Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 15, 1994 TAG: 9405150046
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The beating ebbed last year when a local legislator came to the rescue. This year, threatened first with more than $1 million in cuts, the agency was saved by rigorous lobbying. Cuts came in at $269,000. At least no field staff members will lose their jobs.
But it's been a rough few years for the Virginia Cooperative Extension, where workers have watched up to 85 colleagues take pink slips home or grab early-retirement offers. They've seen state aid to the agency wither by $6.4 million since 1990.
The holes left are hard to plug.
"It's not like it used to be," said Roy Kiser, an agricultural and 4-H extension agent in Craig County.
"We've got to have good programs if we're going to have support. We keep that end up, and hope for the best," said Floyd's extension agent, Dave Gardner.
"It's hard to hold on to the adults [volunteers] we have. We won't recruit any more. It takes TLC, and there isn't anyone here who isn't vastly overworked," said Elizabeth Montgomery, who runs the extension office in Arlington County, just a stone's throw from the Washington area's busy beltway.
Cooperative extension, an 80-year-old brainchild of Congress, was formed in each state so agricultural research from land grant universities could be delivered to the farmers by way of the local agent. In Virginia, Virginia Tech overwhelmingly runs the show, although Virginia State University, also a land grant institution, is part of the administrative equation.
Virginia Cooperative Extension is a complicated animal, with 107 offices that shift individually to fit the needs of the counties and cities they serve.
Agents like Kiser organize 4-H leaders one day, advise farmers on grazing techniques the next. Montgomery, also a horticulturist, coordinates a band of volunteer master gardeners who help suburbanites tend their plots. She organizes an office that hires bilingual immigrants to serve as translators in their neighborhoods.
Gardner has just finished an inventory of long-forgotten pesticides stored in local barns, the first step in a hazardous waste pickup.
Kiser's office-mate, Debbie Snead, is a home economist who worries about kids. She helps run a weight-reduction camp for children each summer, and has colleagues who run nutrition programs.
Funding for each office is a combination of federal, state and local money. This creates patchwork budgets that make it hard to figure out which money pays whose salary. But clearly, life is different from one office to the next.
In an old white house by the side of New Castle's main road, next to the brick storefront where a sheet of paper propped in the window announces the Craig County municipal offices, farmer Charlie Barnes pulled up a stool.
"When the settlers came, there were warm-season grasses," he said. "They started growing in June and the buffalo grazed them."
Then settlers started penning the animals, who promptly overgrazed fields, which by then had been seeded with new grasses - cool-season grasses. Now Barnes wants to see if he can grow the kind of grass the American Indians grew - those old warm-weather grasses that thrived during summer without too much fertilizer.
That's the kind of project that requires a little help, a little research straight from the university lab. Barnes called next door to Kiser, who in turn called an expert from Tech.
"What we hope to do with these farmers is allow them to keep farming," said Kiser, who has watched the family farm dwindle financially to the point that a $10,000 to $12,000 return on a 200-acre beef cattle farm is the norm.
"We've seen a shift. There are more part-time farmers, and a lot of wives work off the farm. At one time, wives were a helpmate on the farm. There are increased demands on farmers because they don't have anybody to help. And in the last 10 years, we've seen more and more farmers get jobs off the land," Kiser said.
Lest anyone say that aid to these farmers is anything resembling a waste of public money, Kiser points out that 3 percent of the people feed the entire population.
Extension statistics show the program gives a 48 percent return on the tax dollar.
More than 200 miles away, in a former schoolhouse in a neat suburban neighborhood, Arlington County Extension toils away.
The unit director there, Montgomery, considers the agricultural reputation of the agency a bit of a problem. It's far too limited a definition of what extension does, she said.
Marketing, Montgomery said, is "one of the places extension truly has not done a good job. There are urban problems, suburban problems, and even in the rural areas, they have the same at-risk problems we have. Like drugs and teen pregnancy."
In Arlington, they deal with those problems in many ways, one of which is adapting your old-fashioned 4-H club. The suburban kids don't focus on grooming horses and raising livestock, as happens in the country. Instead, their members are some of the children of more than 28,000 immigrants who've moved into the low brick apartment complexes where Washington-bound war heroes moved with their brides after World War II.
They've moved from every world hot spot. They are wary of government attempts to help. Where they're from, such offers brought nothing but anguish.
"We started with the Southeast Asians, then Hispanics. The newest waves are from Somalia and the Sudan. And now, some East Europeans," said Montgomery.
