With Death Outpacing Birth, a County Slows to a Shuffle

In fact, this community in West Virginia’s northern panhandle holds an unwelcome distinction. With just 71 babies born on average for every 100 residents who die, Brooke County, in which Weirton is partly located, has the largest such gap in the nation among counties in metropolitan areas, save for a handful of places that are magnets for retirees. (Hancock County, which contains the other part of Weirton, is in similar demographic straits.)

The main reason Brooke County is so far off the national number — which is 171 births to 100 deaths — is that it has missed out on one of the dominant demographic trends to emerge from the recent census: the influx of young immigrants into communities across the United States. The median age for Hispanics, by far the largest immigrant group, is just 27, far lower than the median age for whites of 41.

Without immigrants or economic opportunities to keep its younger residents close to home, Brooke County and others like it are showing their age. At St. Paul Catholic Church in Weirton, the Rev. Larry Dorsch has buried 15 people this year and baptized one. The American Legion in Wellsburg has closed because of a lack of young supporters. Volunteer fire departments are so understaffed that people come from other towns to fight fires.

“You can declare a person dead, but you can’t declare a town dead,” said Daniel Guida, a lawyer in Weirton. “Some towns have energy, that spring in your collective step. We’re missing that. We need to get on with Act 2. But how?”

According to Kenneth Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, there are now 853 counties with similar population trends — “more coffins than cradles,” as he calls it — including parts of the Great Plains, the Midwest and New England. (The problem is even more acute across the Atlantic — countries in the European Union collectively will cross the threshold for having fewer births than deaths by 2015, and would experience population growth only through immigration, according to a 2009 report on aging published by the European Commission.)

West Virginia is the only state in the country with more deaths than births, but other states, like Maine, are not far behind. Mr. Johnson estimates that many white areas will tip into natural decrease in the next 10 to 15 years.

“This is the story of what’s happening to white America,” Mr. Johnson said. “America is built by young people. They are the backbone. But what if they are not there?”

If Brooke County is a postcard from the future, it ended up there because it never adapted from its past.

For decades, it was a steel manufacturing powerhouse, employing thousands of workers in mills along the Ohio River. Weirton Steel, a hulking plant that straddles Weirton’s main street (it was recently used as a set for a science fiction movie, “Super 8,” and in the 1970s for “The Deer Hunter”), was once the largest single private employer in the state.

Now Wal-Mart holds that distinction, and Weirton Steel, now owned by Arcelor Mittal, a Luxembourg company run by an Indian billionaire, is a small fraction of its former size. Grass grows through cracks in the vast, empty parking lots.

Manufacturing jobs, long the lifeblood of the area, shrank by 38 percent statewide since 1990. Now health care is the state’s second-largest employer after government. The number of young people here sagged with the economy. The population under 35 is about half of what it was in 1980, while the number of residents 55 or older has jumped by 23 percent, according to 2010 census data released Thursday.

Now walkers and wheelchairs are more common than strollers. Sunday school classrooms at the United Methodist Church downtown are ghostly quiet, and Brooke High School has just half the number of students it did when it opened in 1969.

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Weirton, W.Va., and Robert Gebeloff from New York.

View the original article here

County Was Struggling Even Before the Storm

  Glenda Dillshaw sorted through debris in Pleasant Grove, Ala., in Jefferson County.? The county is also dealing with a huge debt. More Photos ?

There are few places in America with more precarious finances than Jefferson County, Ala., the scene of some of the worst devastation from this week’s deadly tornadoes.

Even before the dark funnel clouds touched down, the heavily indebted county, which includes the city of Birmingham, was teetering on the edge of what could be the biggest municipal bankruptcy in American history. It is drowning under $3.2 billion in debt, the legacy of a giant sewer project and corrupt, risky bond deals that sent a former top official to prison. And it recently lost one of its main sources of revenue when the State Supreme Court struck down its tax on workers. County officials are worried that they could run out of money in late July or early August.

Now the strained county must struggle to perform a central role of government: protecting the lives and safety of its residents. So as county search and rescue workers sought the living and the dead, triage centers treated the injured and work crews struggled to clear the debris, the Jefferson County Commission met Thursday to make sure that some of the money-saving measures it had instituted would not impede the response to the disaster.

“The needs of the citizens will come first,” said Commissioner James A. Stephens, who oversees the county’s finances and whose district saw some of the worst destruction. “If we have to burn through this cash we’re attempting to preserve, in order to get us through this disaster, the County Commission most certainly will do so.”

People in Jefferson County have spoken about the sky falling, in a figurative sense, long before the clouds lowered this week and swirling winds leveled whole neighborhoods. For many residents, the tornadoes seemed like the latest in a long litany of woes.

