college.

“If you’re an investor and you have stock, you can sell some of that stock,” says Ritchie Morrow, who works as a financial aid officer for the Nebraska state agency responsible for disbursing state education grants. “If you’re a family farmer, you can’t sell an auger, because you need it to move the corn. You can’t sell a tractor.”

Some argue the change just makes everything more complicated, as the new supposedly simpler FAFSA will require families to quantify the value of things like crops and land on top of other assets. And those vagaries are worsened by the fact that the Department of Education has already said it won’t be issuing instructions on how to calculate their value accurately.

A mistake could prove more than just costly: When families fill out the FAFSA, they are required to sign a statement certifying that they aren’t providing false information.

“What that says to a business owner is ‘Be prepared to go to jail or face a hefty fine,’” Ballmann says.

Ensuring rural students can go to college really matters. Many attend two- or -four year programs with the intention of learning the latest farming innovations and returning to their communities.

That was the case for Luke Carlson, a Nebraska farmer in his forties who left to attend Northwest Missouri State but knew he would return.

Luke has long worked alongside his stereotype-defying father Jim, who voted for former President Donald Trump but is known to quote Al Gore about climate change. (He was protesting the Keystone Pipeline when we first met a few years back, and had recently erected a 2.8-kilowatt solar panel over farmland drillers had tried to seize).

Their family has farmed in Nebraska for over a century, as Luke recently recounted in an article published by Central Valley Ag, a farmer-owned cooperative he serves on the board of.

He and his wife, Sherri, hope their three kids will have the same choices they did — whether it’s pursuing a university education, running the farm, or both.

But as family farms like theirs increasingly die out, are absorbed by corporations, or otherwise struggle to make ends meet their options could be dwindling.

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The post FAFSA Rule Change Cuts Financial Aid for Some Rural Students appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

This article was produced with ProPublica as part of its Local Reporting Network initiative. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Whenever a hard rain fell on Harlan County, Kentucky, the mud, rocks and debris from the Foresters No. 25 mine pounded down the hillside into the community of Wallins Creek.

Local residents repeatedly complained about washed-out culverts and mud in their yards. Time after time, county work crews came out after a heavy rain to repair Camp Creek Road, a water line that runs alongside it and a local bridge. The strip mine’s owner, Blackjewel, fixed some problems, but when the rains came again, so did the muddy flooding.

Amber Combs, who lived down the hill from Foresters, recalled a day in August 2017 when “the water was rushing down and the yard was a muddy slush pond. It was literally like a river around my house.” Combs complained to Kentucky regulators, who fined Blackjewel $1,300, which it never paid. Overall, under Blackjewel’s ownership, Foresters would run up 17 violations and more than $600,000 in unpaid fines.  

Runoff from Blackjewel’s Foresters No. 25 mine damaged a road in Wallins Creek, Kentucky, in 2020. (Silas Walker/Lexington Herald-Leader)

Founded in 2008 by West Virginia native Jeff Hoops, Blackjewel grew in just a decade to become the sixth-largest coal producer in the U.S., partly by accumulating mines like Foresters that had gone bankrupt. By 2018, it boasted more than 500 mining permits in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. Then, in July 2019, Blackjewel stunned the industry by declaring bankruptcy, with claims against it later estimated at $7.5 billion. 

That December, environmental groups where Blackjewel operated warned the bankruptcy judge that, while he was focusing on what they called the company’s “significant financial mismanagement,” he should also be aware of “severe environmental mismanagement problems.”

“Reclamation work, water treatment, and other expenses related to environmental compliance should be approved and prioritized” in the bankruptcy case, the environmental advocates wrote. 

Kentucky regulators agreed. But, citing longstanding case law, the judge rejected their request. Instead, bankruptcy trustees began divvying up the company’s assets among preferred creditors such as banks and hedge funds. Problems at Foresters and other Blackjewel sites persisted. By mid-2020, there were more than 600 outstanding violations of state mining and reclamation standards at the company’s mines in Kentucky, including 450 since the bankruptcy filing. On top of that, regulators had cited Blackjewel mines for more than 13,000 violations of Kentucky water quality rules, mostly for failing to monitor pollution discharges.          

The Blackjewel case, still unresolved and nearing its fourth anniversary this July, highlights the environmental toll of what has become a central feature of the coal industry’s business strategy: bankruptcy. Over the past decade, Blackjewel and other coal companies have found two ways to use bankruptcy to their advantage. First, they expanded their holdings by acquiring other companies’ bankrupt mines, which they hoped would turn a temporary profit during upticks in coal prices and production within the industry’s long-term decline.

