APPALACHIAN ABSENTEE LANDLORDS

Egerton, John

They met in a rented revival tent on a mountaintop meadow— close to 300 frustrated individuals with divergent interests but one common determination: to change once and for all the continuing...

...Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, was chosen to handle administrative and fiscal details, and also to stimulate scholarly interest on campuses throughout the region...
...payments in lieu of taxes by Federal and state governments for the more than two million acres they held in the eighty counties ranged from about seventy-five cents per acre to zero...
...Within two months, the Tug Valley group and others in a loose-knit alliance of Appalachian social action organizations met at the Highlander Research and Education Center in the mountains of East Tennessee and formed several task forces to study a variety of regional problems in the wake of the floods...
...They met in a rented revival tent on a mountaintop meadow— close to 300 frustrated individuals with divergent interests but one common determination: to change once and for all the continuing pattern of exploitation that had kept Appala-chia in a perpetual state of poverty and dependency for almost a century...
...There, a newly formed organization, armed with the land study findings, is planning legal action against both the Norfolk and Western Railway and the state of Kentucky— and both the county tax assessor and the local newspaper have given encouragement and support to the group...
...in others, mineral rights are held separately...
...now, with the ARC fighting for its life against the Reagan Administration's budget-cutters, the radical implications of the report are being attacked by corporate and governmental officials who benefit most from prevailing property patterns in the region...
...The project was complicated by many problems...
...The outcome was that ARC decided not to conduct its own research, but instead to make grants totaling $130,000 to the Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force for a comprehensive, two-year study of land and mineral ownership in the region...
...But the documentation of land ownership and taxation in county after county establishes for the first time the pervasive pattern of inequity, and this factual information should provide the basis for long-needed changes...
...No matter how the ARC handles the politically troublesome fact that it sponsored the Appalachian land study—or how it weathers its deeper problems with the Reagan Administration-—the study itself is now a public document, and its potential impact is enormous, not just in Appalachia and Washington but in corporate boardrooms from Louisville to London...
...f The takeover of Appalachian mineral resources by multinational energy conglomerates is spreading beyond the central mountains into adjacent regions, and with the expansion are coming new forms of mineral exploration, greater threats to the environment, more strain on public services, and a continuing decline in local citizens' control over their communities and their lives...
...As the group was struggling to make the most effective use of limited resources, the Federal Government's Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) announced plans to conduct a limited rural land study of its own—the first such inquiry in its fifteen-year history...
...Absentee corporations have dominated Campbell County and many of the other Appalachian counties of Tennessee since the turn of the century...
...Finding the answer to that question in eighty mountain counties is sure to stimulate similar research in other parts of the region, and perhaps in other sections of rural America as well...
...In spite of these problems, the exhaustive survey produced solid information on every major property owner in the unincorporated sections of the eighty counties...
...The plans for that study prompted strong critical reaction from task force members, who spoke out at an ARC committee meeting in Washington...
...40 per cent of the land and 70 per cent of the mineral rights in the survey are corporation-owned, and forty-six of the top fifty private owners are corporations...
...They recorded all absentee, corporate, and government holdings of more,than twenty acres and all parcels of 250 acres or more held by local individuals...
...that policies be designed to mitigate the adverse effects of present ownership patterns, and that steps be taken to prevent the rapid and continuing loss of local land for local use...
...In spite of some showcase parks and resort areas, Campbell County is in fact a plagued jurisdiction—its schools, housing, highways, public services, job opportunities, and atmospheric conditions are uniformly poor...
...The Highlander Center was made the coordinating group for the entire study, and training sessions for researchers were held there...
...What the people of the region have always known in a general way about their land, they have now documented in specific and overwhelming detail...
...Undetained by taxation, money flows quickly out of the coal counties of Appalachia...
...1f Property taxes on large land and mineral holdings in the region are grossly inadequate, in some cases even nonexistent: More than 75 per cent of the mineral owners in the survey paid an annual tax of less than twenty-five cents per acre...
...For more than a decade, aciti-mi zens' group known as Save Our M. Cumberland Mountains (SOCM) has been pushing for social reform in the coalfields of east Tennessee...
...Social reform arising out of adult education and local initiative has been Highlander's trademark since it began almost fifty years ago...
...In addition, more than 100 socio-economic indicators for the eighty counties were programmed by computer to show correlations with various ownership patterns...
...Five Federal agencies and two state governments own more than two million acres in the counties included in the survey...
