The regular session is over, but Gov. Justice may give lawmakers more work to do
A special session is likely on the horizon. Regardless, we're gonna keep plugging along.
Good morning.
Today is Friday, March 17th — and sorry to disappoint our readers of Irish descent who may be celebrating St. Paddy’s Day — but there is nothing exactly remarkable about the date, at least in terms of lawmaking in West Virginia.
The state legislature’s regular session wrapped up last weekend, which means the 60 Days moniker has become obsolete. But we promised a recap before we move on to our next project — and given that this corner of your inbox/the internet is still hopefully familiar (and we still have your email addresses), it just made sense to publish this update here.
Speaking of the session being over: a whole two months went by without a walking bridge over a small creek being named after me or a lookout point somewhere in the Eastern Panhandle being commemorated for my brother-in-West Virginia-journalism-and-goofballing, Giles.
We’re not upset, really. But I figured it wouldn’t hurt to drop some hints to current or future lawmakers that each of us would be open to leaving behind some kind of legacy. The goofier, the better.
We’ve taken a couple days off to catch our breath from the session and recover from the spring forward time warp. But as we regain our footing and gear up for what’s next, we surely won’t turn down a coffee.
Recapping an entire 60-day legislative session can be a bit challenging. After all, multiple storylines emerge — with some falling apart entirely, and some gaining way more traction than expected — all to coalesce together into a jumbled theme that makes varying degrees of sense.
In all, lawmakers approved 332 unique pieces of legislation. Gov. Jim Justice has signed more than 50 of those bills and let two go into law without doing anything. None have so far been given the big rubber stamp with the word “VETO” in big block, red lettering.
That leaves bills for him to decide upon. He has 15 days — except for Sundays — from sine die to make the call once a piece of legislation lands on his desk. (Thanks to Senate Communications Director Jacque Bland for the reminder.)
Given that the budget is the only bill that needs to be passed in a legislative session (or by the end of an extended one, I should say) — and that document controls basically all of state government operations — that seems like the best place to start.
Ahead of the Day 60 mark, lawmakers inked $4.87 billion for the upcoming fiscal year which will run from July 1 through June 20, 2024. Informing spending in the coming fiscal year will be the 21.25% personal income tax reduction, a $2,300-a-year pay raise for teachers, school service personnel and State Troopers — a raise that teachers union leaders argue will be offset by premium increases to the state employee insurance program known as PEIA.
While Gov. Justice boasts budget surpluses of more than a billion dollars — a figure his administration projects to be more than $1.7 billion by the end of the current fiscal year — many critics of the tax cuts and the governor’s budget projections say those numbers hardly reflect reality, especially in a volatile climate for severance taxes on coal and natural gas.
The long-beleaguered West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources is also set to become three separate agencies with three separate cabinet-level secretaries. The DHHR has long drawn scrutiny for high turnover of staff, inefficiencies of services and other troubles. And while Gov. Justice vetoed a similar effort a year ago, he signed off on the split this go-around.
The “Campus Self-Defense Act” was another marquee item this session — having passed after years of effort. With the signing of the bill, West Virginia joins 11 other states to allow firearms on campuses. Now, administrators from public colleges and universities are gearing up to put in place safety measures to account for the legislation. A fiscal note on a similar bill that failed to pass in 2019 estimated the cost to universities across the state — and, thus, on taxpayers — at $11 million a year.
Another big theme this session was LGBTQ rights. While bills that would have banned drag shows in public failed to make headway, a measure to ban gender-affirming care for minors did pass. The bill originally would have also banned hormone therapy for trans youth, but an amendment on the Senate floor on Day 59 reeled back that provision.
Gay rights advocates are also concerned over the passage of the bill that would forbid “excessive government limitations on the free exercise of religion.” LGBTQ advocates say it would give businesses a “license to discriminate” and undo years of efforts on the municipal level to outlaw discrimination in housing and employment based on sexual orientation or gender expression.
