Rural community development finally has come of age. After the not very productive rural development program of the 1950's with its emphasis on the small farm, and the equally tepid rural areas development effort of the 1960's, Congress and the Executive finally seem committed to improving the lot of rural America.

Rural communities in Pennsylvania, as well as in many other parts of the United States, have exhibited a great deal of variation in population trends in recent years. Many rural communities have experienced a declining population along with a decreasing employment base. This causes problems of finding new sources of employment as well as providing educational and other public services that are adequate for their remaining population but are financed by a decreasing fiscal base. On the other hand, many rural communities have experienced a new spurt of economic and population growth resulting in a need for additional public services. While the particular problems to be faced are different depending on whether the community is growing or declining, they each have their own peculiar types of problems.

Congress passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 and reaffirmed its national housing goal of 1948: “the realization as soon as feasible of the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.” However, many states, and New Jersey in particular, have continually fallen short of this goal. The population in the past decade in New Jersey has grown by approximately 20 percent and yet housing has not kept pace with this growth. Current growth requires an additional 100,000 housing units a year, but only 40,000 are being built. In short, the inadequate supply of decent single and multi-family dwellings and increasing housing demand in New Jersey has raised the cost of existing housing out of the reach of many of its citizens.

In communities where average family incomes are low relative to the costs of conventional housing – a common situation in New Hampshire – the services of adequate housing are, in effect, unavailable to many resident. If this service is to be available to low income residents, the public sector must provide public housing, or encourage private provision of low cost housing. Yet, instead of encouraging such housing, many New Hampshire communities ban or restrict the most common form of low cost housing – the mobile home.

Students of our nation's medical care system generally express particular concern over the availability or lack of availability of physician services in rural areas. This concern is not without statistical foundation. In 1969 the nation's most urbanized counties (5,000,000 inhabitants or more) had approximately five times as many actively-practicing private physicians per 100,000 population as did the most rural counties (less than 10,000 inhabitants) [1]. In view of this situation a number of measures designed to increase the rural supply of physician services are being proposed. In general, these measures can be categorized into (1) those designed to increase the size of the resource base used in producing physician services and (2) those designed to reorganize the existant resource base in hopes of increasing resource productivity.

Demands on the public water supply “industry” have been increasing steadily. Most of the existing systems have experienced increased water use per customer over time, as well as a greater number of customers. There has also been a growing interest in and concern about providing adequate quantities of safe, treated water for all of the Nation's population. The cost of providing public water systems for “an estimated 30,000 smaller communities, unincorporated settled areas and farming sectors in rural territory without systems” was estimated at $6 billion in 1966 [1, p. 978]. The cost of completing this task has probably increased, even though many water systems have been installed in these communities since 1966.

The literature on the concept of economies of size in waste water management is extensive. However, only a limited amount of research has been completed which focuses on the extent of these economies associated with the regionalization of waste water management systems.

In the Northeast, major problems relating to natural resource use, particularly agriculture, can be attributable in large part to outgrowths of the rural-urban interface. As communities (cities, towns, boroughs, townships, and counties) strive to fulfill their basic needs for health, education, police protection, recreation, housing, highways, and productive open space, new and more sophisticated methods of implementing land-use controls are needed. Experience indicates that in rapidly urbanizing areas traditional land-use mechanisms for directing growth do not guarantee the degree of permanence that is required to preserve productive open space. An alternative land-use control mechanism to ensure open space preservation explored in this paper is the transfer of development rights and the purchase of development easements.

Creeping urbanization without land use controls is threatening rural areas with the loss of prime and scenic agricultural land. The operation of a relatively free land market shifts land to the highest bidder—one who believes he can make a profit, or one who judges his psychic income from ownership and/or use sufficient to make him prefer land ownership to alternative investments or consumption. As farmers retire and sell to nonfarmers, prime agricultural land adjacent to cities is transferred to more intensive, profitable, and irreversible urban uses—residences, commerce, recreation, and industry. Farmland is shifted from active farming to retirement homes and second homes, both at retail and in large developments. This land use trend is frequently cited as undesirable by municipal planners since it leads to a loss of prime agricultural land which may be needed for future food production and reduces pastoral scenery. In a recent study in Massachusetts, J. B. Wyckoff found that the process of suburbanization was consuming rural land at a very rapid rate—from two to eight times the historic rate.