...it was basic to all the others, the seminal problem from which all the region's problems flowed...
...The magnitude of the study and the volume of data it yielded dwarf all previous efforts to document and analyze rural land holdings in Appalachia...
...1f Appalachian land and minerals are absentee-owned...
...This is one more example of people in the region seeing a need and doing something about it...
...For far less money than an outside consulting firm would have charged, the ARC has gotten an academically sound study that is also practical and useful—and it will be used, because the same people who needed the information and went looking for it are now ready to apply the findings in their home communities...
...The overwhelming control of Appalachian property by a handful of powerful and largely unaccountable landlords is shown to be directly related to severe housing shortages, crippling flood damage, critically inadequate public services (schools, roads, water and sewer systems), the heavy loss of farmlands, restricted economic development, the worst aspects of tourist and recreation promotion, and the accelerating exploitation of minerals and natural resources for energy development...
...the top twenty corporate and individual landlords combined claimed a similar amount...
...Absentee corporations, individuals, institutions, and government agencies control the wealth and the destiny of Appalachia to an extent beyond the imagination of virtually all Americans except the remnant of native people whose ancestors saw the entire continent seized by Europeans...
...Millions of acres of mineral rights in the region are not recorded at all for tax purposes...
...It is a result of local people seeing a need for information and devising a plan to get it...
...This is first and foremost a citizen-based survey," Horton said...
...John Gaventa of the Highlander staff, who heads the task force on land ownership and is co-author (with sociologist Bill Horton) of the research report, acknowledges that the findings of the study were not unexpected...
...More than 80 per cent of Swain County, North Carolina, is government-owned, and 20 per cent or more of eight other counties in four states is also held by public agencies...
...They were the ones who recognized that every problem Appalachia has—mine safety, black lung, strip mining, pollution, the decline of farming, floods, substandard housing, welfare, every single problem—can ultimately be traced back to the question of who owns the land...
...We want to organize people around the issue of tax reform, of equalizing taxes—and for the first time, we've got the facts and information we need to make our case, not just here in this county but all over Appalachia...
...No one who has lived for any time in Appalachia," he said, "can be surprised to hear that a handful of absentee corporations control huge portions of the region's land and minerals and pay a pittance in local taxes...
...The quality of life here has steadily diminished—and more and more, the big companies have been pushing the people out of their way...
...H Large corporations dominate the ownership picture...
...What the rest of us have occasionally seen through a glass darkly, we can now see spelled out with unmistakable and irrefutable clarity...
...In Mingo County, West Virginia, where the rampaging Tug River drove half the population from their homes, angry citizens had formed a group to monitor flood relief operations and to determine the extent to which strip mining had worsened the effect of the flood...
...They have discovered what the people knew instinctively, but their findings have usually been carefully couched in unthreatening terms, and have had all the impact of falling stars...
...In county after county, the study shows, money goes into passthrough accounts where it does not linger...
...almost three-fourths of the surface acres and four-fifths of the mineral acres in the survey were owned by individuals or groups from outside the counties in which their property is located...
...The land study gives us more to work with than we've ever had...
...Whenever efforts have been made in the past to bring about social and economic reforms in Appalachia, dissension among groups within the region has often diverted attention from the absentee landowners...
...Charles Winfrey, the organization's senior staff member and the author of the Tennessee volume in the Appalachian Land Ownership Study, speaks forcefully of that relationship: "As far as we're concerned, land is the issue...
...The major owners of the region's surface and subterranean wealth, its John Egerton, a frequent contributor to The Progressive, is a free-lance writer in Nashville...
...One of the task forces concentrated on land ownership...
...Beginning in the spring of 1979, the task force set up working groups in six states—West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama—and chose about a dozen counties in each of the states for special concentration...
...The greater the absentee ownership, the less of the money generated by coal production remains in the counties giving up their resource wealth...
...They had been brought together by the 1977 spring floods that had caused unprecedented havoc and hardship in the region...
...In Martin County, Kentucky, for instance, a subsidiary of the Norfolk and Western Railway owns one-third of the surface and more than half of the be-low-surface rights, but the company pays an annual property tax to the county of only thirteen cents per acre— hardly enough to buy one bus for the county school system, which is one of the poorest in an educationally poor state...
...Martin County, Kentucky, is a prime example...
...We've got to reverse that trend...
...Eventually, the Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force became the primary focus of the entire Appalachian Alliance, and more than 100 activists, scholars, and interested individuals took part in its activities...
