A 73-year-old coal miner who was killed on the job in Mingo County becomes the first fatality of 2023.
A 73-year-old coal miner who was killed on the job in Mingo County becomes the first mining fatality of 2023.
William Mapes, a contractor for Central Appalachian Mining, had 53 years of mining experience.
No further details were immediately available on what caused Mapes’ death.
According to the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, 10 coal miners died on the job in 2022 and 10 in 2021. Five died in 2020, the lowest number on record back to 1900.
Coal production collapsed in 2020 with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, then made a modest rebound in 2021 as the economy recovered and demand for energy increased.
Prior to Mapes, the last coal mine fatality in West Virginia was in September in Kanawha County.
The public is invited to tour the Itmann Company store in Wyoming County this weekend. The historic building has been on the market for years after a former politician and Wyoming County native purchased the structure.
The public is invited to tour the Itmann Company store in Wyoming County this weekend. The historic building has been on the market for years after a former politician and Wyoming County native purchased the structure.
The building was coal mine owner Isaac T. Mann’s office and employee hub about 100 years ago. The building was designed by renowned architect Alex B. Mahood and is known for the striking stonework, and rotunda. The building was built from stones hand carved from locally sourced stones.
Despite a few reports of plans to renovate and restore it the building has been vacant and is slowly becoming more dilapidated.
The Wyoming County Historical Society and Foxfire Realty, the company representing the owner, Billy Wayne Bailey, are hosting the event.
Anyone who has an account of the community and company store’s history, is invited to share their stories during the event.
President of the Historical Society, Jim Cook, will produce portraits of folks who share their stories about the store during the event.
The open house begins Saturday Oct. 15. At 10 am. Historians will speak at 11:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m. and 2:30 pm.
The building is currently on the market for $499,000. Courthouse officials say the deed shows it was last purchased for $25,000.
Loretta Lynn, the Kentucky coal miner’s daughter whose frank songs about life and love as a woman in Appalachia pulled her out of poverty and made her a pillar of country music, has died. She was 90.
Loretta Lynn, the Kentucky coal miner’s daughter whose frank songs about life and love as a woman in Appalachia pulled her out of poverty and made her a pillar of country music, has died. She was 90.
In a statement provided to The Associated Press, Lynn’s family said she died Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.
“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4th, in her sleep at home in her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” the family said in a statement. They asked for privacy as they grieve and said a memorial will be announced later.
Lynn already had four children before launching her career in the early 1960s, and her songs reflected her pride in her rural Kentucky background.
As a songwriter, she crafted a persona of a defiantly tough woman, a contrast to the stereotypical image of most female country singers. The Country Music Hall of Famer wrote fearlessly about sex and love, cheating husbands, divorce and birth control and sometimes got in trouble with radio programmers for material from which even rock performers once shied away.
Her biggest hits came in the 1960s and ’70s, including “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” “The Pill,” “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” “Rated X” and “You’re Looking at Country.” She was known for appearing in floor-length, wide gowns with elaborate embroidery or rhinestones, many created by her longtime personal assistant and designer Tim Cobb.
Her honesty and unique place in country music was rewarded. She was the first woman ever named entertainer of the year at the genre’s two major awards shows, first by the Country Music Association in 1972 and then by the Academy of Country Music three years later.
“It was what I wanted to hear and what I knew other women wanted to hear, too,” Lynn told the AP in 2016. “I didn’t write for the men; I wrote for us women. And the men loved it, too.”
In 1969, she released her autobiographical “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” which helped her reach her widest audience yet.
“We were poor but we had love/That’s the one thing Daddy made sure of/He shoveled coal to make a poor man’s dollar,” she sang.
“Coal Miner’s Daughter,” also the title of her 1976 book, was made into a 1980 movie of the same name. Sissy Spacek’s portrayal of Lynn won her an Academy Award and the film was also nominated for best picture.
Long after her commercial peak, Lynn won two Grammys in 2005 for her album “Van Lear Rose,” which featured 13 songs she wrote, including “Portland, Oregon” about a drunken one-night stand. “Van Lear Rose” was a collaboration with rocker Jack White, who produced the album and played the guitar parts.
