Appalachian County Insists It’s Distressed

If Fayette County is doing better these days, Lew Hosler can’t see it from his second-floor office window.

Below is an abandoned, windblown street that bares little resemblance to the Brownsville of Hosler’s youth, when there were four movie theaters, three supermarkets, countless little shops and so many people on Market Street on Saturday nights that there was barely room to stand on the sidewalk in Fayette County’s proud little coal town.

“Now we’ve got absolutely nothing,” said Hosler, business manager at Local 286 of the Construction and General Laborers Union. “You can’t even buy a pair of shoes in Brownsville. It’s all closed up.”

Last fall, the federal Appalachian Regional Commission dropped Fayette from its list of “distressed” counties, saying the number of working people has climbed past the cutoff point for aid.

But instead of welcoming the decision as a sign of recovery, many people in Brownsville are bemoaning it.

“I’m supposed to be thrilled,” said County Commissioner Harry Albert, who has been rallying support to get back on the distressed list, to no avail. “We’re being punished. It’s not like we were wasting the money.”

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Ann Anderson, a commission spokeswoman in Washington, said six counties in the 13-state region lost distressed status for 1997.

To Anderson’s knowledge, Fayette is the only county that ever complained about losing the designation.

Brownsville, a community of about 3,100 people, lost its economic underpinnings when nearby strip mines ran out of coal. Similarly, the surrounding county of 147,000 people saw some of its most lucrative jobs disappear over the decades with the decline of smokestack industries.

During the past three years, Fayette County received a total of about $790,000 from the commission. Improvements financed by that aid have been credited with bringing in one company, Columbia Gas, and 106 jobs.

A fiberboard plant may begin construction in April, employing about 130 people.

Under the government’s formula, Fayette County now has 440 too many employed people to qualify for aid.

At the street level, it’s hard to see that much improvement.

“One look at the community, and you’ll know we’re distressed,” said Norma Ryan, a Brownsville councilwoman. “We don’t have to pretend on that one.”

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Brownsville looks like a graveyard of enterprise with empty storefronts standing beneath signs that serve as the epitaphs of the thriving businesses they once were.

People like Albert, who is based in Uniontown, the county seat, said many of those workers counted by the government are stuck in minimum-wage jobs.

Most of Hosler’s union members must drive several hours to get work.

But such hardships are not taken into account in the three statistical measures used to determine whether a county is distressed.

Per-capita income must be two-thirds the national rate or less. Fayette County, which has an annual budget of $11.7 million, qualified with a per-capita income of $10,798, compared with a national figure of $17,256.

The poverty rate must be 1 1/2 times that of the U.S. rate. Fayette County passed the test with a poverty rate of 20.9%, compared with 13.1 percent for the nation.

The third measure proved troublesome for the county. To be termed distressed, a county must have an unemployment rate equal to 1 1/2 times the three-year national average.

From 1992 to 1994, the years used to calculate the 1997 distressed county list, Fayette County had 9.9% unemployment, compared with a U.S. rate of 6.8%. Fayette County missed by 0.3 percentage points.