by Joseph Gresser
ISLAND POND — The annual meeting of the Northeast Kingdom Collaborative is on the move. Last year residents of Caledonia, Essex, and Orleans counties met at the Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro. On November 4, they convened in Island Pond, the group’s first meeting in Essex County.
The organization was created 26 years ago when the Northeast Kingdom was made one of five REAP (Rural Economic Area Partnership) zones in the nation under that year’s Farm Bill. As such, the collaborative works with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development program, which administers additional money set aside for the Kingdom under the REAP program.
The collaborative’s role, in part, is to give the USDA Rural Development program’s staff information about the economic priorities in the Kingdom. Abby Long, the collaborative’s executive director, guided a session halfway through the day-long gathering, that was intended to identify the area’s most pressing issues.
As in past years, those concerns include the need for more housing, better access to medical care — especially in Essex County which currently has only one physician for every 6,000 residents — and educational improvement. Those issues ….
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