Born Loretta Webb, the second of eight children, she claimed her birthplace was Butcher Holler, near the coal mining company town of Van Lear in the mountains of east Kentucky. There really wasn’t a Butcher Holler, however. She later told a reporter that she made up the name for the purposes of the song based on the names of the families that lived there.
Her daddy played the banjo, her mama played the guitar and she grew up on the songs of the Carter Family.
“I was singing when I was born, I think,” she told the AP in 2016. “Daddy used to come out on the porch where I would be singing and rocking the babies to sleep. He’d say, ‘Loretta, shut that big mouth. People all over this holler can hear you.’ And I said, ‘Daddy, what difference does it make? They are all my cousins.’”
She wrote in her autobiography that she was 13 when she got married to Oliver “Mooney” Lynn, but the AP later discovered state records that showed she was 15. Tommy Lee Jones played Mooney Lynn in the biopic.
Her husband, whom she called “Doo” or “Doolittle,” urged her to sing professionally and helped promote her early career. With his help, she earned a recording contract with Decca Records, later MCA, and performed on the Grand Ole Opry stage. Lynn wrote her first hit single, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” released in 1960.
She also teamed up with singer Conway Twitty to form one of the most popular duos in country music with hits such as “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” and “After the Fire is Gone,” which earned them a Grammy Award. Their duets, and her single records, were always mainstream country and not crossover or pop-tinged.
The Academy of Country Music chose her as the artist of the decade for the 1970s, and she was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988.
In “Fist City,” Lynn threatens a hair-pulling fistfight if another woman won’t stay away from her man: “I’m here to tell you, gal, to lay off of my man/If you don’t want to go to Fist City.” That strong-willed but traditional country woman reappears in other Lynn songs. In “The Pill,” a song about sex and birth control, Lynn writes about how she’s sick of being trapped at home to take care of babies: “The feelin’ good comes easy now/Since I’ve got the pill,” she sang.
She moved to Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, outside of Nashville, in the 1990s, where she set up a ranch complete with a replica of her childhood home and a museum that is a popular roadside tourist stop. The dresses she was known for wearing are there, too.
Lynn knew that her songs were trailblazing, especially for country music, but she was just writing the truth that so many rural women like her experienced.
“I could see that other women was goin’ through the same thing, ‘cause I worked the clubs. I wasn’t the only one that was livin’ that life and I’m not the only one that’s gonna be livin’ today what I’m writin’,” she told The AP in 1995.
Even into her later years, Lynn never seemed to stop writing, scoring a multi-album deal in 2014 with Legacy Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment. In 2017, she suffered a stroke that forced her to postpone her shows.
She and her husband were married nearly 50 years before he died in 1996. They had six children: Betty, Jack, Ernest and Clara, and then twins Patsy and Peggy. She had 17 grandchildren and four step-grandchildren.
Thirteen grants totaling $1 million have been awarded to promote U.S. mine safety.
The U.S. Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration announced the funding Tuesday through its Brookwood-Sago grant program.
The program was established in 2006 in honor of 25 miners who died in 2001 in Brookwood, Alabama, at the Jim Walter Resources No. 5 mine and in 2006 in Buckhannon, West Virginia, at the Sago Mine.
Among the grants awarded were $140,000 to the University of Arizona in Tucson for the development of app-based training materials, $130,000 to Marshall University Research Corp. in Huntington, for production of a video on safety and emergency preparedness, and $120,000 to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City to provide virtual reality training materials.
Other grant recipients include schools, state agencies and other groups in Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia.
Wyoming traditionally has more coal production than West Virginia. The states are generally one and two nationally. But like the Mountain State, coal production in “Big Wyoming” has been on the decline for more than a decade. Even so, state leaders there are pinning their hopes on carbon capture technology.
The Carbon Valley podcast is a production of Wyoming Public Media.
Wyoming Public Media reporter Cooper McKim produced a nine-part podcast about the efforts in Wyoming. He spoke with Eric Douglas about what he learned.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: Tell me the basis for the podcast to begin with.
McKim: Coal production here has pretty much been on the decline since 2008. And job growth has gone with it. There have been several bankruptcies and the economy here relies on it for a majority of its revenue. Schools rely on it. It’s a little different than West Virginia, in that we get so many perks, basically from the minerals industry, it’s paid for so much, made the quality of life so good. And with that in mind, the primary effort has been keeping it going.
