Opioid addiction and suicide are much more common.
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Wages tend to be lower and health care harder to find. Rural communities do have their own pressing needs. "If you ask me would I rather see the money go for our water plant, or to possibly try to control our borders and the security of our nation, the security of our nation is more important to me," Fink says. That's just a fact of life, but to get things back into balance," says Jim Fritch, who works at Clark's Farm and Home Store. Somebody's going to get cut, somebody's going to bleed a little bit. That's just a fact of life, but to get things back into balance.īut for all the anger and anxiety over possible budget cuts in policy circles, in Strong City, quite a few people actually embrace those cuts. Tom Vilsack, secretary of agriculture under President Obama, says the Trump administration is packed with urban political operatives and needs an advocate for rural communities "so that someone is pounding the table, as I had to when I was secretary of agriculture, to make sure that people understood how things would impact and affect rural Americans." If passed as-is, the budget would kill programs that train workers, back small town startups and help pay for roads, sewers and broadband in some of the nation's poorest counties. "The more remote you are and the more rural you are, the worse you're going to have it, as a result." "Bewildering might be the best way to describe it," Hladik says. Many of the proposed budget cuts would hit places where Trump got lots of votes: isolated, rural communities, says Johnathan Hladik, who heads the Center for Rural Affairs in Nebraska. People couldn't afford for us to do it," says Larry Sigler, who works at the plant. More than $2.7 million in federal grants made it possible. The treatment plant is paid for, and it started operation about a year ago. It serves only about 500 homes and businesses.Īround the Nation Tired Of Promises, A Struggling Small Town Wants Problems Solved Strong City banded together with Cottonwood Falls, the town next door, to build a $6 million water treatment system.
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"Water's very important and a lot of people don't realize it until they don't have it," she says. DeWitt says the plant was built 40 years ago inside the town's abandoned high school, but the plant kept breaking down. Shari DeWitt, the city clerk, says a couple of years ago, even its water treatment plant was dying. Trump's proposed budget aims at killing the program that threw a lifeline to the town's water system. Strong City is a former railroad town of about 460 people, less than half the size it was in 1890.
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#Jim fink fact check full
Some of President Trump's proposed spending cuts would cripple programs that benefit communities full of his rural supporters, but at least in Strong City, Kan., some say they are ready "to bleed a little bit." A new water tank in Strong City, Kan., (at right) sits next to one that was part of an old leaky system on a hill just outside the city limits.