Most bad legislative ideas begin with good intentions. So it is with the notion, advocated by Cardinal News, that the Virginia General Assembly should create a new secretary of rural development: a bad idea motivated by the best of intentions.
The source of this idea is an article in the University of Richmond Law Review, “Those Who Need the Most Get the Least: The Challenge of and Opportunity for Helping Rural Virginia,” written by Andrew Block and Antonella Nicholas. Block and Nicholas succinctly define the problem as follows: “[R]esidents of rural communities tend to be older, poorer, less credentialed in terms of their education, less healthy, and declining in population.” Among other solutions to this cascade of economic and social problems, the authors suggest the creation of “a high-level cabinet position with interagency authority to oversee rural affairs and development. Only a high-level position like this, with the authority to unify and direct efforts to improve the lives of rural Virginians, will have the ability to fully and comprehensively help rural communities in a way that they both need and deserve.”
The problem is, it just won’t work.
When I was Virginia’s secretary of commerce and trade under Gov. Mark Warner, I was probably as close to being the “secretary of rural development” as anyone has ever been. At that time, my secretariat was comprised of 16 agencies, including the commonwealth’s two economic development agencies, two housing and community development agencies, and the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Forestry, the Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy, the Tobacco Commission, the Department of Labor, and the Virginia Tourism Authority. Virtually every aspect of rural Virginia’s economy was addressed by one or more of the agencies within my Secretariat. And, in Mark Warner, I worked for a governor who was totally committed to addressing the rural-urban divide and the daunting economic issues facing rural Virginia.
With that combination of gubernatorial leadership and agency authority, we were able to make significant accomplishments for rural Virginia. Among these were the establishment in Russell County of the two large data centers serving the commonwealth’s IT departments, the creation of the Crooked Road music trail, the attraction of new businesses to Martinsville and Danville, the allocation of Main Street development funds to small towns across Southside and Southwest Virginia, the creation of Virginia Community Capital which has funneled tens of millions of dollars in loans to rural Virginia, including rural Virginia health centers, and a host of other successful programs.
Imagine, then, a secretary of rural development who commands none of those agencies. Imagine a secretary of rural development who, in order to get anything done, has to seek to coordinate among, say, the secretary of commerce and trade and the secretary of health and human resources to seek to organize and get funded programs that the new secretary wants to implement. Imagine what happens when the new secretary of rural development calls up the executive director of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership or the Department of Forestry and tells them what he wants them to do for a specific project or new idea. Their response, in all likelihood, will be to call up their boss, the secretary of commerce or the secretary of agriculture and forestry (the departments of agriculture and forestry were moved after my tenure to a new secretariat of their own) and say, “Hey this person gave me a call. What do you want me to do with it? He wants me to do this new program. In the first place, I don’t necessarily think his proposed program is a good idea. In the second place, his program is encroaching on my programmatic turf and I don’t like that. And finally, I don’t have any money in my budget for his program anyway.”
Of course, the Law Review authors proposed that the secretary of rural development would have “interagency authority” to avoid problems like that one described above. For good or for bad, that is a pipe dream. It is completely unrealistic to think that this new secretary can commandeer the budget and programmatic resources of another secretariat or agency within another secretariat in order to implement the new secretary’s ideas. Thus, the new secretary will be reduced to advocating among the other secretariats for rural programs, without any actual ability to implement those programs.
Lacking authority, lacking budget, lacking agency personnel, as a practical matter relying almost solely on advocacy and exhortation, a secretary of rural development will accomplish little or nothing for rural Virginia. And, I’m afraid, this new secretariat will allow the other secretariats to ignore Virginia’s rural problems on the grounds that the new secretary is supposed to be taking care of all that.
