A Tangled Web

I've written a lot in this blog about selective justice in the hills of Appalachia. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. After all, everyone is familiar with Smokey and the Bandit, Billy Jack, and The Dukes of Hazard. Everyone knows how these small towns and counties get, and it comes as no surprise that Person A can be caught doing 90mph in a school zone and get a talking to while Person B get caught doing 30mph in a 25mph zone and gets hit with a $150 fine. Just par for the course in Appalachia. Everyone gets it. The worrisome part is that there are levels above the corrupt county level. The "first family" concept gets spread across entire regions. The even more worrisome part is that at the county level, you can tell who the "first families" are. At the regional level, there is a lot of guesswork involved. I guess because cockroaches hate the light or something.

This brings me to today's story. You see in the image, the Clinton Center of Somerset Community College. It was built in 2004 to help stimulate economic growth in the area. It's an impressive building for the area. It had up to date classrooms, state of the art nursing labs, a training center for day care workers, a cosmetology lab, and shops for vocational careers. In short, it has everything that a community college needs to help improve the educational and economic level of a depressed area. Naturally, it couldn't be allowed to survive.

The web starts with the construction of the center itself. The money for the center was obtained through the hard work of then state senator David Williams. Of course, he insisted that the center be placed in his own district. This did not go over well with Somerset Community College. They has a center already operating out of an abandoned elementary school 30 minutes north. It was centrally located, and Somerset wanted the center to be put there, but David Williams was adamant, his county or nothing. Somerset agreed. At first glance, nothing to see here. Just a politician getting pork for his district.

The next thread of the web occurs a couple of years after the center started operation. At first, there were a lot of non-locals there. You see, no locals were qualified to run the place, so foreigners were brought in (foreigner in a hill context means someone from outside the county). Never the less, the center thrived and all was well in the world, well, with the exception of the vocational programs. For some reason, the local Board of Education wanted a monopoly on that, so no tech programs for Clinton Center. Then the "first families" obtained the required degrees to reach critical mass at the college, arrived on the scene, moved into management positions (often over others), and things changed rapidly. They might have had the power to kill vocational programs before, but their power was limited. Now things were different. Through an interesting refusal to provide support for the center, moving the scheduling to two days a week, and farming out classes to local high school teachers, the administration of Somerset Community College managed to destroy the center, which they promptly sold to the local Board of Education.

Now there might be nothing to see here. It might just be a tale of pork and bad administration. But consider: First we have an time of unprecedented educational growth, which starts the first families getting the degrees needed to move in and take over. Then we have a state senator putting a state of the art facility, which his county wants, in his district, even if they don't have control of it yet. Thirdly, we have the "first families" moving into positions of control at an amazing rate and then handing the senator's county exactly what they wanted all along. It may be coincidence, but too many coincidences at once all moving in one direction tends to indicate a Quid Pro Quo, especially since all the actors who have created the situation are from the power broker families.