Then they declared bankruptcy themselves, entering an arena where they didn’t have to pay all of their debts, and where environmental liabilities took a back seat to banks and other financial creditors. As more coal companies busted, hundreds of mines cycled through repeated bankruptcies. Some, like Foresters, are no longer producing coal, yet they continue to pollute their communities.  

A first-of-its-kind analysis by ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight has documented that mines that have gone through multiple bankruptcies also tend to create more environmental damage. By combining data from federal bankruptcy court filings and state regulatory records, we identified mining permits that have been through more than one bankruptcy and compared the number of environmental violations they’d accrued to violations for mines that had not been through bankruptcy. We found that the median number of environmental violations for surface and underground mines that had been through multiple bankruptcies between 2012 and 2022 in Kentucky was almost twice the median number for mines that had not, and 40% higher in West Virginia. Blackjewel mines in Kentucky that have gone through multiple bankruptcies had more than twice as many violations as the state median for nonbankrupt mines. Our analysis could not determine if bankruptcy caused the environmental violations or was simply associated with them. Read about our methodology here.

The analysis suggests that the bankruptcy system is “keeping mines alive that are not viable and that are struggling to remain in compliance with environmental laws,” said University of Chicago law professor Josh Macey, co-author of a 2019 study on coal bankruptcies.

Blackjewel’s founder, Hoops, epitomizes how the story of the coal industry and its barons has become inseparable from bankruptcy. He built his empire on bankrupt mines. Then, as Blackjewel’s liabilities mounted, he began seeking new vistas. In the months before Blackjewel’s bankruptcy, according to court records, he transferred tens of millions of dollars into another company that is building a resort in his native West Virginia, part of a broader effort he has described as a noncoal empire he can leave to his children.  

Hoops, who declined requests for an in-person or phone interview, said in emailed answers to questions that he didn’t intend for Blackjewel to go bankrupt and that creditors forced him into it. “The model was never to bankrupt the company,” he wrote. “In no way have I benefited from the system.” He added, “I will not recover a cent of my valid claims.” Hoops said that Blackjewel complied with environmental laws and that when violations were issued, it took steps to address them.  

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Before his bankrupt company left a legacy of mud-shrouded roads and polluted streams, Jeff Hoops was a local hero. He rose from a dysfunctional family and a menial job in the West Virginia coalfields to create a regional economic engine and become a philanthropic pillar of his community. 

He and his wife, Patricia Hoops, were all smiles on the front page of the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, West Virginia, in April 2014 when the newspaper named him its “Citizen of the Year.” The article recounted Hoops’ charity work close to home — a residence hall at Appalachian Bible College in Mount Hope, an indoor football practice facility at the University of Pikeville in Kentucky — and halfway around the world: distributing Bibles in Russia, financing construction of an orphanage in India, running a hotel for missionaries in the Dominican Republic. The children’s hospital in Huntington was named for him, thanks to a $3 million gift. So was a local soccer facility, after what the paper called a “generous donation.”

Despite his wealth and success, Hoops remained the modest and deeply religious man that his friends and neighbors had always known. As a major donor to Marshall University’s Thundering Herd athletic program, he would rate a perch in a luxury box at the stadium. But he said he prefers to sit in the stands, where he can feel the crowd’s energy and be closer to the action.

“I’ve invited him into the box but he says, ‘No, I’m okay,’” said John Sutherland, executive director of Marshall’s Big Green Scholarship Foundation.     

When Sutherland wants to talk Marshall sports with Hoops, they meet at Shonet’s Country Cafe, a family diner in Milton, West Virginia, for scrambled eggs and sausage, and sometimes a slice of pie.    

Born in 1956, Hoops grew up in Bluefield, deep in southern West Virginia along the Virginia border. Bluefield then had 20,000 residents; it counts less than half that many today. Historically, it was a financial hub and railroad center for the coal industry. Now, it promotes itself as “Nature’s Air-Conditioned City” (elevation 2,611), and the local chamber of commerce gives away cold lemonade whenever a summer day hits 90 degrees.

