Like many small towns across the West, ours grew up beside railroad tracks. It was the train that brought folks here and it was the train that allowed them to make a living in these wide-open spaces far from the markets for grain and beef and wool.
For a century or more the railroad and the federal government have been our closest and most important neighbors, owning most of the land and exerting tremendous influence on the local economy.
But much has changed recently. The railroads and the government have both been downsizing, pruning unprofitable rural branches from their operations. Most farm price supports are being eliminated and, with them, many assistance programs and their administrative offices. Amtrak is cutting back on its rural stops to concentrate on urban corridors.
But all of this downsizing, however welcome and overdue, is putting a real squeeze on small towns like ours. We have been losing not just jobs and services, but also two of our most important community benefactors. These major landholders, who once built parks and contributed to our civic organizations, are fast becoming absentee landlords. They still own the land and rule our economy, but they don't spend as much time or money here anymore.
Like other small towns, ours has a group of volunteers working on economic development. Seeking some way to spruce up our deteriorating downtown commercial district, this group recently applied for and secured a federal grant to help construct a train viewing platform.
Located in a small park beside city hall, the raised platform with benches and a roof faces the two sets of railroad tracks that run through the middle of town and the switching yard at the east end. A passive observer of the industrial behemoths wending their way east and west, the platform is a fitting symbol for a railroad town as well as a pleasant place to sit and watch the traffic.
Although constructed with local volunteer labor, the materials of the platform were paid for with the federal grant, causing a daily newspaper in a nearby city to criticize the project as just another "government handout" that we must learn to do without.
Being the proud sons and daughters of pioneers, survivors of droughts and storms and pestilence, most folks hereabouts consider themselves pretty self-sufficient. One of the worst things you can accuse us of, apart from child abuse, is taking handouts. Even when folks have lost a home to a fire, or have a serious illness in the family, you'd better call your gift a loan or it likely won't be accepted.
Such public slander masks an inequity which urban taxpayers would just as soon forget.
In our county, for instance, the federal government owns 74.7 percent of its 771,000 acres. These are "public" lands owned and cherished by the nation as a whole. They benefit (in countless ways) folks who live mostly outside the county at a cost to the local economy because they are not available for housing or industrial parks or shopping malls.
If I golf in the neighboring city I pay a fee that contributes not just to the maintenance of the course, but to the city's water and sewer lines and its general economic development. But when someone goes hunting or rockhounding in our county, or takes pleasure in its open spaces, there is no user fee to help compensate our small town for its contribution.
Fees that are paid for public lands grazing or mining by mostly out-of-town permittees barely cover the federal government's administration of their profit-making activities. Nothing is left for the communities whose backyards they occupy.
Government grants to rural areas are the nation's way, however awkwardly, of paying back small towns for their contribution to everyone else's profit. They don't begin to cover the real costs of hosting public land, but they are no handout.