In 2008 there was this idea. A legislator from Gillette, our main coal capital, where all the mining is really happening, thought that carbon emissions, that carbon dioxide was the problem, but that if we could take care of that, maybe coal plants would stop going offline and coal demand would maintain. It didn’t really take off, because that recognizes climate change.
I wanted to take that idea, and just really explore how the idea of carbon capture took hold, because there’s this parallel of climate technology and keeping fossil fuels going. They seem like they’re going against each other, but they’re really not.
Douglas: It sounds like there was actually a program set up to encourage carbon capture projects. Was that funded by the state itself? Or where did that come from?
McKim: So there have been a bunch of different investments into carbon capture. And the main one was the integrated test center, which was basically a facility set up next to a coal plant here. And then they started a competition to be the first patent. The basis for the podcast was saying, let’s get a bunch of international companies to come to Wyoming and show that we can do this, to show that this is possible.
The investment was really into this facility. It was, I think, around $15 million. But there was also money from several utilities that went into it. And it was going to reward whoever produced the best technology. Carbon capture itself is trillions of dollars away from commercial viability.
Douglas: But it wasn’t just capturing the carbon emissions, it was trying to develop a system to capture the carbon emissions and then use the carbon as a byproduct as well. So you were trying to cut down on emissions, but also find a use for the material.
McKim: Yeah, so Gov. Matt Mead, the governor before our current one, had the idea that carbon capture and sequestration is great, but you’re just putting it underground. What are you doing with it? These things are expensive, so offsetting the cost by creating a different profit from another resource that it’s producing. Carbon capture utilization is sort of a sub industry of carbon capture. And that’s not trillions, but probably billions away from commercial viability. The only areas that it’s really working in right now is producing concrete from it and some are trying to produce sort of a renewable gas.
Douglas: So what did you find? What was the final result?
McKim: So what I found is that carbon capture is very different from how carbon capture helps coal. This industry itself could do very well and potentially affect net zero emissions. But the timeline for that is just different from the timeline for coal demand. That’s already been going down really fast. In Appalachia, it happened even sooner than it is here.
The reality is that things are moving really, really fast. And carbon capture is moving really, really slow. And so what this sort of exemplified is, we may not have enough time, and other people in the state want to look elsewhere to economically diversify in a way that is safer, is potentially a little bit broader, provides near term solutions, because it’s not providing jobs right now. Hundreds of people have lost their jobs in coal bankruptcies in the past few years. And there aren’t jobs being replaced by carbon capture yet. So the timelines are just off.
Douglas: What was your big takeaway at the end of the podcast?
McKim: Economic diversification can’t really be replaced by one industry. Whether or not you keep something going, it’s going to have to be larger than one industry. What I found is that there are other people who want to not just keep coal demand going, but diversify a little bit beyond that. And that’s not to say there aren’t efforts but the primary effort is to transform the city into a Silicon Valley for carbon products, whether that’s carbon dioxide or coal directly itself. And I think that’s going to be the primary effort and what I think I sort of found in the podcast is.
Douglas: What did you learn during the podcast that we haven’t touched on?
McKim: The podcast is actually very humorous. It follows a competition that involves an underdog doing carbon capture. We sort of build a friendship throughout the show. It talks about the grief of losing coal and coal plants. I lost my dad while reporting the story. And so I talked about that. There’s a lot of sentimentality and humor, and it tries to sort of get at this in a way that is not boring. So hopefully, it’s an interesting story. And I think there are a lot of parallels with West Virginia. So I hope that some of your audience might find it compelling.
The podcast Carbon Valley looks at carbon sequestration and alternative uses for carbon.
Standing at the site of a long-abandoned, multimillion dollar industrial park in November 2016, U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers urged residents in southeastern Kentucky’s Bell County to envision the tourism potential for miles of open land.
Joined by Matt Bevin, then Kentucky’s governor, and local politicians, Rogers pointed to the expanse of forestlands and mountaintops in the distance as he unveiled a $12.5 million federal grant for the Appalachian Wildlife Center. Rogers, a Republican who represents the state’s Appalachian region, had helped secure the money through the Abandoned Mine Land Pilot Program, a federal initiative designed to foster economic development around former coal mine sites in Kentucky and other states.
