A voice for rural America
It was not an auspicious beginning. Campaigning for a seat on the Blue Earth, Minn., County Commission – which no woman had ever done successfully – Colleen Landkamer figured her best shot was doing the door-to-door thing to introduce herself to her fellow residents. Despite the fact that, having worked as a legislative aide to local Congressman Tim Penny, she was well-known in local political circles, Landkamer saw the race as an uphill battle. It was, after all, 1988, and voters in Blue Earth County were just getting used to the idea of electing women.
That point was brought solidly home when she knocked on the door of an elderly woman. “My father was a county commissioner,” the woman told Landkamer. “Only men can be county commissioners.” Briefly stunned, Landkamer recovered enough to tell the woman that, if she looked at the county commission’s budget, she would see that 50 percent of it went toward human services like health care – soft issues that many voters associate with women’s concerns. “The perception is that county commissioners deal with roads, bridges, that kind of thing,” Landkamer says. “That’s certainly true, but it’s a much smaller piece of our budget. I’ve always felt that it was important to encourage women to get another perspective.”
No one knows whether Landkamer was able to convince the woman, but she was able to convince most Blue Earth voters, and, since then, she has convinced her county – and her country – that she has what it takes to help make county policy. Her efforts on behalf of the nation’s rural counties have thrust her to center stage, giving her a strong voice in both the National Association of Counties and the U.S. Congress. Those efforts have helped put the concerns of rural counties on the national agenda. And they have made her the first County Leader of the Year of the new millennium.
Creating the Task Force
Blue Earth County, so named for the clay that colors its soil, is a sprawling southern Minnesota county. Of its 55,000 residents, 35,000 live in Mankato, and the rest are scattered over 700 square miles of hills and valleys. The county also is home to 11 other smaller towns, most of which rely on a commercial/industrial tax base.
Born just a few hours away in Minneapolis, Landkamer moved with her family to Mankato as a child. She never left, marrying a local boy and raising three sons in a place she describes as “half rural, half urban.”
It is a combination that makes her 60-hour-a-week “part-time” job challenging and interesting. Ironically, Landkamer says, many of the issues affecting rural America are the same ones with which the country’s urban cores wrestle.
For example, health care and the growing “digital divide” that separates the technology haves from the have-nots have commanded not just the attention of NACo’s Large Urban County Caucus but that of the organization’s Rural Action Caucus, which Landkamer chairs. “The issues are largely the same [for urban and rural communities],” she says. “The solutions are just a little bit different.”
Landkamer’s election to the Blue Earth County Commission and subsequent involvement with NACo provided the push that the organization needed to address those concerns. Incidentally, it was NACo President Michael Hightower, a commissioner from Fulton County,Ga., the urban county that encompasses most of Atlanta, who tapped her to serve on the association’s Rural Renaissance Task Force. “Even though he represented a large urban county, he saw the need for balance,” Landkamer says. “NACo had always tried to figure out how to address the needs of rural counties, but its efforts didn’t have much of a focus.”
Under Betty Lou Ward – Hightower’s successor as president and a county commissioner from Wake County, N.C. – the task force, co-chaired by Landkamer and Dale White of Haney County, Ore., morphed into the Rural Action Caucus. Landkamer has chaired the caucus since its inception.
“Without her efforts on the task force, it would never have evolved into the caucus,” says NACo Associate Legislative Director Eric Ciliberti. “There was nothing there before Colleen.”
Indeed, Landkamer’s enthusiasm for the caucus has helped take it from a group of 20 to 30 working members to one of several hundred, according to Bill Stanley, a Buncombe County, N.C., commissioner who has worked with Landkamer on the task force and the caucus. Stanley attributes the growth to Landkamer’s personality and drive. “She’s just so dang pleasant,” he says. “And she knows how to get things done.”
Once the caucus was established, its members went to work, defining priorities and setting agendas. But the first order of business was convincing people that “rural” did not necessarily mean “agricultural.”
It is an ongoing process; in fact, in her March testimony before a congressional committee with oversight on rural development, Landkamer continued to make the point. “Rural is not agriculture,” she told the committee. “Ag is an integral part, but it’s not the whole piece. It’s all these partners that are working together to build resilient rural communities.” “People have this American Gothic picture of rural America,” says Jane Halliburton, the chair of the Story County (Iowa) Board of Supervisors and a member of the task force and caucus. “It’s a nice picture, but it doesn’t really hold true. Rural means all kinds of different things, and Colleen understands that.” In her testimony, Landkamer told committee members that only 6.3 percent of rural Americans live on farms. More than half of that 6.3 percent also rely on off-farm incomes. Consequently, she says, the country, which has always had an “agriculture policy” needs a policy that addresses all other rural needs.
