BELLEVILLE, Kan. (KPR) — Like many rural communities in Kansas, Belleville keeps getting smaller. Since 1990, the Republic County town's population has fallen from more than 2,500 to 2,000, a 20% drop. In the same time, the county as a whole has seen its population fall from about 6,500 to 4,600, a nearly 30% decline. Part of the problem: Young people going away to college and never coming back.
Many newly-minted graduates move to metropolitan areas like Kansas City or Wichita to find work. "Unfortunately, the kids growing up in the area usually can't wait to leave," says Maria Dahlquist, a program specialist at the non-profit Innovation Center in Norton, Kansas.
The Innovation Center is funding programs that encourage people to move to rural Kansas. The program in Republic County, called the County Level Incentive Program, or CLIP, pays people who move to the county and meet certain criteria $10,000. Recipients must move to Republic County from outside the 26 counties of north central and northwest Kansas and find a job that pays at least $32,500 a year.
Chris Zach, the county's economic development director, says the response has been encouraging. Since June, 28 people have applied for it—and all have been approved. "We pay 5,000 up front and then, if you still meet all the qualifications, we'll pay the other 5,000 after 13 months from the first payment," he explains.
Although the county's economy is based largely on agriculture, Zach says there are also plenty of opportunities in other areas: "We're always looking for people in the workforce in different industries, the high school and the elementary school are always looking for teachers." One company on the lookout for workers, Zach says, is Reinke Manufacturing, which builds irrigation systems.
CLIP has also helped fill vacancies in one area that is always short-staffed in rural areas: health care. Lexia Zenger is a family medicine physician who graduated from Belleville's Republic County High in 2013. She returned to the town after completing her residency in Lincoln, Nebraska, last year. Even for a doctor, she says, "It's not a cheap process to move and get established in a new living situation." Zenger says the $10,000 she and her husband received helped them to move back to Belleville. "For people that are kind of on the edge [of deciding whether to move], it makes a big difference in just giving you a little more freedom to set up life how you want to when you're making a transition from somewhere else to Republic County."
Some of the recipients are recent college graduates who moved away to attend school—and decided to come back. Brody Boyer is a Belleville native who graduated from Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, with degrees in finance and accounting last December. He came back to Belleville to work in his father's accounting firm, BRB Services. Boyer says he plans to use the $10,000 to make a down payment on a new home. "It was pretty cool to hear about that program," he said. "I think it's been a pretty good deal." Boyer says he's glad to be back in Belleville. "I've been in the big cities," he said. It's not my thing."
The Innovation Center's Maria Dahlquist hopes CLIP will encourage more young people like Brody Boyer to return to Republic County. "They think life is so exciting outside in the bigger cities and such," she said, "and a lot of them are figuring out that's not quite the case."
This report is part of the Kansas Public Radio series Rural Kansas Rising: Tech, Talent, and Tomorrow's Jobs. Funding for the series was provided by the Kansas Department of Commerce.
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