The proposed state-of-the-art facility would include a museum and local artisan market where visitors could learn about nature. The center’s biggest attraction: the elk that roam the area.
“Let me assure you this is a worthy project that we are investing in,” Rogers said during the gathering. “The Appalachian Wildlife Center has the potential to transform tourism in our region. There is no place in the country with a better story than eastern Kentucky.”
Nearly four years after the announcement, and three years after the wildlife center was first supposed to be completed, the land is still largely untouched except for a few pens to hold elk and some water utility construction. The projected infusion of hundreds of thousands of tourists has not materialized. And Bell County residents, a third of whom live in poverty and fewer than 1 in 10 of whom have a college degree, are still waiting for an influx of jobs from yet another effort promising to help the area recover from the decline of the coal industry.
The AML Pilot Program, created in 2015, is among the latest efforts that pledged to change the fate of eastern Kentucky. State and federal leaders have directed hundreds of millions of dollars to the region over the past 50 years as part of multiple economic revitalization efforts.
Those investments have resulted in some improvements, including new hospitals and other health care facilities, job-training programs, and some businesses that have come and stayed. But many projects haven’t lived up to expectations, leaving residents waiting for an economic lifeboat that never seems to arrive.
Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica
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Downtown Pineville, Kentucky, a small town in Bell County near the future site of the Appalachian Wildlife Center.
Since its inception, the AML Pilot Program has awarded $105 million to 43 projects in the state with little vetting. Some projects like the wildlife center have taken far longer to complete than promised, with no consequences. And lofty projections for job creation, visitation and tourism revenue made by the wildlife center and other projects went largely unchallenged by the state, the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica found.
An industrial park in Martin County was awarded $3.37 million in September 2019 even after a consultant warned that the project had “fatal flaws,” including its location near a federal prison. Two other industrial parks that received funding have already lost, or are at risk of losing, major businesses after pledging large numbers of jobs and related economic growth.
And a $2.5 million grant to Harlan Wood Products LLC in 2016 was tabled after the company was unable to obtain additional private funding. The Harlan County business, which is now dissolved according to the Kentucky secretary of state’s office, had planned to produce wood pellets for biomass fuel, employ up to 35 people and create about 60 indirect jobs.
For the wildlife center, pledges of economic turnaround soared even as the projected opening date was repeatedly delayed. The center is now expected to open in June 2022, according to the Appalachian Wildlife Foundation, the nonprofit organization that is responsible for its construction.
“We’re actually building it. Nobody’s ever done anything for tourism like we’re doing,” said David Ledford, president and CEO of the nonprofit foundation. He said project delays have been primarily due to construction challenges on the reclaimed mine site and a request by federal authorities for an additional environmental assessment. The coronavirus pandemic also has pushed back construction, according to recent reports submitted to the state by the foundation.
The federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, which oversees the distribution of AML Pilot Program funding to states, did not respond to a request for details about its application review process. But three officials familiar with the process, who aren’t authorized to speak publicly, told KyCIR and ProPublica that the agency does no independent scrutiny of grant applicants’ claims.
Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica
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A pawnshop window in downtown Pineville.
State officials also could not provide KyCIR and ProPublica with records showing that they verified the tourism and job projections. In fact, a committee appointed by the state Energy and Environment Cabinet secretary has helped to dole out millions in taxpayer dollars without maintaining any records of discussions or votes, as required for public bodies, KyCIR and ProPublica found.
The committee, which helps determine how the program’s federal tax dollars are spent, is not required to comply with state transparency laws, according to state officials who argue that it is not a public agency because it serves in an advisory capacity to the cabinet secretary.
State and local programs across the country that offer incentives for economic development repeatedly come under scrutiny for failing to achieve job creation and revenue benchmarks.
The AML Pilot Program falls within a gray area that sometimes escapes deeper examination.
The federal government has gradually given states more decision-making authority over grant distribution and oversight, said Brett Theodos, a senior fellow and director of the community economic development hub at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.
But the AML Pilot Program stands out because the federal agency responsible for distributing the funds does not appear to have provided clear parameters and measurements for success, he said.
“The lack of expert decision-making, public meetings or outcome tracking makes (the AML Pilot Program) open for abuse,” Theodos said.
