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Local fire departments and emergency service personnel play a critical role in ensuring community safety.  Every community, no matter how small, should have access to top-quality emergency services.

This is the latest in a series of blogs from West Virginia Student Reporter Abbey Hart on behalf of Bobby Lewis, State Director

On November 16, 2010, a Construction Progress Meeting was held at the Newburg Town Hall. Although progress has been slower this past month, 76 percent of the project is finished. With the exception of 3200 feet of waterline, all of Route 26 is complete. Also, approximately 50 percent of the new waterline has been pressure tested.

USDA Rural Development has a long history of providing rural Americans with access to safe, sanitary and affordable housing.  In interior Alaska, quality housing is a basic need.  Temperatures regularly plunge far below zero, often to as cold as -60 F. Thanks to extra effort on the part of some dedicated USDA employees, this winter a number of rural families in interior Alaska communities will have homes they can be proud of.

November is National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month and a fitting time to highlight USDA Rural Development’s recent projects on tribal lands. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe of Mashpee, Massachusetts, are the direct ancestors of those who helped the Pilgrims on their arrival to New England over 400 years ago. Thanks to recent financing from USDA Rural Development (USDA RD), a means to preserve their culture and conduct tribal operations will soon improve dramatically.

David Villano, assistant administrator of USDA’s Rural Utilities programs recently provided the keynote address to the 2010 Kansas Broadband Summit in Wichita.  The Summit, entitled “A Fully Connected Kansas – Mission Possible” addressed topics of telemedicine, government services, economic development, mapping and digital accessibility.  Over 180 attended including USDA Recovery Act broadband awardees Madison Telephone Co., LLC, NEX-Tech, and SC Telcom.  The purpose of the summit was to begin building a statewide sustainable broadband focus.

After struggling for several years with a stagnant economy, the future is looking brighter for Paulsboro, New Jersey.  Earlier this week, USDA Rural Development Deputy Under Secretary Cheryl Cook, Assistant Administrator for the Water and Environmental Program Jacki Ponti, and I attended an event to celebrate a Recovery Act-funded water project that will help to stimulate job creation while also upgrading Paulsboro’s water system.

USDA Rural Development Deputy Under Secretary Vasquez and Congressman Bob Etheridge along with North Carolina Rural Development State Director Randall Gore visited the Middlesex Elementary School construction site in Nash County, North Carolina earlier this week.  The project was funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Yesterday I accompanied Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan, State Director for Michigan Rural Development James Turner and Congressman Mark Schauer on a visit to the Center for Family Health (CFH) in Jackson, a city about 30 miles south of Lansing.

Cross-posted from the White House Blog.

The estimated number of jobs created or saved through USDA Recovery Act investments in rural America continues to grow.  Today, I am in Ohio, where USDA has provided over $59.5 million in loan guarantees to help rural businesses grow, innovate and create jobs.  You can see economic activity everywhere.

On the first day of October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month 2010, USDA Rural Development and Calais Regional Hospital came together with the mission of saving lives. The hospital’s outdated mammography machine was being replaced with a state-of- the-art digital mammography machine, funded in part by a $200,000 USDA Rural Development Community Facilities grant through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.