Hoops was the second oldest of five children of Roy Hoops, who worked as a clerk for the Norfolk & Southern Railroad, and Lucy Walker. Roy’s drinking, infidelity and physical abuse of Lucy strained the family, according to court records. Lucy filed for protective orders and divorce several times. When Roy promised to change his behavior, they reconciled.

“Certainly my childhood had its challenges, as my father’s life was controlled by alcohol,” Hoops said.

Hoops was a striver. He sang in the youth chorus at church and made the Bluefield High basketball team as a sophomore despite standing 5-feet-1-inch tall. He sprouted to what he called “a towering 5-8” by 1974, when he graduated from Bluefield and married his high school sweetheart, Patricia Johnson, a week later. He wanted to work right away, but he was only 17, and the minimum age in the coal industry was 18. So he altered his birth certificate and found a job running parts in an underground mine, he said.  

In 1975, Hoops joined the engineering department of a mining company, doing surveying and designing ventilation plans. He began going to college at night, eventually earning associate’s and master’s degrees and an executive MBA. Within a decade of high school, he became a top corporate engineer and then vice president of operations for United Coal, which became part of Arch Coal. After leaving Arch in the late 1990s, Hoops established and sold a series of coal companies. A former associate described Hoops as a workaholic driven by a competitive streak. “The joy of his life is coming out on top of a business deal,” the former associate said.

Hoops’ parents divorced in 1985, remarried in 1986 and divorced again in 1991. Roy retired from the railroad and owned an Exxon gas station from 1983 to 2002. On his deathbed in 2014, he called his son to apologize. “I forgave him, told him I loved him, and told him the most important thing was for him to make peace with God,” Jeff Hoops recalled. 

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When Hoops was growing up, coal was the most powerful business and political player in places like southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. But then, buffeted by skyrocketing natural gas production, cheaper renewable energy prices and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the industry began to founder. 

Makers of everything from asbestos to opioids have used bankruptcy to avoid paying for damage they caused, but the sheer volume of coal bankruptcies outpaced any other sector. At least 60 coal companies went bankrupt between 2012 and 2022, including some of the biggest in the country. The environmental group Appalachian Voices warned in July 2021 that a wave of bankruptcies could leave 633,000 acres of coal mines in the eastern U.S. in need of cleanup, eroding the ability of communities to rebuild economically.  

In theory, bankruptcy doesn’t exempt a company from its responsibility to preserve the environment. The 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act requires coal companies to clean up damage as they mine. When mining is over, the land must be put back to “a condition capable of supporting the uses which it was capable of supporting prior to any mining.” 

That’s not how it generally works in practice. Coal companies often fall behind on so-called mine reclamation and, with obligations also mounting for worker pensions and health benefits, file for bankruptcy protection. They lay off employees at mines that are no longer productive or profitable, ditch pension and health care liabilities and avoid paying for environmental damages.

For example, coal giants Peabody Energy and Arch Coal created a third company, Patriot Coal, and spun off their mines with environmental problems and pension obligations into it. All three companies eventually went bankrupt, ducking a combined $2.6 billion in liabilities, according to Macey, the University of Chicago law professor. Many of these mines have changed hands since then but still have not been reclaimed.

“Bankrupt coal companies dump their mine cleanup obligations onto communities and taxpayers who simply don’t have the money to pick up the tab,” said Peter Morgan, a Sierra Club lawyer who has tracked coal bankruptcies around the country.

The purpose of bankruptcy is to give desperate people and companies time and relief from creditors so they can get back on their feet. But not all creditors are treated equally. Bankruptcy law gives secured creditors such as banks, law firms, the Internal Revenue Service and equipment suppliers — but not environmental costs or fines — priority for payment. 

“Bankruptcy courts are not doing enough to stop conduct that allows coal companies to get out of their environmental responsibilities,” Macey said.

There’s a potential backstop to pay for environmental cleanup: reclamation bonds. Federal law requires coal companies to post these bonds to receive mining permits, as a sort of insurance. The amount that companies are required to put up varies from state to state; in West Virginia, it can be as much as $5,000 per acre of the permit. To secure the bonds, companies pay a surety firm a one-time fee — typically 20% to 50% of the face value, according to Hoops. If a mining company goes belly up, state regulators can revoke its permits and use the bond money to clean up whatever mess is left. Money from forfeited bonds, sometimes along with other revenue such as environmental penalties or coal production fees, goes into state reclamation funds to restore abandoned mine sites.

