Orlan Love, CR Gazette –
Most Iowans believe they and the state they live in are not nearly as bad off as University of Iowa journalism professor Stephen Bloom portrayed them in his infamous Dec. 9 essay in The Atlantic online.
Bloom remains unapologetic about calling small-town Iowans “elderly waiting to die” and “waste-toids and meth addicts.” His only regret, he said, is that they don’t get the satire with which he attempted to communicate “unspeakable truths” about them.
Most residents believe the rural Iowa problems that he cites — a shortage of good jobs, the exodus of bright young Iowans, an aging, slow-growing population and meth addiction, for example — are neither new, peculiar to Iowa, nor all that dire.
Unemployment, for example, is worse in 44 other states. Iowa’s 5.7 percent jobless rate in November was nearly three points below the national average.
The brain drain, an aging population and the meth epidemic are more acute in Iowa than in some other states, but progress has been made in the war on meth, and getting older is generally considered preferable to the alternative.
Reversing or even slowing the brain drain, which accentuates the expansion of the elderly demographic, will take a transformational reordering of the state’s economy, experts say.
Resilience in the workforce
Contrary to public perception, unemployment rates are not dramatically worse in Iowa’s rural counties than in its urban areas, either. According to state unemployment figures for November, 12 of Iowa’s 15 most-populous counties had unemployment rates lower than the statewide average, as did 60 of Iowa’s 84 rural counties.
Small-town workers demonstrate resilience and adaptability. Take the case of Wilbert Plastics, which employed 115 people in the Buchanan County town of Winthrop, population 850, before shutting its doors on July 16, 2010, in the depths of the recession.
Those 115 displaced Wilbert workers joined 113,700 other out-of-work Iowans at a time when the state’s unemployment rate stood at 6.8 percent, with a comparable national figure of 9.5 percent.
“They told us in February that it would be closing,” which gave workers four months to find another job while still drawing a paycheck, said Chad Schwarting, 38, of Quasqueton, a 17-year Wilbert employee.
By the time the plant actually closed, Schwarting and his wife, Jan, 45, another veteran Wilbert worker, had secured jobs at Viking Pump in Cedar Falls. Neither missed a payday.
“We were pretty nervous about it. We had our health insurance there. We had all our eggs in one basket,” Chad Schwarting said.
While Jan Schwarting remains at Viking Pump, earning more than she had at the plastics factory, her husband has moved on to an even better paying job at Red Star Yeast in Cedar Rapids. The Schwartings say they are better off now than before.
Having stayed in touch with many of their former Wilbert co-workers, they estimate that “more than half upgraded themselves,” while many others have found at least comparable employment.
One who has not is Devlin Reinhold of Quasqueton, a 13-year Wilbert employee who has been drawing down his savings to pay his bills, which include about $500 a month for health insurance under the COBRA program.
Reinhold, a Navy veteran, said he has been tapping his savings since July, when his unemployment compensation ended.
“I tried to get back into welding. I took a refresher course at Hawkeye (Community College in Waterloo), but that hasn’t worked out yet,” he said.
Reinhold, 55, believes his age is working against him. “They are not going to tell you that (age is a consideration), but I feel it is. (Employers) definitely want the younger people,” he said.
Hawkeye Community College training administrator Jean Wright, who helped displaced Wilbert workers upgrade their skills, said she agrees that employers would never admit a preference for younger workers.
“But common sense and observation tell me that age can be a barrier to re-employment,” she said.
Impact on small towns
Winthrop Mayor Gerald Dennie said the loss of the town’s leading employer, which began as Triangle Plastics in the 1960s, could have been worse.
The building is still used and maintained and will be on the property tax rolls at full assessed value for at least another year, he said.
A local development group has leased the building, which is used for storage by Independence-based corncob processor Best Cob, Dennie said.
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“To be honest with you, the future of that building is probably as a warehouse” — a use that would entail minimal jobs, Dennie said.
Citing 2009 figures, Buchanan County Economic Development director Nate Clayberg said that only 8.5 percent of people holding primary jobs in Winthrop actually resided there, with 63 percent commuting from surrounding rural areas. Many of the displaced Wilbert workers, he said, found jobs in Waterloo, Cedar Rapids, Independence, Oelwein and Manchester.
Information on the outcomes of displaced workers at specific employers is confidential under federal law, said Kerry Koonce, a spokeswoman for Iowa Workforce Development, but Clayberg and Hawkeye College’s Wright believe the Wilbert workers fared exceptionally well.
Wright said 34 of the 115 displaced workers enrolled in training supported by federal Workforce Investment Act funds.
“We had hoped to enroll more,” she said, adding that the 30 percent participation suggests that many of them moved on quickly to other jobs.
“A lot of them had been there a long time. That plant had so many quality, experienced workers that they could almost name their new jobs,” Clayberg said.
Wright and Clayberg said experienced factory workers have little trouble finding jobs.
“Manufacturers are desperate for skilled workers. The pool of skilled workers with good attitudes and work habits is simply not adequate to fill their needs,” Wright said.
“We’ve got plenty of jobs around here — manufacturing, retail, health care and ag-related — if someone wants to work,” Clayberg said.
The brain drain
While Iowa has job openings in manufacturing and industries that process and refine agricultural products — most of which pay an hourly wage in the teens — the state’s shortage of high-tech, high-paying jobs has caused an exodus of college-educated young Iowans — the brain drain.