...An estimated one-third of the farm land in the surveyed counties was taken out of agricultural production during the 1970s, and about half of the farmers in those counties quit farming...
...In Campbell County, where SOCM is headquartered, a single company—the Koppers Corporation of Pittsburgh—owns nearly 100,000 acres, one-third of the surface total...
...Here are some of the major conclusions drawn by the task force: H The ownership of land and minerals in Appalachia is highly concentrated in the hands of a few...
...it may, in fact, be the largest rural land study ever undertaken anywhere in the nation...
...And in the same county, Harvard University, the largest private, non-profit owner of mineral rights in Appalachia, owns 9,720 acres of oil and gas rights and pays no tax at all on them...
...People who see problems first-hand know best how to deal with them," he says...
...There's a lot of truth to the notion that Appalachia has been an economic colony of the big corporations and absentee owners, but it would be suicidal for us to take such a position when our very existence is in jeopardy...
...Some of the field researchers in the land ownership study say the project could never have been completed without Highlander's organizing skills, but Mike Clark, the research center's director, turns the credit back to the people...
...As the months passed, the members of that group came slowly to the conviction that land was more than just a single issue among many...
...During the remainder of 1979, the researchers pored over tax rolls and deed books in eighty selected counties to determine the primary owners of land and minerals...
...From this extensive effort came a vast body of information on more than 55,000 parcels of land and minerals representing some twenty million acres...
...In every case, such payments as are made in lieu of taxes fall short of the rates paid by private owners of adjacent lands...
...ARC officials have avoided public comment on the study as much as possible...
...From a political standpoint, the land study could not have come at a worse time for the Appalachian Regional Commission...
...Finally, nineteen of the counties were singled out for detailed case studies based on public records and personal interviews...
...Funding this effort was a very courageous and progressive thing for the agency to do," one highly placed source said privately...
...The 1,800 pages of raw data and analysis in the land study go far beyond the tabulations of property ownership and taxation to show how those factors are closely related to virtually every major problem facing the region...
...The reforms being sought appear to follow closely the general recommendations of the land ownership study: that ways be found to assure people of the region "more access to, control over, and benefit from the land and its resources...
...What they have now produced is a study, released this spring, which documents in specific and overwhelming detail what the people of the region have always known in a general way: that they are not poor by accident...
...Repeatedly, the report focuses not just on the patterns of ownership and taxation but also on the impact and consequences of those patterns...
...the average tax paid on surface holdings was only ninety cents per acre...
...Local investment by coal companies tends to take the form of temporary facilities and movable equipment...
...The Appalachian Land Ownership Study portrays a land-locked colony owned in large measure by a handful of absentee corporations and individuals whose interests have been favorably served by government officials at local, state, and Federal levels...
...in still others, there may be one owner of a surface parcel, another claiming the coal beneath it, and still another holding the gas or oil rights...
...One other result of the survey is already apparent: In several of the counties where land ownership has now been documented by the study, residents have initiated legal and political drives for tax reform and other measures to make large property-holders more responsible for their holdings...
...although the twenty million acres in the survey were held by 30,000 different owners, more than 40 per cent of the total—some eight million acres—was claimed by only fifty private owners and ten government agencies...
...The Appalachian Land Ownership Study is different: more comprehensive, more authoritative, more pertinent, more powerful...
...SOCM has been around long enough to identify Campbell County's major problems, and to see their direct relationship to the control of land...
...In some cases, surface acres and the underlying minerals are combined in one deed...
...Gaventa and Horton, working from the office of the Highlander Center, were determined from the start to involve people from the region—new and old activist groups, Appalachian scholars, unaffiliated individuals—in designing and conducting the study...
...The task force that has documented this colonial pattern in a monumental seven-volume, 1,800-page study started its work with a stroke of good luck...
...Appalachians absenteelandlords Aground-breakingstudyshows the causes of poverty inthemountains JohnEgerton forests and its coal, pay such a piddling tax sum on their holdings that local governments and the Appalachian people are chronically impoverished...
...Now, in a number of counties, local citizens' groups are pressing for tax reform with the unaccustomed support of county officials, the press, and even rival political parties...
...The populist nature of the study was controversial even when the agency first decided to fund it during the Carter Administration...
...Appalachia has been studied to death by academicians, consultants, experts...
...The longer they have stayed, the more wealth they have hauled away, and the less responsible they have been...

Vol. 45 • June 1981 • No. 6


 
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