But the required bond amounts often aren’t enough to cover all potential costs. Cleanup costs have soared, partly due to larger surface mines that blew up or chopped off entire mountaintops, and partly because modern studies have increasingly identified water pollutants requiring lengthy and expensive treatment. According to a 2021 legislative audit, West Virginia’s reclamation bonds have covered only one-tenth of cleanup costs. Separately, the Appalachian Voices analysis projected cleanup costs in West Virginia alone as high as $3.5 billion.  

As a result, state officials are reluctant to revoke permits and take on the financial responsibility for cleanup. What often ensues instead is a game of musical mines. Knowing that they won’t end up on the hook for reclamation, other coal companies buy mines out of bankruptcy — and then often go bankrupt themselves. 

The ProPublica analysis identified 2,030 mines in Kentucky and West Virginia that have been through bankruptcy since 2012 — more than a third of all coal mines in those states. Of the bankrupt mines, 491, or 24%, have gone through more than one bankruptcy.  

Of the 210 bankrupt Blackjewel mines in our database, including 197 in Kentucky and 13 in West Virginia, almost half have gone through at least one other bankruptcy. The vast majority of those — 101 of 103 — are in Kentucky and had a median of 16 environmental violations, more than twice the median for nonbankrupt mines in that state. 

Since Blackjewel went bust in 2019, more than 100 of its Kentucky permits have been sold out of bankruptcy — many for the second time, according to court filings. Lawyers jokingly call the second round of bankruptcy “Chapter 22,” or Chapter 11 twice over. 

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In 1999, Hoops went out on his own with just one mine, the Hunts Branch Mine in Phelps, Kentucky. In 2008, he founded Revelation Energy. It grew, and Hoops changed the name to Blackjewel in 2017 as part of what he called “a strategic restructuring.” The plan was to shift away from providing steam coal for power plants and toward producing more metallurgical coal for steel mills, a market where prices were increasing.

Blackjewel assembled mines from the bankruptcies of James River Coal, Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal and others. Alpha paid Hoops $200 million in cash and more than $100 million in installments to take about 250 of its mining permits. Every acquisition “was based on a detailed economic model that demonstrated the mines could make money even in a down market,” Hoops said. 

The strategy, Hoops said, was working. Blackjewel expanded from central Appalachia to Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. It employed 1,700 miners and boasted 1.2 billion tons of coal available for mining, enough to keep going for many decades.

But in April 2019, two bankruptcy experts questioned whether Hoops would be able to honor his companies’ environmental obligations.

“Rather, his businesses have begun to exhibit a pattern,” Macey and Jackson Salovaara wrote in “Bankruptcy as Bailout,” an article in the Stanford Law Review. “Hoops takes over abandoned mines, receives cash from the company that wants to get rid of them, and then fails to actually remediate the environmental problems.” 

Three months later, Blackjewel declared bankruptcy. It cited a roof collapse at a Virginia mine, a spike in workers’ compensation costs and flooding that prevented railroads from moving coal out of Wyoming. It also blamed adverse market conditions, including the rise of cheap natural gas, greater use of renewable energy and increased regulatory pressures.

Energy industry researcher Clark Williams-Derry pointed instead to questionable business decisions, such as Blackjewel locking in prices for steel-making coal just before prices increased sharply. “The signs of financial distress have been evident to anyone who cared to look,” he wrote in a blog post titled, “Seven Bombshells in the Blackjewel Bankruptcy.” Hoops said that lenders forced the timing of the price locks on Blackjewel, costing the company millions of dollars. 

Hoops said that key lenders — United Bank and the investment firm Riverstone Holdings — cut off credit for Blackjewel, forcing the firm into Chapter 11. “They had managed to get my funds put on hold before and during the bankruptcy, as I would have never allowed the company to file but for their actions,” Hoops said. United and Riverstone declined comment.

In a press release, Hoops portrayed the bankruptcy as part of an effort to “position the company for long-term success.” But it didn’t feel that way to many Blackjewel miners. Some mines closed, sending workers home without any notice, and without their most recent paychecks. A mine in Wyoming was on fire, and Blackjewel was scrambling to pay employees to put it out.

Joseph Fox, who worked at a Blackjewel coal preparation plant in Virginia, had just taken his family on vacation to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Then, his paycheck bounced. Fox, his wife and their son and two daughters cut their beach trip short.

“They’re kids. All they wanted was a vacation,” Fox recalled. “They didn’t understand, and you don’t want to be telling them your paycheck bounced.”

