Statehouse beat: West Virginia continues to fall behind on roads

Adding insult to injury, the $225 million Nitro project was constructed complete with an amusement park-style, front-end de-aligning dip that has unnerved many a driver. 

Morrisey cited statistics from the Federal Highways Administration showing that West Virginia has the second highest percentage of bridges in poor condition in the U.S. If even one of those deteriorating bridges were to collapse, needless to say, it would be catastrophic.

I rarely venture beyond the East End and downtown Charleston, and when I do, it’s usually by train. However, I had occasion this week to drive out into the county, and was aghast to see roads in such bad shape, to the extent that one of the bigger potholes I passed was dutifully marked with a traffic cone.

Morrisey also found that instead of solely investing in infrastructure, a portion of the $2.8 billion helped fund a bloated Department of Highways bureaucracy, with divisions employing as many as five assistant directors when a single assistant would have sufficed.

On these pages, I’ve commented at length about how even if the $2.8 billion had been entirely devoted to building and maintaining roads and bridges, it would have been a proverbial drop in the bucket of what is needed.

It’s been 10 years since the Blue Ribbon Commission on Highways formally issued its report, offering a comprehensive long-term plan for bringing state roads and highways up to par.

The report concluded that in order to fund the completion of state highway projects and adequately maintain the state road system, the state would need to nearly double its annual investment in the Road Fund, which at the time was $1.1 billion a year. (And that’s back when a billion dollars was real money, and billionaire oligarchs were relatively uncommon.)

As then-Sen. Mike Hall, R-Putnam, noted at the time, “I think people understand you can’t do it without a revenue measure.”

Naturally, state politicos didn’t have the stomach for either a massive tax increase or extensive tolling of state highways, so the report ended up where so many reports find themselves, on a shelf gathering dust.

And every year, the state has fallen another $1 billion behind what it needs to have a safe, viable network of roads and highways.

Justice, now a Republican in the U.S. Senate, considers Roads to Prosperity to be his crowning achievement as governor, so much so that in an astounding display of tone deafness, he has repeatedly called for making the day voters approved the bond referendum – Oct. 7 – a state holiday.

On that day in 2023, Hamas launched an attack on Israel, the deadliest assault on the country since its independence, resulting in over 1,200 Israeli deaths and significant casualties among both civilians and military personnel.

Now, the $2.8 billion has come and gone, and while it provided a few shiny projects here and there, what most West Virginians are left with are crumbling roads, unsafe bridges and $120 million a year of bond debt that will hamstring efforts by Morrisey and future governors to undertake road improvement projects for the next 23 years.

Prosperity, my foot.

Meanwhile, Morrisey’s allegations of mismanagement and bureaucratic bloat are worthy of further investigation, perhaps even criminal investigation. I would think at the very least, a contract-by-contract review of each of the Roads to Prosperity projects is warranted.

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I don’t expect Republican policies to be rational, but could they at least be consistent?

Congressional Republicans, for instance, are telling us the national debt is so out of control that vitally needed programs like Medicaid and SNAP (what us Boomers used to call food stamps) have to be slashed, at the expense of allowing millions of Americans and hundreds of thousands of West Virginians to suffer and die. Yet, the self same federal budget bill they are proposing provides tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy that are so massive, they alone will grow the national debt by $2.4 trillion.

Where is the logic in that?

Likewise, the Trump administration says that federal government is so bloated that it has set out to indiscriminately eliminate hundreds of thousands of federal jobs, including some 80,000 Veterans Administration positions, in order to cut costs.

Yet, despite the supposed financial crunch, the Trump administration is staging a massive Soviet-style military parade in Washington, D.C. to honor a five-time draft dodger at a cost estimated at $45 million.

Additionally, Trump announced he will rename seven U.S. military bases in honor of Confederate generals, defying an act of Congress in 2020 to remove the names of those traitors who took up arms against the United States. It cost nearly $40 million over three years to change the base names (signage alone had to be a significant expense), and now Trump wants taxpayers to pony up another $40 million to change them back, for no good reason other than personal whim and to appeal to members of his base whose only apparent source of happiness is “owning the libs.”

None of it makes any sense.

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Speaking of consistency, now that Huntington city officials have opted to end the tradition of displaying a Pride flag at city hall during Pride Month, one hopes they will be consistent in enforcing their commitment to neutrality.

That means no Christmas decorations at city hall this year, since not all Huntingtonians are Christian, nor do all celebrate the holiday. Indeed, many residents may, like Charlie Brown in the classic 1965 special, resent the crass commercialism that pervades the holiday.

Likewise, no displays for Passover or Kwanzaa, and any commemoration of Festivus should be strictly forbidden.

Official neutrality must also extend to St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Labor Day and Thanksgiving. Halloween is a definite no-no, given its pagan roots.

Yes, if neutrality is to be the official position of the city of Huntington, it must apply in all instances. Otherwise, the refusal to display the Pride flag will be less an act of neutrality, and more an act of bigotry.

Speaking of, what are we to make of Morrisey’s announcement that he is canceling Juneteenth as a paid holiday for state employees?

Morrisey, who certainly knows how to win friends, contends the state cannot afford to give employees consecutive paid days off for the federal holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. on June 19, and for West Virginia Day on June 20.

If one of the two holidays had to go, why wasn’t West Virginia Day given the ax, considering that West Virginia is one of just a handful of states that treat the state birthday as an official holiday?

For state employees who will see pay cuts take effect next month in the form of a major hike in PEIA health insurance premiums, and who may have been taking solace in making travel plans for what they thought would be a four-day weekend, Morrisey’s announcement is a real grinch-like double whammy.

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Finally, I’ve been coming to my little corner of the Capitol Press Room for more than 35 years. In semi-retirement, I suppose I could write this column from home, but being a creature of habit and routine, I find it comforting to continue coming to work at the Capitol, even if only part-time these days.

So imagine my surprise to learn Monday that a water line in the Capitol basement had burst, flooding the Press Room, as well as multiple other subterranean offices nearby (many of which contain servers and other computer equipment).

Fortunately, the damage to my little corner was relatively minimal. The charger for my laptop got fried, and a sizable pile of notepads, documents, and other statehouse detritus that I had stacked on the floor next to my desk had to be tossed – not a big loss since I’d been meaning to throw it out for years.

I’ve spent the week being serenaded by the roar of multiple powerful Servpro fans being used to dry the office’s wall-to-wall carpet. If there are any typos or errors in this week’s copy, I will not hesitate to blame the distracting nature of all the loud fans.

That I continue to have this column, a source of income, and my own little space in the Capitol is largely thanks to Doug Skaff Jr., who was instrumental in seeing that this column continued after I left full-time employment at the Gazette-Mail at the end of 2021.

Being the savvy businessman he was, I think Skaff realized that continuing the column would be mutually beneficial to myself and to the paper. I’m forever grateful for his trust and support.

Like all other West Virginians, I was stunned to learn of Doug’s tragic death, and extend condolences to his family, and his many, many friends.