Ironic, that young people are dying to live in Colo's ski mountain towns but can't find affordable housing to make ends meet and, therefore are being forced to live elsewhere.
Rural Towns Are Aging, Cash-Strapped and in Desperate Need of Workers
With younger labor in short supply, aging workers often find themselves pulling double—or triple—duty to keep towns afloat
By Jon Kamp, WSJ
July 28, 2024 5:30 am ET
ASHLAND, Maine—This tiny town in northern Maine gets by these days because of people like Lendell Tarr.
Tarr, the recreation director, runs the town’s sports programs and drives Little Leaguers to away games. He also cleans the town office, takes seniors out for meals, mows the cemetery lawn and can pitch in driving ambulances and school buses.
The challenge for Ashland, population about 1,200: Tarr is 65 years old and says that “fishing is calling me.” Town manager Cyr Martin can’t imagine finding enough people, or money, to fill the void.
“He just can’t retire,” Martin said. “There’s no way I could have another Lendell doing the lawns, the bus driving.”
The challenge of both finding and affording workers faces small governments scattered around the U.S., and often leaves those still there to pick up the slack. Jessica Jimmo, 32, who grew up in Ashland, is the town’s deputy clerk, assistant librarian and a volunteer firefighter for the Ashland Fire Department, where she serves with family including her mother and sisters. Several other multitasking workers are at least a generation older, including Tarr and David Milligan, 56, who is both a police officer and Ashland’s town code enforcer.
Martin, 59, has pulled double-duty as Ashland’s police chief for years. He also served as chief in nearby Washburn, Maine, before stepping down early this year. Stymied by hiring struggles, that town voted in June to disband its police department and rely instead on county and state law enforcement.
In Texas, roughly two-thirds of cities with 3,000 to 5,000 residents are missing a finance director, according to the Texas Municipal League. And nearly all of the hundreds of Texas cities with fewer than 3,000 people are missing one, too.
Other city employees who might not have financial-management experience often end up filling in, said Bennett Sandlin, the league’s executive director. One consequence is cities that go without audits, raising the chances of uncorrected bookkeeping errors, he said. The league is working on a remote bookkeeping program that would aim to have retired finance officers manage a handful of cities remotely.
Federal data show the public-sector workforce outside metropolitan areas skews older, which increases the pressure to replace retiring workers. Local officials and government associations in many states say they face a persistent challenge to find qualified employees who want to work in a small town’s office.
Rural areas have long struggled to hang onto—or recruit—young residents launching their careers. Small-town officials say they face particular hurdles when it comes to offering competitive salaries to compete for workers.
“They’re not as interested in starting in a small Texas town like Muleshoe,” Sandlin said, referring to the city of about 5,000 people located near the New Mexico border.
Increasing salaries is one way state and local governments that can afford such moves have eased some of their recent hiring strains, the firm MissionSquare Research Institute found in an annual survey this spring. There are also signs of a cooling job market, which might ease some private-sector competition.
More strain looms ahead, however: The newly released survey data found 54% of respondents expect their largest number of potential retirements among baby boomer-age workers in the next few years. Also, 37% of respondents said they had hired back their already-retired employees.
“We’re going to have to get aggressive about attracting the next generation of workers to our towns,” said Cara Woodson Welch, chief executive of the Public Sector HR Association, whose members are among those surveyed.
The research firm has found that hiring challenges span big cities and small towns alike. But such shortages can be especially visible in small towns while chipping away at the hands-on services that residents rely on. Small government-offices are places where locals can pay taxes, get dog licenses or complain about potholes in person, often to a neighbor standing behind the counter.
“People love their local control,” said Ryan Pelletier, the administrator for Maine’s Aroostook County, which includes Ashland and features a vast expanse of rolling hills, potato farms and dense forest abutting Canada. The county, which is bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island, yet home to fewer than 70,000 people, is checkered with communities that have struggled to find employees.
“As you can’t fill positions, you’re going to see more regionalization of services, whether by choice or by force,” Pelletier said.
Maine faces stark challenges because it is the state with the nation’s oldest population, with a median age of about 45 years. Several rural counties, including Aroostook, have significantly older populations.
Limestone, a small town there abutting Canada’s New Brunswick border, is still smarting from an Air Force base closure decades ago. More recently, Limestone has struggled with retaining town managers—it has gone through more than a dozen in less than a decade—and has lost services.
The town closed its ambulance service many years ago, contracting it out to the nearby city of Caribou for less money. Last year, the police department closed and the town redirected funding toward roadwork.
Losing those services has hurt, but they were expensive, and the town couldn’t find qualified officers to provide round-the-clock coverage, interim town manager Alan Mulherin said. He said that, without police regularly nearby, there is more speeding and drug activity, but also less confusion about whom to call now that state and county officials are officially in charge.
The 67-year-old—a retired U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent—joined the town council last year. Within months, he was thrust into the manager role to fill yet-another opening. He said he’s trying to help repair what he described as bookkeeping issues that stemmed from government instability.
He has also taken on other jobs out of necessity: road commissioner, local health officer and even animal-control officer. “I was happily retired,” Mulherin said.
Joe Lapierre said that when his now-teenage son was a toddler, he had a seizure and stopped breathing at the family’s Limestone home. Town emergency services were on the scene right away.
“The best sound in the world was that ambulance siren, that police siren, coming to my house,” Lapierre said.
He fought recently to keep police, believing that such services are vital when it comes to recruiting businesses such as his graphic design firm, located on Main Street. Lapierre is also still worried about emergency aid for his son, who has a severe form of the bleeding disorder hemophilia.
On a recent weekday in Ashland, Milligan, the police officer, stopped by the home of two young boys he knew were alone while their mother worked. He advised one of them, who was riding a bike with headphones, to keep an ear uncovered for safety. It was the kind of interaction a county deputy or state trooper hours away couldn’t have.
Martin, the police chief and manager, is worried about whether Ashland can maintain its tiny force. He has lost officers to higher-paying towns, sometimes after paying for training. More immediately, he has to try to replace Ashland’s retiring highway foreman.
For now, at least, town workers are plugging the holes, said Sherri Calhoun, a teacher and town councilor.
“It’s keeping us afloat,” she said.
Adolfo Flores and Paul Overberg contributed to this article
Write to Jon Kamp at Jon.Kamp@wsj.com
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