In Kentucky, a group of miners who missed paychecks blocked a Blackjewel coal train in Harlan County. Hoops said that all of the miners have been paid. Still, they filed claims and lawsuits alleging that they were laid off without due notice. 

The bankruptcy trustee settled the lawsuits with a promise that miners would be bumped up in the ranking of creditors. But court documents suggest there will be little money to go around, maybe only enough to pay the lawyers, accountants and consultants managing the liquidation, lawyers monitoring the case said.

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By the time of the bankruptcy, Hoops was already preparing for a future outside coal. He set up a family holding company, Clearwater Investments, with his three sons as trustees. Its purpose was to “leave a financial dynasty to Jeff and Patricia’s heirs by investing in several businesses as well as by collecting royalties on various investment properties,” said an internal “executive overview” filed in the bankruptcy case.

Some of the listed holdings retain a connection to coal, including a trucking firm and a mining equipment sales service. Others don’t, like a wheelchair and brace sales firm with sales in 2018 of $8.7 million.

In January 2019, Hoops sent the Clearwater overview to his sons, Jeffrey Jr., Jeremy and Joshua. “I hope by the end of this year to have a nice package together that shows everything we own as it is a vast company now,” he wrote. “Love you guys …. Dad.”

It didn’t take long for Clearwater to surface in the Blackjewel case.

Creditors discovered that in the six months prior to Blackjewel’s bankruptcy filing, as the company was becoming increasingly insolvent, Hoops had transferred at least $34 million from Blackjewel to Clearwater. 

Hoops said that these transfers were appropriate because they represented partial repayment of $51.5 million in loans that he and his family had made to Blackjewel since January 2019 via a revolving line of credit. But this explanation didn’t satisfy creditors, who accused him of violating bankruptcy rules by putting himself at the head of the line.  

It was a “sweetheart deal,” then-bankruptcy trustee David Bissett told the judge during a July 2019 hearing. Hoops was “protecting his own self-interest” rather than Blackjewel’s employees or creditors, Bissett said.

Lenders were so outraged at Hoops’ money transfer that, as a condition for providing Blackjewel with emergency financing, they forced Hoops to step down as an officer of the company. They also blocked any Hoops family members from taking a management role. 

In a farewell email to employees, Hoops defended himself. “No one is hurting more than me over what has occurred,” he wrote. “There has not been one cent taken out of the mining company, the exact opposite I have loaned more money to try to get this company through these difficult times.”

The email continued: “I accept responsibility for being unable to lead this company through these difficult times.” Hoops wrote, “I know in my heart how hard I fought for each of you and this company and to have people threaten me and say I took money out of this company for other projects hurts more than words can express.” 

The liquidation trustee sued Hoops and seven family companies, including Clearwater, over the money he shifted from Blackjewel to them in the months before the bankruptcy. 

Last August, the trustee settled these cases. Few details were made public, except that as part of the deal Hoops dropped a $2.6 million claim for money he argued Blackjewel owed him. 

Hoops said only that the lawsuit was “resolved amicably.” The liquidation trustee declined comment. 

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Another bankruptcy court fight focused on the Foresters mine.

This wasn’t the mine’s first brush with bankruptcy. U.S. Coal, its original owner, went bankrupt in June 2014. By the time Hoops took over the permit in 2016, the mine was down to fewer than 20 workers, and production was a third of its 2013 peak of 550,000 tons. In 2018, it stopped producing coal altogether, and had only three employees, according to the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

A year into Blackjewel’s bankruptcy, a flood from Foresters eroded part of a local road and damaged a drinking water line. The rest of Blackjewel’s now-idled operations across Kentucky were also polluting their surroundings. Alarmed by the worsening conditions, the state’s Energy and Environment Cabinet sought the court’s help. In June 2020, the environmental regulator asked the judge to order Blackjewel’s trustee to bring all of the company’s permits into compliance with mining standards and pollution rules. 

In a court filing, agency officials warned that Blackjewel sites not only weren’t being restored to pre-mining conditions but weren’t even being maintained to prevent contaminated water from pouring downstream into water supplies. The agency warned of flooded holding ponds being at high risk of “discharging metals and suspended solids into adjacent rivers and streams” and of landslides “that could endanger the lives and the property of residences below.” 

