Delta poverty aid doesn't compare to woodpecker funding

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In the cash-starved Arkansas Delta, federal dollars to fight poverty don't usually come so easy, but the discovery of the once-thought-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker has $10 million headed to the area.

The bird was recently rediscovered in the wooded swamps of eastern Arkansas and $10 million was appropriated last month for the bird with promises of more to come.

In contrast, the Delta Regional Authority, which serves an eight-state region that encompasses some of the most impoverished areas of the country, has a $6 million 2005 budget.

"I think there is a definite irony there," Rodell Mollineau, a spokesman for U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., said Tuesday.

"We realize the excitement of the discovery of a bird that everyone thought was extinct and we are part of the excitement. We understand where the will to open up the coffers comes from. That being said, we have a lot of priorities we wish we could show this administration and generate this much excitement for," he said.

Phil Baldwin, Southern Bancorp chief executive, is working with the nonprofit Walton Family Foundation on a plan to spur development in the Delta. He said the slow drip of funding from Congress to the Delta Regional Authority hinders economic progress in the region.

"We fund an almost extinct bird but we won't fund our own citizens. You have children that are going hungry, who cannot get an education, generations of poverty," he said. "We have relegated the Delta to be a Third World country within our own country and that's not acceptable. The Delta Regional Authority was established to try and change that."