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Last year, West Virginians from all over the state traveled to Charleston to attend public hearings to speak out on bills being considered by the House of Delegates.

The chamber saw robust public hearings on contentious pieces of legislation, including a bill that would have limited the use of air data collected through community monitoring programs and a measure that could have opened up teachers and public librarians to criminal liability for displaying or disseminating “obscene matter.” Both bills died.

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House approved new rules that do away with that longstanding practice and voted down attempts to make sure the public would always have the opportunity to be heard. 

“I’ve always prided this body on allowing the public to come in and at least allowing them to be heard,” said Del. Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, during Wednesday’s House floor session. “Taking away that, it’s a further path down the wrong road we’ve been going I’ve seen over the past several years to further close the wings on the eagle in this room.”

Until now, anyone, a citizen or lawmaker, could call for a public hearing on a proposed bill, and the House of Delegates had to schedule it, and post a public notice about it on their website 48 hours before the hearing. This gave time for people in Wheeling or Welch, hours from Charleston, to make arrangements to travel to the Capitol and participate in the hearing.

The elimination of public hearings is part of a broader rule change that Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, proposed to provide more committee time for review of bills.

Under the newly adopted rules, lawmakers will have to consider bills over two days. The first day of committee consideration, according to the rule, will include “taking of testimony.” However, there is no language about when committee agendas have to be published, which has raised concerns as in the past agendas have sometimes been posted only hours before the committee meets. 

“The public has all the opportunity it had to engage before, plus more,” Hanshaw said in an interview last month. “We’ve created a structure here in which members, or the citizens, for that matter, will have an opportunity to come before the body that’s actually making the decision at the time the decision’s being made.”

When the House took up the new rules on the first day of the session, Del. Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia, proposed an amendment to require a committee agenda be posted 48 hours in advance.

Hansen said he appreciated the new committee process, but the rules needed to be fine-tuned to make them work better for members of the public who want to be involved.

The now-abandoned advance notice rule for public hearings “allows people who don’t live in Charleston to make child care arrangements, maybe to take the day off from work, to figure out how they are going to get here to Charleston to make their voices heard,” said Hansen.

“Without this amendment, the only people who are going to be able to speak at the new hearings are people that are in the Capitol building anyway,” he added. 

Del. Clay Riley, R-Harrison, urged delegates to reject the amendment, saying he believes committee chairs will work to give the public advance notice. But he said enacting such a requirement could prevent the delegates from getting their work done. 

“Including this in the rules may impact our ability as a body to serve those citizens – provide services that are needed,” Riley said. He added that people who can’t come in person can still submit written comments. 

Hansen noted that written comments require lawmakers to open and read them, and they don’t offer the opportunity for clarifying questions.

After his first amendment was defeated, Hansen tried again to ensure public participation, proposing an amendment to keep the public hearing process as it was.

“People are fired up about this across the state. I’ve heard from a lot of my constituents. I’ve heard from people that are not my constituents because we’ve always considered this to be the people’s house,” Hansen said. “We ran things a little bit differently than in the Senate, and one of the things we do differently here is we let people speak at a public hearing and give them enough notice so that they can come to Charleston.”

His second amendment was also rejected.

Under the new rules, for members of the public to speak on a bill, they must be invited by the committee chair. Del. John Williams, D-Monongalia, tried to ensure that minority committee chairs could also invite witnesses to speak. 

“While we’re doing a much-needed overhaul to our committee process, I see no problem in putting in writing, essentially codifying, that we’re going to give the minority chair the ability to call witnesses,” Williams said. “I think that this is very important.” 

House Majority Leader Pat McGeehan, R-Hancock, urged delegates to reject Williams’s proposed amendment, saying that the committee chairs must have the “discretion on their own to manage and take ownership of their committee process, and this just simply interferes with that principle.”

Williams’s amendment was also rejected.

At the end of the 75-minute floor session, lawmakers approved the new rules in a voice vote.

Reach reporter Sarah Elbeshbishi at sarah@mountainstatespotlight.org