Recruiting these children into 4-H is not easy, but extension tries. Through cooking demonstrations or camping trips, the children learn U.S.-style leadership at 4-H the same way their peers go to Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts.
"We don't worry about getting somebody who belongs to the country club into 4-H," Montgomery said.
But the director for that program, paid for out of the state appropriation, resigned recently. The position is empty, and likely will remain so.
Montgomery said the group is relying on volunteers' help.
But volunteers have a habit of slipping away.
At a time when about 2 percent of the state's residents farm, does Virginia need an agency that devotes more than 50 percent of its funding to farming and natural resource efforts?
The perception that extension's only an agricultural program doesn't always help the urban agents.
"Some of the things extension does best is work with human resources and human needs," said Tobin Smith, chairman of Arlington's extension leadership council and a member of the state extension advisory committee. "If there's anything that could be supported more, that needs to be understood by the university, I'd like to see it's more than just agriculture."
But Craig County's Kiser says extension has "gotten into trouble" because too many urban legislators just don't understand the importance of farmers and have cut funds.
Farmer-senator Madison Marye of Shawsville points out that Arlington has one of the state's strongest extension programs. Still, that appears to be due to county coffers - the office budget shows the state kicks in around 20 percent of the total.
Back in Blacksburg, administrators launched a new educational program a couple of years ago that reaches everyone - city folk and country folk alike. Called "Keep it Under Your Hat," it was a skin cancer-fighting program that seemed to get good response, and even helped 20 people discover their skin cancer.
Such efforts may have helped bring around legislators in the past two years. Tech's new president, Paul Torgersen, talks hopefully of the statewide network that extension agents create for the university - perhaps to the benefit of both extension and the school.
Last week, the university announced that William A. Allen, extension's interim director for 20 months, had been given the permanent job.
But the promising new signs follow long frustration.
"Just yesterday, one of our administrators was visiting in a county that used to have five agents. They now have three, but they keep trying to do what they did with five," said Bonnie Braun, the former associate director. She said that last week, just before leaving for a job at the University of Minnesota.
"They're frustrated. They're worried about what the people in the county will say," she said.
Other holes remain.
The core of experts on campus - the ones who are supposed to deliver research to agents - "is decimated right now," Kiser said. From a high of 213 in 1988, the program's down to 158.
At the moment, 19 jobs are frozen; five are filled temporarily. Agents based in one county's office are trying to cover the empty office the next county over. Or even two counties over.
With the most recent budget, two of those jobs can be filled, and the field agents who have worried about layoffs for months can relax now, said Andy Swiger, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, which oversees the agency.
But in the overall picture this year, "there will be fewer people employed," he said. Braun's administrative post, for instance, won't be filled.
"We have informed our field staff that we will not have to force anybody out of their jobs," Swiger said. "It will take a little while to digest the total budget."
The budget was delivered just this month, after a legislative action that chopped former Gov. Douglas Wilder's nearly $1 million cuts in half. But even last month, layoffs seemed inevitable in an agency that's 90 percent personnel costs. A stiff lobbying effort that included Torgersen persuaded Gov. George Allen to add another $300,000, bringing the year's deficit to $269,000.
The president's action lifted some spirits.
Still, the deficit remains. There's still a hidden deficit of something like $400,000 because of mandated salary raises with no way to fund them, said Katherine Johnston, Tech's director of budget and finance.
And there's still next year. The state's two-year budget unveiled in December proposes $870,000 in cuts - a "huge shortfall," Swiger said.
Some savings may come from Tech's proposed early-retirement/buyout plan, but that will need the attorney general's approval before it's offered officially. Besides, extension workers point out, most of the over-55 set who'd be eligible grabbed a similar state offer back in 1991.
The agency's been pushed to the limit.
"Yes, I think we're there. But I think we're creating a way to get ourselves on through this," Braun said.
What happens next?
The power in extension is shifting to local boards who set the office's priorities - sort of a total quality management model that's helping Craig County land funding for a badly needed child-care center.
"We've moved away from particular groups, like extension homemakers, and are broadening. Extension agents are deeply involved in the community," said Paul Paradzinksi.
In other words, agents are acting as the glue that fastens various agencies together to work toward one goal.
And, that's one example of how the service needs to shift, adapt, and try to work with what it has, Braun said.
Time will tell.
Said Braun, "It may not look like the extension service that's worked so well for a long time."
by CNB