Landkamer says that right now, the greatest of those needs can be boiled down to health care and technology. She is passionately pursuing legislation that would change the Medicare reimbursement formula that tends to slight rural areas. “Health care is the biggest economic engine in any rural county,” she points out. “There’s not a rural county in the nation that is not struggling with it. And we get a much lower [federal] reimbursement than anyone else. It’s not that it’s cheaper to provide health care in rural areas; it’s just an old formula that the government uses.”
The technology issue, based on pure economics as opposed to an outdated formula, may be a tougher nut to crack. “A lot of times, rural counties are just left out,” she says. “In these good economic times, we’ve seen growth in just 40 percent of our rural counties, and those are the ones that are close to an urban center. In terms of technology, concentration is where you make your money. You don’t make any money when you’re wiring houses that are five miles apart. It’s a huge, huge problem, and there is a real concern that we will get bypassed.”
To ensure that that does not happen, Landkamer is working with NACo on a biweekly e-mail report for already-wired rural member counties that summarizes major news stories pertaining to their concerns and keeps them in an information loop. Ciliberti notes that Landkamer has pushed for development of a rural information clearinghouse that will provide success stories and prompt members to get involved in day-to-day lobbying on critical issues.
The final frontier
The hard work has been duly noted, both within her state and nationally. Besides testifying before Congress, Landkamer has worked with the Clinton Administration – Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, in particular – to help national leaders craft a workable rural policy.
Within Minnesota, she has drawn the attention of Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone, who chose her to make the speech renominating him at the 1996 state political convention. Additionally, she has been mentioned by the last four Democratic gubernatorial candidates as a viable candidate for lieutenant governor. (A brief flirtation with higher office ended when she withdrew from the race for Secretary of State in 1998, but she does not rule out the possibility of another statewide or national campaign.)
Penny, for whom she worked, is a big fan and meets with Landkamer weekly to share ideas and concerns. He particularly praises her efforts on behalf of rural areas. “She’s really invested herself in an advocacy rule at several levels,” he recently told The Free Press, the local Mankato newspaper. “She wouldn’t have to take on these bigger, broader issues in order to serve her constituents in Blue Earth County, but she sees [them] as important to all rural areas over the long term.”
Interestingly, Landkamer owes her political success not to Blue Earth’s rural areas, but to her largely urban district. “Our county is divided into districts,” says Mankato City Council President Kathy Sheran, Landkamer’s long-time friend. “Three of them have Mankato as a substantial component. That certainly helped in her initial election.” (Landkamer has run three times since, each time winning re-election handily.)
Landkamer’s success prompted The Free Press to note about successful women politicians: “There is no better example of how stereotypes are changing than to see Landkamer next to a county boardroom wall stacked with pictures of balding, retired commissioners – all the men who have ever been elected since county government began.”
At the time, Landkamer credited her success to the fact that a number of women, including Sheran, had enjoyed political success in the city. “They’ve shown that women are competent in office,” she told the newspaper.
Now, Landkamer calls county government “the final frontier” for women, noting that it is no longer unusual to see women in the state legislatures and on city councils. “It’s important that women get involved,” she says. “The issues that county governments deal with are our issues.”
Perhaps afraid of sounding chauvinistic, Landkamer quickly asserts that “it’s not an us vs. them thing” and notes that she has worked with “many, many wonderful men who have made a difference.” Peter McLaughlin, a county commissioner from nearby Hennepin County, Minn., and former chair of NACo’s Large Urban County Caucus is one of those, and the admiration is mutual. He praises Landkamer’s ability to relate to women but notes that she “is not a pushover. If there’s a fight, she’ll take it on,” he says. “But she also knows how to mobilize potential allies.”
One thing she is not, McLaughlin says, is a publicity hound. “She’s not necessarily visible, but she does a good job at building institutions,” he says.
Ciliberti agrees. “She’s not a showboater,” he says. “She just wants to get the job done.”
That ‘aw shucks’ thing
That job, as Landkamer sees it, is making sure that the nation’s rural counties see the prosperity their urban cousins enjoy. “My main passion,” she says, “is trying to figure out what we need to do to make rural areas sustainable and viable. It’s a big question. There are some people who think if you’ve seen one rural area, you’ve seen them all. But there’s a lot more similarity between different urban centers than there is between different rural areas.”
Landkamer hastens to point out that she does not see the problem as a competitive one. Within NACo, she notes, “there is no wall between large urban counties and rural counties. The issue is how to create the partnerships that will help everybody.”
Those partnerships begin in Landkamer’s community, according to Sheran. “We work often – and well – with her on issues like orderly growth and transportation corridors. She’s a great collaborator,” she says. “I’m most impressed by her interest and her activism on state and national policies that affect rural communities. The amount of time and investment she has given to developing connections with people so we can have a voice is amazing.”
“She does the small rural county routine,” McLaughlin laughs. “She’s got that ‘aw shucks’ thing down. But she’s a big time player. She has helped give rural America a voice.”