Disney-like Experience
The announcement on building the wildlife center came nearly two decades after the failure of an industrial park project on the same site.
The state spent more than $10 million to buy the land, build a bridge over the Cumberland River and run a three-lane, paved road up to the mountaintop, where the industrial park would be located.
But no industry came. The park sat empty for more than a decade.
Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica
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This sign is all that remains of a proposed industrial park. Nearly two decades later, the Appalachian Wildlife Center would choose to build on the same site.
Then, in 2014, Ledford announced plans to construct the Appalachian Wildlife Center. At the time, Ledford said he was considering five counties as potential locations for the center, which would be funded solely through private donations.
The following year, Ledford chose Bell County.
Ledford said in 2015 that the project, which would encompass 12,000 adjoining acres, would draw 580,000 visitors and generate more than $113 million for the region in its fifth year in operation. “We will not seek any government funding for the project. It will be funded thru private donations,” Ledford said in a news release that projected a 2017 completion date.
After three years of operating at a net loss, the Appalachian Wildlife Foundation sought to bolster funds for the center by seeking an AML Pilot Program grant.
In an application filed in 2016 by the county, the foundation offered more ambitious tourism numbers than it had a year earlier. Not only would the center draw 638,000 visitors in its fifth year in operation, it would spur the creation of more than 2,000 jobs in the region.
Ledford did not respond to a request to explain why he sought government funding after vowing not to do so. He has said that the state and federal governments vetted the economic projections.
But hundreds of pages of federal and state documents related to the Appalachian Wildlife Center project show no indication of any independent assessment or critical vetting by the state or the federal government of the tourism and job creation projections. At least three federal documents, including a 2019 report, repeat almost verbatim the project application’s claims for visitation, job creation and revenue generation.
In 2019, foundation leaders estimated that the center would open in June 2021. By its third year, it would make $8.5 million after operating expenses, they said. The projection was based on new estimates of 850,000 visitors annually, starting in its third year, and average per visitor spending of $44 on admission fees, food and gift shop items.
“We’re going to build a first-class tourism destination and we’re going to deliver a Disney-like experience,” Frank Allen, a foundation board member, said during a presentation last year. “I know it sounds ambitious and it is but, bear with me, at one point so was Disney World. Ultimately, all you need is a great plan and a lot of money. We’ve got the plan and most of the money.”
A screenshot of Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin’s Facebook post in 2016 announcing the Abandoned Mine Land Pilot Program grant for the Appalachian Wildlife Center and showing the proposed rendering.
Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica
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Four years later, the future site of the visitor center still lies empty.
The Appalachian Wildlife Foundation’s tourism projections exceeded by nearly 300,000 the number of visitors last year to western Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park, one of the region’s leading tourist attractions and home to the longest-known cave system in the world.
Ledford said the projections stem in part from his belief that the wildlife center will generate more visitors and revenue than the Keystone Elk Country Alliance in northwest Pennsylvania, which was created in 2009. The facility attracts more than 481,000 people annually, according to its website.
The wildlife center hopes to capitalize on tourists traveling to other destinations, including resorts such as Pigeon Forge, a mountain town two hours away in eastern Tennessee that is home to Dollywood, and Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, which is a seven-hour drive from Bell County. About 94% of the center’s visitors would be from outside the state, according to the foundation’s estimates.
“Our visitors are not going to spend three or four days here,” Ledford said in an interview. “It’s not the end destination. It’s a stop on the way to someplace.”
Jeffrey Larkin, an Indiana University of Pennsylvania professor who teaches ecology and conservation, is skeptical that the wildlife center will be able to live up to its projections.
Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica
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An elk pen at the future site of the Appalachian Wildlife Center in Bell County, Kentucky.
“I would say that the challenges that lie before the Kentucky facility would be, ‘If you build it, would they come?’” said Larkin, who received his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Kentucky and who once conducted fall elk tours in the Appalachian area of the state. “It’s in a part of Kentucky that’s not often visited by a lot of people.”
A New Program, Another Promise
Nestled in the southeastern corner of the state at the juncture with Virginia and Tennessee, the land that would become Bell and Harlan counties was cemented in the region’s history when frontiersman Daniel Boone blazed a trail through the Cumberland Gap in 1775.
The counties also reflect in many ways the Appalachian region of which they are a part: They are breathtakingly beautiful, largely rural, overwhelmingly white and significantly poor.
