The Promises to Coal Country Are Familiar, but Can Biden Deliver?

CUMBERLAND, Ky. — From a porch in Martin County, Ky., in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty. Decades later, President Barack Obama dedicated millions of dollars to work force development projects in Appalachia. President Donald J. Trump even pledged the impossible: a revival of the region’s faltering coal industry.

President Biden is talking big, too, assuring residents that his climate plan will also create well-paying jobs there. But after generations of promises, communities once reliant on coal mining are understandably skeptical. Administration after administration has tried to bring the region sustained prosperity, yet many communities remain on the brink.

In eastern Kentucky, the poverty rate in several counties exceeds 30 percent. Unemployment is among the highest in the nation. And an outward migration over several decades has cut the populations of some counties nearly in half, leaving local governments strapped for tax revenue and struggling to fund essential services.

“Fifty years from now, this could be a ghost town,” said former Gov. Paul E. Patton, an eastern Kentucky native. “That’s my prediction.”

If Mr. Biden is to succeed, local economic experts and historians say, he will need to avoid the pitfalls of even the most serious past efforts at lifting up the region, many of which exacerbated economic gaps and further isolated its poorest communities.

“It was a very uneven process,” said Ronald D. Eller, who wrote one of the defining histories of the Appalachian economy, “Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945.”

Days after taking office, Mr. Biden signed an executive order on climate change that also promised a new focus on economic development in communities that have been reliant on coal mining and power plants. A committee tasked with wrestling with the problem was given 60 days to make a plan. “We’re never going to forget the men and women who dug the coal and built the nation,” the president said. “We’re going to do right by them.”

Without direct federal help, local residents and experts say, people living in those communities could suffer increasingly dire consequences as the nation moves away from coal for good — ending the boom-and-bust cycle that dominated their economies with a final and decisive bust.

Past administrations have “accomplished really important work,” said Peter Hille, the president of Mountain Association, a Kentucky-based nonprofit group focused on community development, “but it has not been fundamentally transforming.”

Near the end of the Obama administration, for example, the federal government poured $38.8 million into two dozen economic and work force development projects, many of them in central Appalachia. It included $7.4 million to create an optometry school in Pikeville, and $2.7 million to help train residents for jobs in information technology.

“What is really going to be needed to move the dial in coal-impacted communities is some order of magnitude larger than that,” Mr. Hille said.

Dotted across the mountains are towns where storefronts are vacant, grocery stores are distant and community schools are boarded up. In rural areas, making a decent living can mean juggling several of the scarce job opportunities that exist. Accessing adequate health care can be even more difficult. Some workers leave the region entirely, sending money back home and visiting on the weekends.

Mr. Eller believes that Mr. Biden has a window for success where other administrations failed — but only if he takes a new approach.

From Mr. Johnson onward, he said, federal administrations have largely followed the same formula: job training programs, the recruitment of outside industry and a model that has consolidated power in the hands of few companies and public officials.

“It’s kind of state-of-the-art economic development from 1947,” Mr. Hille said.

The result has been a wildly uneven distribution of wealth and opportunity that is evident to anybody who strays off the highways or outside the county seats. Some towns, such as Pikeville, are centers of wealth within the region, with a private university, several grocery stores and law offices.

Outlying rural areas have largely been left out.

Federal programs, from the war on poverty to the Obama administration’s cash infusion, “improved the quality of life for many in the middle class,” Mr. Eller said, “but most of your services, your food stores, your health services, and all kinds of things became concentrated in those select growth centers at the expense of those more removed, rural areas.”

More challenging, perhaps, than diagnosing the problems of the past is figuring out what to do next. How should Mr. Biden direct federal investments? How can communities keep young people from leaving the region? How can they balance the cultural interests of Appalachian people with the economic realities of a globalized world?

Local residents largely agree on this: How the new administration follows through on its promise could be a determining factor in whether some of these communities survive at all.

For Thor Campbell, a coal miner in Perry County, his children’s future could be at stake. His daughter is taking classes at a local community college, hoping to be a veterinarian. His son will graduate from high school soon. Both hope to stay close to home, but Mr. Campbell is skeptical.

“As far as not struggling, I don’t see them achieving that if they stay in Perry County,” he said.

Mr. Campbell, 36, said he hoped Mr. Biden would not sideline people like him in his new energy plan. He expects coal mining in his area to dry up completely in the next five years, and for many miners in his age group, there are no clear substitutes.

“I made the choice to be a coal miner,” he said. “I could have probably gone to college and pursued a different career, but I didn’t.”

“I don’t know nothing else,” he added.

Matt Wireman, the county judge executive of Magoffin County, sees considerable potential in his community. The county has a new industrial park, tourism potential and broadband access. With the right nudge from the federal government, he thinks things could turn around.

“I want to see action, I want to see things that are tangible,” Mr. Wireman said. “They can talk and talk and talk. Let’s see things we can see, feel and touch.”

Of course, not everyone is waiting for Washington to come to the rescue, or even thinks it is the best approach. Gwen Johnson, who operates a bakery near Neon, said outside help was often misplaced and the money mishandled. While she would welcome some federal attention, she is wary.

The bakery, she said, shows how local people can better their own communities their own way: providing fresh bread and a place to gather, and offering employment to people recovering from drug addiction.

“I’m just sick and tired of outsiders saying what we need,” Ms. Johnson said. “Don’t plan out what we need thinking you know, because you don’t know.”

Rebecca Shelton, the director of policy and organizing at the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, in Whitesburg, supports a program to employ former miners in the reclaiming of abandoned coal mines. Old mines, if left to lie, can be dangerous for residents living near them and environmentally destructive. As climate change brings more extreme weather, the chances of mudslides, rockslides and other public safety hazards will increase.

The workers are already here, waiting for the call, Ms. Shelton said. The equipment is here. And a safer, cleaner environment could set the region up for success in the long run.

Dan Mosley, the county judge executive of Harlan County, believes that the president should consider tax incentives for people who move to distressed Appalachian counties, a highway extension, and the reduction of red tape for federal grants that fund economic development projects.

“I hope this plan that’s been written isn’t just some promise to get our hopes up here,” he said.

“This region powered our nation through wars, and people have forgotten that,” he added. “These investments are critical to giving people a chance to have a quality of life here.”

Lacy Davidson, who operates a farm and trading post in Wayne, W.Va., with her husband, Park Ferguson, said the administration should also prioritize the region’s cultural heritage, which includes subsistence farming, furniture-making and other skills handed down from the days of homesteaders.

That could come in the form of a tourism campaign, a refocusing of the region’s education system, or a federal program that gives small farmers an edge, Ms. Davidson said.

Others see a broader need. Many in the region voted — twice — for Mr. Trump, some believing that he would bring economic prosperity, others as a form of protest against an establishment and a new economy that left them behind.

Regardless of the motivations, Mr. Trump’s presidency exposed a rift that Mr. Biden will be tasked with mending.

“Investing in these rural, hurting places and providing the resources for people to survive and have a shot of doing well here, I think, is the only way we can start to heal as a country,” said Brandon Dennison, the founder and chief executive of Coalfield Development, a West Virginia-based nonprofit group focused on economic prosperity in Appalachia.

“The rural-urban divide, we’re ripping apart,” he said. “Our cohesion as a country is at stake.”