National rural panel to hear local voices in Hazard next week

In Perry County, brain drain is not an abstract phrase. It means fewer young workers filling shifts, fewer future business owners opening shops on Main Street, and more grandparents watching children leave Hazard for jobs elsewhere. That pressure will be front and center when a bipartisan national panel focused on rural America meets with the public from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 13, at Hazard Community and Technical College.

The session will center on job creation, workforce training and the role of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence in rural economies. For Hazard, those are not policy buzzwords. They touch the same questions families ask every year: Can a young person train here, work here and stay here? Can a graduate build a life in Perry County without having to move to Lexington, Louisville or beyond?

Hazard Community and Technical College is a natural setting for that discussion. The college is one of the 16 schools in the Kentucky Community and Technical College System and operates six campuses in eastern Kentucky. It already serves as a bridge between education and employment, with selected allied health classes also offered in the Bailey-Stumbo Building at the University of Kentucky Center for Rural Health near Appalachian Regional Medical Center in Hazard. A Dec. 1, 2024 feasibility study for the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education even examined whether HCTC could be transformed into a four-year residential university, underscoring how central the campus has become to the region’s future.

The numbers behind the conversation are sobering. Perry County’s population was 28,473 in the 2020 Census and an estimated 26,555 in July 2025. The county’s civilian labor force participation rate was 47.4 percent in 2020-2024. In 2024, the Kentucky Lantern reported that just under half of residents over age 16 were employed, more than a quarter lived in poverty, and median household income was about $45,000, far below the national figure of about $75,000. Those trends help explain why local leaders keep returning to workforce development and higher education as the most direct tools for keeping young people close to home.

The panel also comes to a county still marked by flood recovery. On June 5, 2024, Melissa Neace became the 100th flood survivor to receive a home built or rehabilitated by the Housing Development Alliance. More than 600 new homesites had been laid out, and the region had seen an influx of $298 million in federal disaster-relief money. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland said the July 2022 floods damaged 8,408 homes, destroyed 542 homes and killed 44 people across 13 counties, while nearly 500 property owners used buyout programs and seven high-ground sites were expected to hold 560 houses. FEMA also opened a Disaster Recovery Center in Perry County on Feb. 28, 2025.

The real test for next week’s meeting will be whether it produces ideas that can move beyond talk, linking education, employers and new technology in a way that gives Perry County’s young people a reason to stay, and a reason to come back.