A major environmental problem is the loss of recreational and asthetic values for bodies of water resulting from accelerated eutrophication. Eutrophication is only part of the concern over increased nitrate levels. More important, several streams have been found to have nitrate concentrations above U. S. Public Health Service Drinking Water Standards of 45 mg/l. Given agriculture's use of nutrients, agriculture's contribution to the nitrogen and phosphorus content of water needs to be evaluated.

This paper deals with one of the many aspects of controlling air pollution–equity. The equity issue discussed concerns the fact that areas with high and low levels of air pollution are subjected to many of the same controls under current legislation. The equity issue is, of course, only one of several imperative questions that should be addressed and fully researched before society embarks on an abatement program of great magnitude. In fact, comparisons between expected cost outlays by firms and individuals to control air pollution, and the cost of allowing the pollution to continue, indicate that it may be less costly for firms and individuals to do nothing.

Flood proofing first entered the flood damage reduction literature with the pioneering work of John Sheaffer. Prior to this, flood control measures considered were predominantly structural – consisting of dams, levees, dikes, channel improvements, etc. The addition of flood proofing to other flood damage reduction measures has broadened the choice among the existing alternatives for decision makers. Unlike the structural measures, flood proofing measures do not actually reduce flood stage or prevent the water from reaching the structures, but rather are as considered by Sheaffer, “adjustments to structures and contents which are designed and/or adopted primarily to reduce flood damages”.

Prince Edward Island, one of the four Atlantic Provinces of Canada, has recently, in conjunction with the Federal government, undertaken a comprehensive development plan in an effort to break the “vicious circle” of poverty, low income and low productivity characteristic of a depressed region. Before the development plan was instituted, levels of unemployment on the island were consistently three to seven percent above the national average. The economy is characterized by a heavy dependence upon land based resource industry, particularly agriculture, and the resources of the sea. The small amount of manufacturing is related almost entirely to these resources and is organized in small production units. Accordingly, per capita income ranges between 60% and 70% of the national average. The P.E.I. development plan is broad-based, massive in relation to the economy of the island, and contained in a single geographical and political unit. Development projects are planned, not just for a few sectors of the economy, but for practically all sectors and at a scale of investment where significant changes should occur.

A commonly visualized benefit from natural resources is outdoor recreation including activities such as fishing, hunting, hiking, and nature study. Due to the extra-market nature of these activities, monetary measures of the benefits emanating from them require use of some kind of simulated prices. The procedure most widely used for this purpose has been that of estimating a demand function, using differential travel costs associated with the locational dispersion of the recreationists, as a proxy price variable. These methodologies may be labeled as “willingness to pay” approaches and have been used by a number of economists.

Perhaps we should begin this session by clarifying the title and then take a closer review of the situation which developed at West Virginia University. First, when we discuss institutional restructuring it is assumed that we are restricting our field of inquiry to the College of Agriculture, including Cooperative Extension and the Agricultural Experiment Station. Second, when we speak of changing missions it is assumed that we are referring to the missions of the College of Agriculture, including Cooperative Extension and the Agricultural Experiment Station. Considerable change in structure and in mission has occurred throughout our University but those which are not directly related to agriculture are omitted.

The advertisement of one of our automobile manufacturers 10 to 15 years ago ended with the slogan, “Ask the man who owns one.” Probably my presence on this program on institutional restructuring can be explained best by paraphrasing this ad to read “Ask the man who's been through one.” Although I shall describe Vermont's experience with reorganization, in the process I want to discuss a few ideas on the changing role of the university and the land grant college in the last half of the 20th century. I readily confess that many of the ideas expressed in this paper are not original; I have drawn heavily upon recent writings of James Bonnen (1), Emery Castle (2, 3), and Earl Heady (4), and I recommend the original articles to you.

Rutgers University was chartered as Queen's College on November 10, 1766. It was the eighth institution of higher education founded in Colonial America prior to the Revolutionary War. From its modest beginning in the New Brunswick area the University has grown to eight separately organized undergraduate colleges in three areas of the State, with a wide range of offerings in liberal and applied arts and sciences.

The Economic Research Service is in the midst of reorganization. For the past 1-1/2 years, ERS researchers and administrators have been working overtime to make sure that ERS research dovetails with today's priorities.