Upstate NY has 53 “distressed communities.” Comparing the worst to two Pennsylvania shale communities shows us Gov. Corruptocrat’s fracking ban didn’t help.

The Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association “dividing line” video tells a powerful story but the most compelling part of that story is told in Census data. The American Community Survey is the tool the Census Bureau uses to estimate population, incomes and the like on an annual basis. It has proven quite accurate and I went to it yesterday to check out the facts on a rural community in Chenango County, New York know as the Town of Plymouth. It’s not far from Norwich and part of the Southern Tier of New York that has been denied fracking by Gov. Corruptocrat at the behest of gentry class families hoping to empty out as much of Upstate as possible. Plymouth explains a lot.

Why Plymouth? Well, it has to do with an interesting article the other day that caught my attention. It was about the “most distressed places in Upstate NY” and listed “53 communities struggling to get by,” ranking them from bottom to top. I perused the list and saw the most distressed place in Upstate New York in the judgment of a public policy research organization called the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) is the Plymouth zip code (13832). EIG says distressed communities are defined as those with the lowest “economic well-being,” based on a combination of factors including the following:

• Adults without a High School Diploma
• Poverty Rate
• Prime-Age Adults Not in Work
• Housing Vacancy Rate
• Median Income Ratio
• Change in Employment
• Change in Establishments

I know a little about Plymouth. It was the subject of a somewhat intense fracking debate five years ago when out-of-town ... to tell the Town Board they’d better enact a ban or death and destruction would be coming their way. Rebecca Roter, who later split her own estate in Pennsylvania to make a small fortune and run off to Georgia, after telling others her property values were destroyed, was there, as were others. The Town Board was anything but impressed and never passed a ban, but Gov. Corruptocrat took the matter out of their hands to not only deny economic opportunity to Plymouth, but also the rest of Upstate as he created the dividing line between hope and darkness.

Read more:

http://naturalgasnow.org/dividing-line-upstate-ny-distress-pa-success/