Between 2000 and 2008, Iowa lost 7 percent of its 25- to 44-year-old population — a loss most pronounced in rural areas and small towns, which lost 16 percent of that key demographic, said Christian Fong, 34, a Cedar Rapids businessman who chaired a legislative commission to study the brain drain.
If not stemmed, the brain drain will cost the state its next generation of leaders, said Fong, a candidate for governor in 2009. He cites as proof that five of the 15 members of the Generation Iowa Commission left the state during its three years of operation.
While one-third of young Iowans attain a college degree, just 12 percent of available jobs require one, he said.
Fong said an assumption that the quality of life in Iowa is not attractive to young, well-educated Iowans is off-base. Young Iowans, he said, “are very satisfied with the quality of life here and want to stay here.” What’s lacking, he said, are jobs commensurate with their education.
“We need to change Iowa’s economic foundation from manufacturing to creative, information-based, high-tech enterprises,” Fong said.
Karris Golden, 35, of Cedar Falls, another member of the Generation Iowa Commission, said many young Iowans who leave the state do so with plans to return to raise their families.
“But they won’t come back if they can’t find rewarding jobs,” said Golden, president and chief operating officer of Wasendorf and Associates, a Cedar Falls publishing firm.
Golden said the state could make itself more attractive to young professionals by encouraging entrepreneurs to develop their businesses here and by “wiring every nook and cranny of the state for high-speed Internet access.”
Meth problem is resurging
Like the brain drain, meth abuse is more severe in Iowa than in many other states — a fact underscored by statistics compiled by the Drug and Alcohol Services Information System. In Iowa during 2010, 12.6 percent of all drug treatment admissions were meth-related, exactly twice the national average.
Still, statistics from Iowa law enforcement agencies show the meth epidemic that left many Iowans with toothless frowns peaked between 2003 and 2005, declined markedly for three years and then resumed a gradual upward trajectory.
In Fayette County, the focal point of “Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town,” about one-fourth of all crime is meth-related — down from more than 70 percent at its peak, said Assistant County Attorney Nathan Lein, whose efforts to put meth cooks in jail were documented in the popular non-fiction book.
A state law strictly regulating the sale of the antihistamine pseudoephedrine — a key meth ingredient — “has helped a great deal in getting rid of mom and pop labs.”
Meth imported from Mexico fuels a continuing addiction problem, though, Lein said.
More than 80 percent of the illicit methamphetamine consumed in Iowa is smuggled into the state, said Dale Woolery, director of the Governor’s Office of Drug Control Policy.
Some of it, he said, comes from “well-financed and sophisticated criminal operations, including Mexican drug cartels.”
Woolery declined to say methamphetamine remains the state’s most dangerous drug but said it is especially problematic because of its high addiction quotient, its ease of manufacture and its potential harm to innocent bystanders through explosions and fires in the manufacturing process and exposure to toxic materials.
Perhaps the drug’s gravest collateral damage, however, is to the children of abusers. The number of confirmed or founded child abuse cases involving meth-addled caretakers peaked at 353 in 2003.
By 2007, that number had fallen to 56, following implementation of the pseudoephedrine law, but such cases, like all indicators of meth abuse in Iowa, have since been steadily rising.
Meth seizures, for example, peaked at 174,000 grams in 2003, dropped to 18,300 grams in 2009 and stood at 14,000 grams through the first 8 1/2 months of 2011. Responses to meth labs peaked at 1,500 in 2004, dropped to 178 in 2007 and stood at 257 through the first nine months of 2011. Meth-related prison admissions peaked at 711 in 2004, bottomed out at 304 in 2009 and climbed to 416 in 2011.
“There was a big drop around 2005-2006 in meth-rehabilitation clients. We saw that at ASAC,” said Shirley Schneider, director of the Area Substance Abuse Council’s east Cedar Rapids outpatient clinic.
Acknowledging that meth addiction remains a serious problem, Schneider said most meth addicts do not voluntarily seek treatment but enter the program through court orders or referrals from the Department of Human Services.
Schneider said methamphetamine stimulates pleasure centers in the brain. “Users quickly become addicted because they like the effect, and they stay addicted to avoid painful withdrawal,” she said.
As usage increases, they become less productive at work, family relations suffer and they spend more time trying to access the drug, she said.
After prolonged abuse, Schneider said many users match the stereotype — emaciation, stringy hair, damaged skin, bad teeth. Dental damage may be at least partly attributable to neglected hygiene, but the chemicals in meth also leach calcium from the body, she said.
Seniors are active voters
Though 14.8 percent of Iowans are 65 or older, which ranks Iowa fourth among the states in that category, they are hardly waiting around to die, said Donna Harvey, director of the Iowa Department on Aging.
Many of them remain active in the work force and often volunteer their services, she said.
Nor are they barely subsisting. While their household incomes are substantially lower than the statewide average, just 7.3 percent of older Iowans are defined as living in poverty, compared with 11.8 percent of all Iowans.
Iowa’s seniors also take their citizenship seriously, voting at a higher rate than any other age group — 76.2 percent in a recent national election. Though they made up less than 15 percent of the state’s population, they cast 19.4 percent of the votes.
By 2030, older Iowans’ share of the state population is expected to rise from the current 14.8 percent to 22.4 percent.
With that same demographic trend accelerating faster elsewhere, however, Iowa is expected to drop from fourth to 12th among states in percentage of residents age 65 or older.