The remote counties, among 38 deemed economically distressed in eastern Kentucky, have long wrestled with high poverty and unemployment rates. But a struggling coal industry hastened economic contractions for rural communities in Appalachia.
In the past decade, coal production in the state’s Appalachian region dropped from 67 million tons to 13.6 million, forcing the elimination of most mining-related jobs, which plummeted from 13,000 in 2010 to 3,400 in 2019.
“Coal’s hold over eastern Kentucky has long dampened creativity, long-term planning, alternative economic development, the ability to think in terms of the public good rather than personal gain and adequate taxes with which to support public infrastructure and services,” said Ronald D. Eller, former director of the Appalachian Center at the University of Kentucky and a retired history professor.
Rogers, the politician who earned the nickname “Prince of Pork” because of his success earmarking funding for his district, has been at the center of many of the infusions of federal dollars for the region he represents. In June 2015, he chaired the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, which pushed for the AML Pilot Program as part of the U.S. Department of the Interior and Environment Appropriations Bill.
Lawmakers created a new pot of money, setting aside $90 million in 2016 to create new job opportunities and stimulate the economies of Kentucky, Pennsylvania and West Virginia by developing reclaimed mine sites. The program later expanded to include three additional states and three Native American tribes.
The federal government distributes the money but allows state officials to develop their own criteria for selecting the projects and monitoring their progress.
“This is a thoughtful alternative to help hard-hit communities reinvigorate their economies by using abandoned mine land to develop hospitals, community centers and much more,” Rogers said in a June 2015 news release after his committee’s approval.
Rogers has since promoted the program as a key economic driver in Appalachia. In a 2018 news release, he called it “one of the most successful job creation and tourism initiatives that we’ve ever had in Eastern Kentucky.” At the time, none of the projects had been completed.
Rogers defended the money spent on various projects that have drawn limited results.
“There isn’t a silver bullet that can lift our region out of generational poverty, and none of our local officials who have applied for an AML grant believes that one project in an industrial park or an exciting new tourism project will lift their county out of poverty,” Rogers said in an email.
Kentucky officials acknowledge that the state’s oversight of the projects focuses on planning and construction, not on expectations for economic development. Once construction is complete, state oversight largely ends, leaving no consistent accountability system for measuring whether the investments drew promised economic changes to the area.
Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica
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A coal miner’s flag hangs in the front yard of a home in Middlesboro, Kentucky.
John Mura, a spokesman for the state Energy and Environment Cabinet, said the administration of Gov. Andy Beshear is committed to helping to improve the economy in coal communities and considers the AML Pilot Program an effective tool.
While agreements with grantees do not clearly articulate oversight responsibilities once projects are completed, Mura said the cabinet “may require that the grantee continue to submit an annual report on various metrics such as job creation.”
“This program has brought a good measure of economic vitality to eastern Kentucky in the past four years and there is every expectation that under the Beshear administration, it will continue to produce new jobs and new economic vitality in this part of the state,” Mura said in an email. He did not respond to questions about which circumstances might trigger the request for annual reports.
Mura pointed to two projects that he said have led to an additional 44 jobs in eastern Kentucky.
Dajcor Aluminum, a business operating in the Coal Fields Regional Industrial Park in Perry County, has hired 31 employees since the county received a $6.5 million AML Pilot Program grant in 2018 to buy equipment for the company. SilverLiner, a tanker truck manufacturing company, also has hired 13 employees, Mura said. The company is located in Pike County, in the Kentucky Enterprise Industrial Park, which received a $5 million AML Pilot Program grant in 2016.
James P. Ziliak, an economics professor at the University of Kentucky, said the eastern part of the state could be in worse shape without government investments such as the AML Pilot Program. But he worries about the lack of a broader strategy.
“It’s kind of a failure of economic development policy,” Ziliak said. “A lot has been spent, but has it been spent in the right places? And there have been a lot of empty promises over the years.”
Banking on Tourism
The Appalachian Wildlife Center is not the only tourism project in eastern Kentucky banking on big promises to uplift the region.