Lawmakers may not yet be done in terms of big-ticket items. Gov. Justice signaled this week he may call lawmakers back to Charleston to address the ongoing state of emergency related to staffing in West Virginia jails and prisons.
The issue has been well reported. Justice announced in August a second state of emergency related to corrections officer vacancies since taking office in 2017. But despite that ongoing declaration of trouble, lawmakers could not settle on ways to address the problem in the course of 60 days.
The West Virginia Poor People’s campaign has called for a federal civil rights investigation. The group delivered a petition to Gov. Justice last month.
In the meantime, there’s been another inmate death in state custody — this one at the South Central Regional Jail in Kanawha County.
Gov. Justice is no stranger to calling legislators back for a special session. In fact, he’s done so at least once each year since taking office, except for 2020. Some have been simple, while others saw Gov. Justice issuing a proclamation ready for lawmakers to make quick work, only for the House and Senate to need a bit of time to hash things out.
While some special sessions under Justice have been run-of-the-mill technical cleanups of bills the governor vetoes, others have been much heavier lifts — such as dealing with education reform or putting a near-ban on abortions — sometimes necessitating months-long breaks in between work sessions.
Nevertheless, the overtime post-regular session comes at a cost to taxpayers: roughly $35,000 each day they put in work at the Capitol.
Speaking of Gov. Justice, he’s disputing this week’s report in the Wall Street Journal that linked a potential run for Democrat Joe Manchin’s Senate seat with a decision to explore selling coal assets owned by his family. “Gimme a blooming break,” he said during his virtual briefing on Wednesday. He said it’s ridiculous to link the two and “that’s all there is to it.” Before Justice made those comments, MetroNews spoke to the WSJ (paywall) journalist who first reported the move.
Another small town is losing its newspaper. The Welch News, “the Spirit of McDowell County,” announced plans to shut its doors immediately this week.
Permanently Closed: The Welch News Shutters All Operations - The Welch News
The closure of one small newspaper in one small town in rural West Virginia may not seem like a big deal, but at a micro level, who’s going to serve as the people’s eyes and ears at city hall meetings? Or keep an eye on the McDowell County Commission?
After nearly 100 years, it won’t be The Welch News any longer.
At a macro level, Welch is hardly alone in losing its newspaper. It’s a problem faced by rural communities across the country.
Think of the following link as the Cliff’s Notes version of a 2020 study on the health of local journalism by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The headline seems pretty stark to me but the subhead is sobering as well — “at least 1,800 communities that had a local news outlet in 2004 were without one at the beginning of 2020.”
A quarter of all U.S. newspapers have died in 15 years, a new UNC news deserts study found - Poynter
The effort we plan to put into this newsletter can hardly replace local outlets like The Welch News, but we plan to at least make up for the loss in some small way. After all, both of us cut our teeth as West Virginia journalists.
Seems like now is as good a time as any to start giving back.
As we’ve said all along, we’ve been scheming on ideas for the future. We aren’t quite ready to unveil anything, but the two of us figured out over the course of the legislative session that we have a sort of Vulcan mind-meld going on when it comes to the tone and focus of this kind of work.
While we do have some ideas in mind (including a podcast, because, well, we are audio guys) we need a bit of help refining our ambitions.
Which is why we put together this short survey.
Do us a favor and take a few moments to tell us what you think. And if you know anyone interested in helping us become a juggernaut of West Virginia news media through a sponsorship, we might entertain that kind of offer, too. It gets kind of awkward begging for coffee donations all of time and having a little bit of breathing room to do what we’d like to do would be nice.
That’s it, at least for now. At this point we’ll see you in your inboxes when we see you.
We’re going to migrate things under a new banner here on Substack soon.
So, if you’re not interested in keeping up anymore, let us know and we will take you off the list I’m pretty sure you can unsubscribe yourself, if you want to. But everyone seemed to like us for the two months of the session, so why in the world would you want to run away now?