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Two months ago, lawmakers gathered in Charleston to kick off the 87th Legislature.
They met in committee rooms and floor sessions against the backdrop of federal ICE troops snatching up immigrants along the state’s highways.
In Minneapolis, the killing of two residents by ICE in a Trump administration crackdown caused a national furor. Meanwhile, in West Virginia, multiple state agencies were helping ICE.
Under the Capitol dome, West Virginia lawmakers moved to require state agencies to cooperate with ICE, to make helping immigrants a crime and to limit the ability of the public to photograph or record video of law enforcement attacks like those that killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
But before long, federal judges began ordering the release of dozens of those who were swept up, ruling the arrests were unconstitutional.
Legislators followed the Trump administration’s lead, prioritizing deregulation and propping up the coal industry.
Gov. Patrick Morrisey asked lawmakers for a 10% tax cut and fully funded a $300 million Hope Scholarship program, diverting resources from public schools.
And even though Legislators compromised and gave only a 5% cut, little money was left for urgent local needs like better public schools, more addiction treatment and significant spending on drinking water.
The annual 60-day legislative session is the time for elected officials to address the state’s biggest challenges.
Here’s what they did.
- Lowering power bills
- Fixing a broken foster care system
- Helping people find and keep jobs
- Giving kids a good education
- Clean drinking water and flood preventions
Lowering power bills
West Virginians have sold their valuables, missed paying other bills or skipped meals to afford their power bills.
Lawmakers stalled, weakened or refused to put rate freezes and protections for ratepayers on committee agendas.
Instead, they worked to hand out more incentives to West Virginia’s dying coal industry, which could raise electricity rates.
One bill would have frozen electric rates for one year and required state regulators to study how to lower them. But it was watered down in committee and never made it to the floor for a vote.
Sen. Laura Chapman, R-Ohio, the bill’s sponsor, said on the Senate floor that utility costs were the biggest issue for her constituents and she was disappointed the bill wasn’t advanced.
Leaving families and small businesses to deal with skyrocketing energy costs, lawmakers moved quickly to help the coal and natural gas industry.
In the waning days of the session, they raced to slash the severance tax on metallurgical coal. The state senate threw a bonus by cutting the tax on natural gas, but the bill wasn’t picked up in time to pass and died in the House.
Going into the session, lawmakers were dealing with fallout from last year’s push to open the state to data centers, despite objections from communities that don’t want them.
Despite the protests, lawmakers pushed through a set of rules that would maintain secrecy and largely exclude the public from decisions about data centers.
However, a change in those rules would require developers to disclose to the Department of Commerce how their water use would affect nearby landowners.
The data center rules are now awaiting approval by the governor, who, in the middle of the session, announced a $4 billion data center coming to Berkeley County.
Fixing a broken foster care system
Each year, lawmakers say fixing the broken foster care system that oversees 6,000 kids is a priority. Often, legislators seem to come up short.
But this year, they made some meaningful changes.
One bill lawmakers passed will speed up the process for providing funds for family members who take in kids. These kinship families previously had to complete a complex certification process that could take months.
Lawmakers also took steps to ensure foster kids get more support as they transition into adulthood.
A Mountain State Spotlight report in December found the state had returned nearly $7 million in federal funds to help kids with housing, tuition and independent living since 2010.
A bill, sponsored by Del. Adam Burkhammer, R-Lewis, requires the Department of Human Services to develop a system that provides kids with regular access to people who can provide those resources.
The bill also requires the agency to report on the system’s use of federal dollars for kids. It passed.
Another measure would have required state agencies to work with schools to make sure foster kids were given information about their options. It failed.
Lawmakers didn’t embrace reducing the state’s overreliance on out-of-state placement of kids.
In his State of the State address, Morrisey proposed a special fund to bring foster kids living out-of-state back to West Virginia. The governor’s proposal would have renovated existing state facilities to provide group homes. Legislators didn’t move it beyond the House Finance Committee.
Helping people find and keep jobs
For decades, the state has had the lowest workforce participation rate in the nation. Outside of childcare, lawmakers made little progress addressing the barriers West Virginians face in seeking jobs.
Long waitlists and child care center closures have forced many parents to miss work or school.
Lawmakers passed a bill to help stabilize the industry by expanding tax credits for businesses that offer child care and by enshrining fair reimbursement for providers. The changes come as federal officials are working to repeal rules that helped keep child care centers open.
Sen. Ben Queen, R-Harrison, supported passage of the bill and said it would help parents stay in the workforce. Queen said child care is “an incredibly important part of the state’s workforce.”
Other efforts to retain workers and help working families died this year.
Lawmakers let a tax credit that would help unpaid family caregivers with their loved ones die this year. Another would have piloted the state’s first paid family leave program for public workers, which about a dozen other states already offer.
Lawmakers made no progress on other issues, such as affordable housing and public transportation, which stand between many West Virginians and a job.