“This is not a county that needed this,” said Lexis Bennett, 36, a paramedic who lives in Pleasant Grove, a Birmingham suburb among the hardest-hit places.

His house was destroyed. His dogs were killed. He barely survived by huddling in a closet with three other people and then crawling out of the rubble.

Asked about Jefferson County’s troubles, he shook his head and laughed. “Money?” he asked. “They ain’t got none. And now this tornado.”

County officials expect the federal government to cover much of the cost of the disaster, said Mark Kelly, a spokesman for the county’s Emergency Management Agency. He said the county’s response had not been constrained by its fiscal woes.

But a natural disaster was the last thing the county wanted to face as it sought to untangle itself from a series of man-made ones.

The county’s trouble began more than a decade ago. Its sewers were discharging raw sewage into local rivers during heavy rains, and a federal court ordered the county to refurbish the system. The county began borrowing money to pay for the upgrade. Then things went badly awry.

Local officials signed off on risky, and ultimately very expensive, exotic bond deals that they barely understood — some after they had been bribed.

Larry P. Langford, the former president of the county commission, was sentenced last year to 15 years in prison after he was found guilty of accepting more than $230,000 in cash, expensive clothing and jewelry in exchange for steering millions of dollars in bond business to a prominent investment banker. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit in 2009 charging that J. P. Morgan Securities had made unlawful payments to friends of the county commissioners to help it win bond business; J. P. Morgan settled the suit, agreeing to drop its claims for $647 million in fees it had been seeking, and to pay a $25 million penalty to the commission and $50 million to the county.

Those exotic deals backfired when the economy collapsed, and they sharply drove up the county’s costs instead of reducing them. The county defaulted on its bond payments; a court-appointed receiver is preparing a plan to help pay down the debt.

The Alabama Supreme Court dealt the county another blow in March, when it upheld a ruling striking down the county’s occupational tax — basically an income tax on people who work in the county — on the grounds that it was not properly advertised before the Legislature approved it in 2009. The tax netted the county $74 million a year, but the new Legislature — which, after November’s elections, is now in Republican hands — has been reluctant to approve a new tax.

The new sewer system suffered minor damage in the tornado, said John Young, the receiver who oversees it. But he said it should be quickly repaired.

 

Ohio County Losing Its Young to Painkillers’ Grip

Their pictures hang in the front window of an empty department store, a makeshift memorial to more than two dozen lives. The youngest was still in high school.

Nearly 1 in 10 babies born last year in this Appalachian county tested positive for drugs. In January, police caught several junior high school students, including a seventh grader, with painkillers. Stepping Stone House, a residential rehabilitation clinic for women, takes patients as young as 18.

In Ohio, fatal overdoses more than quadrupled in the last decade, and by 2007 had surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of accidental death, according to the Department of Health.

The problem is so severe that Gov. John R. Kasich announced $36 million in new spending on it this month, an unusual step in this era of budget austerity. And on Tuesday, the Obama administration announced plans to fight prescription drug addiction nationally, noting that it was now killing more people than crack cocaine in the 1980s and heroin in the 1970s combined.

The pattern playing out here bears an eerie resemblance to some blighted cities of the 1980s: a generation of young people who were raised by their grandparents because their parents were addicts, and now they are addicts themselves.

“We’re raising third and fourth generations of prescription drug abusers now,” said Chief Charles Horner of the Portsmouth police, who often notes that more people died from overdoses in Ohio in 2008 and 2009 than in the World Trade Center attack in 2001.

“We should all be outraged,” Chief Horner said. “It should be a No. 1 priority.”

Scioto County (pronounced sy-OH-tuh), of which Portsmouth is the seat, has made it one, bringing what had been a very private problem out into the public.

A coroner and a pharmacist are among its state lawmakers, and a bill in the state legislature would more strictly regulate pain clinics where drugs are dispensed. The most popular drug among addicts here is the painkiller OxyContin.

The county’s efforts got the attention of political leaders in the state, including Governor Kasich, who declared the county a pilot project for combating addiction.

The problem is so bad that a storage company with business in the county recently complained to Chief Horner that it was having trouble finding enough job candidates who could pass drug tests.

“Around here, everyone has a kid who’s addicted,” said Lisa Roberts, a nurse who works for the Portsmouth Health Department. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a police chief, a judge or a Baptist preacher. It’s kind of like a rite of passage.”

About 10 years ago, when OxyContin first hurtled through the pretty hollow just north of town where the Mannering family lives, the two youngest children were still in high school. Their parents tried to protect them, pleading with neighbors who were selling the drug to stop. By mid-decade, they counted 11 houses on their country road that were dealing the drug (including a woman in her 70s called Granny), and their two youngest children, Nina and Chad, were addicted.

