Community Development Issue

Over 40 percent of New Mexico's citizens live in rural areas. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate is nearly a third higher outside of major cities and rural job markets are often left behind when it comes to high technology. In an effort to boost employment and encourage technological investment and development outside of New Mexico's metro population centers, Senator Domenici created the Rural Payday initiative. Rural Payday is an effort to help New Mexico's smaller cities and towns prepare themselves to meet the needs of today's information and technology based businesses. Already there has been great success: Rural Payday, in close collaboration with local and state economic development efforts, has led to more than 3,000 jobs at call centers in many New Mexico communities, among them are Alamogordo, Carlsbad, Espa��ola, Grants, Las Vegas, Moriarty, and Taos.

Along with Rural Payday, Domenici strongly supports the New Mexico Technology Research Corridor (TRC) initiative. TRC is an effort to bring more coordination and focus to facilitate commercial development and job creation from technology developed at federally-funded laboratories and universities in the state. He is spearheading this urban-rural cooperative effort not only to increase economic growth in New Mexico's more urban and border areas, but also to attract high tech jobs to rural areas that have the workforce and infrastructure to sustain private-sector technical jobs.

Nearly 15 years after Senator Domenici helped push a technology transfer bill through Congress, we are seeing its benefits with thousands of spin-off jobs being created in New Mexico. But they are mostly in the Los Alamos-to-Albuquerque corridor. New Mexico must identify rural communities that also have the infrastructure and workforce base to host such companies. Federal investments in Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories are ramping up. Technologies developed at our labs can be commercialized anywhere. Fuel cell technologies, space commercialization, and environmental technologies have tremendous potential not only to solve problems in rural areas, but also to be developed and produced in rural communities.

As chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee that funds the national laboratories, Senator Domenici has been able to promote CRADAs, business park development, and other laboratory collaborations with universities and the private sector.

For more information on Rural Payday, please visit:
http://www.ruralpayday.com/

For information on USDA's Rural Development programs, visit:
http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/

What is a CRADA?
http://www.usgs.gov/tech-transfer/what-crada.html

For more information on Senator Domenici's views and activities on community development, visit our online News Center.

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