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Legg sees vital role for utility co-ops in rural America's future

Rural Cooperatives - September 1, 2002

Hilda Gay Legg, Administrator of USDA Rural Development's Rural Utilities Service (RUS), has worked in a number of capacities to promote development in rural areas. A native of rural Adair County, Ky., she served as executive director and CEO of the Center for Rural Development in Somerset, Ky., from 1994 until her appointment as RUS administrator in October 2001. In that position, she helped develop and implement a broadband telecommunications program in rural communities throughout southern and eastern Kentucky.

From 1990 to 1993, Legg served as alternate federal co-chairman for the Appalachian Regional Commission in Washington, D.C. There she represented and promoted economic policies and assisted in the management of a $190 million budget for job creation, building infrastructure, education and workforce training, as well as research programs for economic development.

Legg has also served as a field representative for Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, as acting executive director of the National Council on the Handicapped and as the director of admissions for Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, Ky.

Legg believes that access to high-speed, broadband communications service is vital to the future growth and prosperity of rural America. She talked with "Rural Cooperatives" magazine about the promise of broadband and the challenge of promoting rural economic development in the 21st Century.

Rural Cooperatives: It has been estimated that the cost of providing rural America with broadband communications would be in the neighborhood of $14 billion. Can we afford that cost?

Legg: I think a better question is, can we afford not to have broadband in rural America. Rural communities will always face a big challenge in competing economically with urban areas. They need to have competitive infrastructure both to attract companies from outside and to encourage the development of locally-owned businesses. And that leads us to what I call the Three "A's" of technology:

1. Communities have to be aware of what new technology, such as high-speed internet connections, can do for them.

2. They have to have access to it. And that leads to:

3. Application--applying the technology constructively.

My job at the Center for Rural Development was dealing with the first two requirements. We established and managed 40 World Wide Web conference sites in eastern Kentucky, in small towns and villages of 1,000 to 5,000 people, occasionally more. The sites offered high-speed, interactive video conferencing and community-access computers to all comers.

The way the sites were used gave us a glimpse of the possibilities this technology offers people living in rural areas. In one town, we had an elderly gentleman who would bicycle over from his home every day and spend an hour or so surfing the Web. Another user was a lady who used the computers to communicate through e-mail with her grandson in the army overseas. A local hospital rented the video-conferencing facility to hold management meetings with its sister hospital in another part of the state. And a life-insurance agent used the conferencing services to simultaneously keep in touch with her district office in Lexington and her corporate office in Colorado.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, because rural people may not yet be aware of what this technology offers them in their private lives and in making their living. I think it will take a little time, but I have no doubt that in the future the way we do business will depend on broadband.

That brings up the question: just what does broadband offer rural areas? Can it help them entice a corporation to bring in jobs?

The thing to remember is that before corporations decide to locate in a rural area, they're going to make sure they have access to the same kind of infrastructure and services they can get in an urban area, not just for doing business, but also for the sake of their employees. That includes fast computer communications, and, just as important, the other resources to which broadband gives access, that otherwise might not be available outside the cities.

Bringing a big corporate Facility to your rural area can be important. In Kentucky, we've made big efforts using tools such as tax credits to bring in big facilities, like a Toyota assembly plant to Georgetown. So broadband isn't the only reason any company will want to locate to your area: they're going to look at the whole package.

But we've also had successes because of access. For example, Amazon.com has a communications center coming to Campbellsville, where infrastructure in place was a big factor.

We have to remember that small operations, such as call centers and local small businesses are important, too. Four or five jobs added to an existing business because of expansion does not seem like a big deal. But in the long run, this type of growth is more sustainable and may be more realistic to building the community than hitting the home run, like the Toyota plant or Amazon.com.

By connecting people and computers in different locations, the new technology has the potential to help rural businesses achieve economies of scale that allow them to compete on an equal footing with businesses located in the cities. And it also offers incentives to people who might want to return home after living in the city. They're going to want the conveniences and advantages they've gotten used to, from not having to depend on a slow dial-up connection, to convenient banking--all sorts of things broadband makes possible.

A good case in point is telemedicine and distance learning, which use video conferencing to put medical specialists in remote clinics and operating rooms, and teachers in specialized subjects in remote classrooms. Using these technologies you can have access to the same level of medical care and the same education curriculum you could find in the city.

RUS is actively promoting its new Distance Learning/Telemedicine (DLT) program, but it has met resistance in some areas. Would you care to comment?

We're making loans, but not as many as we'd like. I think it's going to take time for the telemedicine technology to be fully accepted, and there are a number of reasons. The first is that the clinics that can most use telemedicine are the ones that are in the most remote, least-developed areas. Unfortunately, they're also often the ones with the least ability to pay the costs of installation and hook-up.

There's also a cultural problem. People just don't want remote doctors; they're used to dealing with a physician face-to-face, and they'd rather travel miles out of their way than to be examined over a remote hook-up. It will take awhile to get used to this new technology, just as it took awhile to get used to the telephone and other innovations.

There are other problems, too, such as: when you have a remote doctor and a doctor on the spot both helping a patient, which one does the billing? How is the fee split? We have no precedents yet for those issues, and they'll have to be worked out.

Distance learning presents some special problems, too. For instance, we have a college in rural Kentucky that's linked to one in southern Tennessee and a tribal college out West. They share a language teacher, but the colleges are located in the jurisdictions of different accrediting bodies. Sc) how do they resolve the accreditation issue? New technology always poses challenges to existing systems, and the people who are in charge of those systems aren't used to it and need to learn how to deal with it.

When you get enough colleges demanding the resolution of the accreditation issue, it will get resolved, and the other problems will, too. The culture has to change to adapt itself to new technology, but it takes time. In the meantime, we often have to go out of our way to find the most isolated, hungriest doctor to get someone who is willing to take the risk of adopting the new technology.

In an emergency, the DLT technology really proves its worth. A rural clinic with a surgeon who isn't experienced in a specific type of surgery could--with a telemedicine set-up--be guided through a surgical process by a specialist at a large hospital.

The great thing about this technology is that, in a situation like that, the camera provides a sharp, close-up view for the remote physician that is actually superior to what the doctor on the spot can get using his own unaided vision. For all practical purposes the remote doctor is right at his elbow, guiding him through the procedure.

As long as we're talking about development in rural areas, what do you think utility co-ops can do to encourage economic growth in the areas they serve?

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