In September 2020, a week after state inspectors again cited Foresters for erosion and drainage, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Benjamin A. Kahn held a hearing on the regulators’ complaints. But the concerns about environmental fallout ran smack into a wall of decades-old law. While noting that crews were already responding at Foresters and other sites, the bankruptcy trustee argued that legal precedent gave the judge little scope to intervene. The judge agreed. Citing U.S. Supreme Court and federal appeals court decisions, Kahn instructed the trustee to clean up only “imminent” threats to public safety, not “speculative” threats.

Some problems at Foresters met this standard, and Kahn ordered them fixed. Still, violations for muddy runoff and sediment from holding ponds have persisted there.

Kahn deferred action at dozens of other Blackjewel sites with hundreds of environmental violations that he deemed less severe. Kahn’s analysis didn’t address the risk that if bankrupt mining companies can avoid routine maintenance and reclamation, speculative threats can turn imminent in a hurry. Once the judge’s criteria are met, “it’s too late,” said Lena Seward, lawyer for the Kentucky state regulatory agency. “The road is washed out.”

Kentucky also tried to forfeit bonds for some Blackjewel mines so that the state could begin cleanup. But that’s tied up in a legal challenge by the surety company, which contends that it has the right to restore the sites itself instead of losing the bond money. For other mines, the state and the bond company are still working out terms for cleanup. 

Meanwhile, the companies that bought most of the mines haven’t gotten very far with cleanup, sometimes because the state blocked final approval of the purchases due to unresolved violations at mines they already owned. Kentucky regulators acknowledged in an email that they “would like to have seen a faster transfer applications/reclamation process.”

As it acquired mines, Blackjewel posted a total of more than $500 million in reclamation bonds in four states. But that sum may not be enough. State regulators warned the bankruptcy judge in late 2020 that, for the 32 Blackjewel mines without buyers, conditions had deteriorated so much that cleanup costs were estimated at $20 million more than the bonds would cover.    

Hoops disputed that the bond amounts were inadequate. The regulators were “wrong,” he said, but he did not elaborate.

In February 2021, the Kentucky cabinet went back to the judge. A Blackjewel mine was showing severe erosion, with sediment ponds so full that they posed what an inspector called “an immediate danger to the public and environment downstream.”

Kahn ruled against the regulator again.

“The violations just continue to mount,” said Kentucky attorney Mary Varson Cromer, who represents coalfield residents in the Blackjewel case. “The whole system is not functioning, and it ends up costing more to reclaim, and it’s the residents and the community that are at risk.”

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The game of musical mines is slowing down. Across Appalachia, coal production is forecast to drop more than 20% over the next decade. In a market where coal production and prices continue to drop, there’s little demand for Blackjewel’s coal. Almost all its mines in Kentucky, including Foresters, have been sitting idle for four years. 

Blackjewel’s case has also bogged down in paperwork, or the lack of it. “The books and records inherited by the trust were woefully incomplete (and largely nonexistent in some instances),” the trustee complained in March 2023, explaining yet another delay. 

With Blackjewel behind him, Hoops is looking to the future. Clearwater is building a resort in Milton, where Hoops lives. The project is meant to invoke the splendor of ancient Rome. Hoops named it the Grand Patrician Resort. Patrician has a double meaning: It refers to the ruling class of ancient Rome and also honors Hoops’ wife, Patricia.

Hoops wept as he announced the resort project, which is located on the site of a former children’s hospital. His aunt and his brother-in-law had both been patients there, he told a local newspaper. “I get emotional,” he said. “To see God take something that was used to treat kids that were hurting, a lot of them crippled for life, he always takes something bad and turns it for good.”

The resort’s golf course had a soft opening last August. Construction of a luxury hotel continues. Local press accounts say the site will include a 400-seat steakhouse, a wedding chapel and ballroom and two indoor pools. A second phase is expected to feature another hotel, equestrian trails and a 3,500-seat outdoor arena modeled on the Roman Colosseum. This month, Hoops hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new hiking trail at the resort.

Even though Hoops left Blackjewel four years ago, one of his family-run businesses is still connected to its mines. The insurance company holding the reclamation bonds for the Blackjewel mines that weren’t bought out of bankruptcy has hired Lexington Coal to reclaim them. Its manager is one of Hoops’ sons. Lexington Coal “has not benefited in any way economically” from the reclamation contract, Hoops said. 

Joel Jacobs and John Templon contributed data reporting.

In the game of musical mines, environmental damage takes a back seat appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.