Meeting Rural Challenges Requires Informed Leaders

Rural Minnesota faces significant challenges in the years ahead and the only way to effectively address them is through an informed and collaborative effort.
Cooperation among local units of government, local businesses and industries, area foundations, economic development groups, and citizens will be fundamental to our future success or failure.
Essential to our success is having information that clearly points out the threats to our quality of life and economic future, identifies their causes, and gives us an idea of what works and what doesn’t.
To aid in rural Minnesota’s efforts, the Center for Rural Policy & Development has chosen five topics to focus on over the next three years. Its work will shape the conversation and development of solutions for rural counties, cities, school districts, and communities.
The five topics it will research are:
- Remaining Resilient in an Aging Rural Minnesota
- The Future of Rural Access to Well-Being
- Funding Local Government in Changing Times
- How to increase civility among and towards our civil servants and public workers.
- The Role of Rural Places and People in a Shifting Energy Infrastructure and the Environment.
“The five themes recommended by staff and selected by CRPD’s Board of Directors reflect the broad array of issues and challenges facing rural communities and build on the important research conducted by the organization over the past two and a half decades,” Julie Tesch, president and CEO of the CRPD, said.
CRPD’s research has led to legislative action to help local governments and inspired local leaders to take innovative actions to support families, businesses, students, and employees. Last week, we wrote about the rural renewable energy development wave headed our way and what it could mean for our landscape, rural residents, farmers, and local governments. This week we take a brief look at the other four areas of its research.

Remaining Resilient in
an Aging Rural Minnesota
Our aging population, the rate of deaths exceeding births in some counties, and the loss of young people to metropolitan areas or other states all create challenges for community growth and prosperity.
“Rural Minnesota is in the midst of the most significant demographic shift in modern history – the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation,” the CRPD said in announcing its research agenda. “With this shift comes many opportunities and challenges that must be addressed in the community and economic development fields.”
CRPD says its research will explore the impacts on staffing senior care facilities, providing care for aging seniors in their communities close to families, and filling the gaps in our labor force left by retiring workers. It will also study the “social and financial infrastructure impacts from shifting demographics.”

The Future of Rural Well-Being
Across America, rural communities are working hard to keep their hospitals open. However, many have closed as the high costs of medicine and the increasingly complex reimbursement systems have made keeping the doors open impossible.
It has also meant selling hospitals or entering into management agreements with regional medical providers. Some of these transactions have benefited local communities, while others have left them at the mercy of boards of directors with no local loyalty.
CRPD says its focus in this area will be on:
- Current and future access to healthcare services
- Sustainability of rural emergency medical services (EMS.)
- And on access to mental health and addiction services.
Providing rural mental health services has been increasingly challenging and costly for counties and school districts. Costs have increased substantially while the number of providers is limited. At the same time, the need for these services has been rising.
EMS and rural fire departments are seeing their current staff aging without enough young people stepping up to fill the gaps.

Funding Local Government
It’s been over 50 years since Minnesota “fundamentally overhauled its philosophy on moving local governments away from property taxes to sales and income taxes in the general fund - called the Minnesota Miracle,” CRPD points out.
However, growing demands placed on them by the state and federal government mandates, law enforcement and mental health service needs, and meeting housing and daycare shortages all have increased the need to raise local taxes.
CRPD plans to study the current funding sources of local governments while looking at their transportation and replacement of aging infrastructure needs.
It will look at the increasing lack of civility and “towards our civil servants and public workers” and the challenges it poses for local leaders.

A New Future for Rural Child Care
CRPD has been a leader in Minnesota in studying the childcare needs of communities and the impact shortages have on the potential rural labor force.
It has studied the shortage of facilities, high costs, burdensome regulations, and low earnings for some who provide home daycare.
“With this additional focus, CRPD aims to provide solution-oriented research on maintaining and increasing childcare capacity in rural Minnesota,” it says. It will focus on efforts around the state to “maintain and increase childcare capacity and state support for childcare initiatives.”
Communities, local governments, schools, and private industry have all stepped in to help meet childcare needs.
CRPD says its focus is now “solution oriented. What is being done throughout rural Minnesota to maintain and increase childcare capacity? How might the state support these efforts?”
Citizen awareness of the importance of the challenges ahead and how they can effectively be addressed is key to gaining local support for measures that will eventually be adopted. Communities that are informed, innovative, and supportive of meeting the challenges ahead will be successful. Those that don’t will continue to fade away.
Reed Anfinson serves on the CRPD board.