A Letcher County nonprofit, the EKY Heritage Foundation Inc., was awarded two AML Pilot Program grants totaling nearly $3.5 million in 2018 and 2019 after promising to transform more than 100 acres of “stagnant land” into Thunder Mountain, a “world-class” sport-shooting and archery resort park. The park would draw an estimated 40,000 annual visitors, according to the nonprofit’s application.
The completed project would employ 40 to 50 people and include shooting ranges, campgrounds with cabins, an amphitheater and a training site for law enforcement and the military.
The application offers no supporting evidence that Thunder Mountain could attract the number of tourists it projects. And while the application asserts that Thunder Mountain would be a “valuable resource” for personnel at a federal prison to be built in Letcher County, plans for construction of the prison were shelved last year.
Missy Matthews, president of Childers Oil Co. and of Double Kwik, a chain of more than 40 convenience stores and gas stations in the southeastern Kentucky region, formed the nonprofit that proposed the project. She did not respond to interview requests.
State Rep. Angie Hatton of Whitesburg, an EKY Heritage Foundation board member, declined to discuss claims for the project in detail. She provided a statement that she attributed to Sally Oakes, a Childers Oil Co. employee who served as the foundation’s grant writer.
“The estimates in the grant application are based on various sources of information including reports, journals and magazines as well as communications with other owners/operators of shooting ranges,” the statement said. Oakes could not be reached for comment.
About 130 miles northeast of the proposed site for Thunder Mountain, another tourism-related project, in eastern Kentucky’s Boyd County, received a $4 million AML Pilot Program grant after pledging to double the number of visitors for an existing off-road park.
The grant, awarded in 2017 to Boyd County government, would assist with water, sewer and road improvements intended to primarily benefit Rush Off-Road, a for-profit business owned by E.B. Lowman III, who also is president of a real estate company in eastern Kentucky.
In its application, Boyd County government officials said the improvements would help the park increase to 100,000 the number of visitors. It did not provide a timetable for the increase and offered no evidence or documentation to support the claim.
Project documents cite, but do not include, a market research study by Marshall University in West Virginia, which Lowman said found that the park had a $5 million-plus economic impact on the county in 2017. Lowman declined to provide KyCIR and ProPublica with a copy of the study, and university officials said they were unable to find one.
Boyd County officials did not respond to repeated requests from KyCIR and ProPublica to discuss the project. Federal and state officials did not reply to specific questions about the project.
Shawna McCown said she struggles to understand how the four-wheelers roaring by her house in Rush, Kentucky, will help her or her neighbors.
“They’re saying it’s going to help the community, but we don’t see any benefit for us at all,” McCown, a schoolteacher, said of the project. “How does that help me? I want a community center, a library.”
Residents Left Waiting
Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica
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Cynthia Gooch and her niece in an unfinished park in Pineville. Pineville and other towns in Bell County have struggled with unemployment and poverty.
By now, the Appalachian Wildlife Center, which has rebranded itself as Boone’s Ridge, was supposed to be pumping millions of dollars into Bell County. It was expected to have created more than 1,000 direct and indirect jobs in the region, as many as the county’s two largest employers combined: Smithfield Foods, which produces a variety of hams and smoked meats with 500 workers, and the Bell County school system, which has about 430 employees.
Instead, a countdown clock on the project’s website winds down to the most recent opening date: 593 days away.
Meanwhile, Rome Meade, a 26-year-old who lives in the area, has for six months hunted for a full-time job without success.
“I believe it’s gonna turn around,” Meade said. “At least I hope so.”
He’s better off than some. He draws a salary as pastor of the Winchester Avenue Church of God in Middlesboro. And he, his wife and their two young children live rent-free in the church parsonage.
Meade makes too much money to qualify for food stamps or most other government benefits, except for health care.
“I want a job. I’ve always worked, but I can’t get no help,” Meade said.
Meade wishes the government would focus more on helping create well-paying positions that will allow him to stay in the area and not “on things that don’t matter, like an industrial park.”
“All of the tax dollars are going for things that people see no benefit to,” Meade said. “They’re getting frustrated. People are bustin’ their tails, trying to make a living for their families.”
R.G. Dunlop is an investigative reporter for the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. His work has exposed government corruption and resulted in numerous reforms. Email him at RDunlop@louisvillepublicmedia.org and follow him on Twitter at @rgdunlopjr.
This story was produced in partnership with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power, and the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.