A vast majority of young people, officials said, get the drugs indirectly from dealers and other users who have access to prescriptions. Nina and Chad’s father, Ed Mannering, said he caught a 74-year-old friend selling the pills from his front door. The sales were a supplement, the man said sheepishly, to his Social Security check.

“You drive down the road here, and you think, ‘All these nice houses, no one’s doing any of that stuff,’?” said Judy Mannering, Nina and Chad’s mother. “But they are. Oh, they are.”

Nina Mannering tried to quit, her mother said. She had a small daughter to care for. She was in a counseling program for a few months, but was told to leave when her boyfriend brought her pills. At one point, Ms. Mannering counted the number of schoolmates in four graduating classes who had died from overdoses, her mother recalled. The total was 16.

“It’s like being in the middle of a tornado,” said Ed Hughes, director of the Counseling Center, a network of rehabilitation and drug counseling clinics in the county. “It was moving so fast that families were caught totally off guard. They had no idea what they were dealing with.”

 

Ohio County Losing Its Young to Painkillers’ Grip

Their pictures hang in the front window of an empty department store, a makeshift memorial to more than two dozen lives. The youngest was still in high school.

Nearly 1 in 10 babies born last year in this Appalachian county tested positive for drugs. In January, police caught several junior high school students, including a seventh grader, with painkillers. Stepping Stone House, a residential rehabilitation clinic for women, takes patients as young as 18.

In Ohio, fatal overdoses more than quadrupled in the last decade, and by 2007 had surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of accidental death, according to the Department of Health.

The problem is so severe that Gov. John R. Kasich announced $36 million in new spending on it this month, an unusual step in this era of budget austerity. And on Tuesday, the Obama administration announced plans to fight prescription drug addiction nationally, noting that it was now killing more people than crack cocaine in the 1980s and heroin in the 1970s combined.

The pattern playing out here bears an eerie resemblance to some blighted cities of the 1980s: a generation of young people who were raised by their grandparents because their parents were addicts, and now they are addicts themselves.

“We’re raising third and fourth generations of prescription drug abusers now,” said Chief Charles Horner of the Portsmouth police, who often notes that more people died from overdoses in Ohio in 2008 and 2009 than in the World Trade Center attack in 2001.

“We should all be outraged,” Chief Horner said. “It should be a No. 1 priority.”

Scioto County (pronounced sy-OH-tuh), of which Portsmouth is the seat, has made it one, bringing what had been a very private problem out into the public.

A coroner and a pharmacist are among its state lawmakers, and a bill in the state legislature would more strictly regulate pain clinics where drugs are dispensed. The most popular drug among addicts here is the painkiller OxyContin.

The county’s efforts got the attention of political leaders in the state, including Governor Kasich, who declared the county a pilot project for combating addiction.

The problem is so bad that a storage company with business in the county recently complained to Chief Horner that it was having trouble finding enough job candidates who could pass drug tests.

“Around here, everyone has a kid who’s addicted,” said Lisa Roberts, a nurse who works for the Portsmouth Health Department. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a police chief, a judge or a Baptist preacher. It’s kind of like a rite of passage.”

About 10 years ago, when OxyContin first hurtled through the pretty hollow just north of town where the Mannering family lives, the two youngest children were still in high school. Their parents tried to protect them, pleading with neighbors who were selling the drug to stop. By mid-decade, they counted 11 houses on their country road that were dealing the drug (including a woman in her 70s called Granny), and their two youngest children, Nina and Chad, were addicted.

A vast majority of young people, officials said, get the drugs indirectly from dealers and other users who have access to prescriptions. Nina and Chad’s father, Ed Mannering, said he caught a 74-year-old friend selling the pills from his front door. The sales were a supplement, the man said sheepishly, to his Social Security check.

“You drive down the road here, and you think, ‘All these nice houses, no one’s doing any of that stuff,’?” said Judy Mannering, Nina and Chad’s mother. “But they are. Oh, they are.”

Nina Mannering tried to quit, her mother said. She had a small daughter to care for. She was in a counseling program for a few months, but was told to leave when her boyfriend brought her pills. At one point, Ms. Mannering counted the number of schoolmates in four graduating classes who had died from overdoses, her mother recalled. The total was 16.

“It’s like being in the middle of a tornado,” said Ed Hughes, director of the Counseling Center, a network of rehabilitation and drug counseling clinics in the county. “It was moving so fast that families were caught totally off guard. They had no idea what they were dealing with.”