Instead, they focused on imposing jail time and raising fines for homeless people living on public property.
But lawmakers approved one housing-related investment: $10 million for the state’s only program that helps communities afford to tear down abandoned buildings after funding dried up last year.
Meanwhile, an effort to grow West Virginia’s workforce by training more people passed and headed to the governor’s desk for signing.
The bill allows the state to reimburse businesses up to $100,000 for skills training. It helps small businesses train employees who otherwise couldn’t afford it.
Another effort to attract businesses to the state was passed, expanding the state’s site readiness program by allowing development officials to access additional funding. However, it did not provide new money for the program.
Giving kids a good education
At the beginning of the session, House lawmakers heard from RAND Corporation analysts about how to improve education. They suggested reinstating eligibility for the Hope Scholarship and increasing funding for public schools.
Instead, lawmakers fully funded the state’s school voucher program to the tune of almost $300 million.
Plans to increase public school funding languished. Ambitious packages, amounting to more than $200 million, were watered down and delayed. Eventually, Senate Finance trimmed a $45 million proposal for additional special education funding to $8 million.
And that money wouldn’t even come until next year.
Senate Finance Chair Jason Barrett, R-Berkeley, said he is committed to looking at the well-documented issue and working with the House for a fix to school funding.
While lawmakers consider the issue after the session, Kanawha County will be undergoing layoffs, and potentially Cabell County, too.
But lawmakers were interested in fixing high school sports.
A bill to repeal the high school transfer portal passed both the House and Senate and is now awaiting the governor’s signature.
In the three years since the Senate allowed athletes to start playing as soon as they transfer, coaches and athletic directors have said some schools can’t even field a team because so many students are leaving for other schools.
Clean drinking water and flood prevention
The Rev. Brad Davis, a Methodist pastor in McDowell County, says that when it comes to what goes on in Charleston, he hears a lot of cynicism from people in his community.
“People in power in this state simply do not care about us,” Davis said.
The Legislature’s actions this session surrounding two issues — lack of clean water and flooding — facing McDowell and other southern coal counties probably won’t change many minds.
Lawmakers blocked multiple attempts to secure additional funding for the region to address the water crisis. They secured $76 million for water projects across the state, with no guarantee that the funding will reach those who need it most.
It would take nearly $300 million to fund water projects in just four of those counties, some of which have been waiting decades for clean water.
But as lawmakers wrung their hands over providing people with safe drinking water, they showed little hesitation in chipping away at drinking water protections.
They did so by passing legislation weakening rules for aboveground storage tanks. These are tanks that leaked hazardous chemicals into the Elk River in 2014, contaminating drinking water for over 300,000 West Virginians.
At the start of the session, Morrisey called on lawmakers to pass legislation to implement a pilot program for an early flood warning system. That failed.
But lawmakers did put $5 million into the flood resiliency office, which is a start, but won’t do much to help communities prepare for floods.
Lawmakers fill final moments with politics, not substance
As the session wound down, distracting issues began to take up hours of lawmakers’ time.
Some lawmakers wanted to legalize the sale of machine guns, while others raced — ultimately unsuccessfully — to make it harder to take firearms away from alleged domestic violence batterers.
Others focused on banning drag shows and regulating bathroom use. Legislators spent a lot of time talking about which dyes are allowed in food, but then didn’t fund food banks that make sure kids get enough to eat.
To be sure, there were a few times officials did something substantive. Lawmakers voted to give foster kids more resources, protect child care providers and spend the $38 million the state accumulated in its medical cannabis program, putting money into addiction and marijuana research.
Del. Shawn Fluharty, D-Ohio, tried again to get legislation passed that would keep parents who are being investigated for child abuse or neglect from pulling their kids out of public schools to homeschool.
Called Raylee’s Law, it was named after a child who died under those circumstances in 2018. Fluharty tried several times to include the legislation in other bills this session but failed.
On the second-to-last day of the session, the Senate launched an effort to override Senate President Randy Smith, R-Preston, to amend Fluharty’s measure into another bill.
They were successful.
On the last day of session, lawmakers milled around. They considered bills for an hour or two, then took breaks to hear farewell speeches from those not returning next year to their chamber.
All the while, Raylee’s law lay buried in a bill that was taken up in the House 45 minutes before the Legislature adjourned.
Opponents loaded the bill up with amendments. Supporters successfully limited debate, but failed to get an actual vote.
At midnight, Raylee’s Law was defeated by time and politics.
Fluharty lost his temper in the last 10 minutes of the session.
“We played political football for four years on this, Mr. Speaker,” he said. “And we did it today because we’ve had this since like 10 a.m. We wait until now to take it up. How embarrassing this legislature is. How embarrassing. Shame on all of us.”
Reach reporter Henry Culvyhouse at henry@mountainstatespotlight.org
Reach reporter Tre Spencer at tre@mountainstatespotlight.org
