The Special Circus - Part 3

In this part of the Special Circus, the House again had several successes, but once again fell victim to the mirage of ‘creating’ jobs by spending millions.

The Corrections and Emergency services crises were the primary reasons we had a special session. The Corrections issue has been with us for years, with no significant progress. Last year, for the 2nd time in five years, we had to deploy our National Guard to support Corrections’ staff. The costs are enormous – nearly $20 million per year. A special committee worked on the issue after the regular session, and came up with limited fixes to the crisis. The key solution is paying Corrections officers and staff enough to keep them in their jobs. Most of our Corrections personnel can go to other states to earn more, so we must pay more or this crisis will only deepen.

Eventually, we passed bills that will provide about $25 million dollars to increase pay and retention incentives. These will be critical to keeping Corrections personnel, but may not be enough. We must do more work to resolve this crisis in the regular session.

The Legislature knew this during our last regular session, but other ‘priorities,’ such as giving the Leftist Form Energy company nearly $300 million, as well as a facility probably worth $850 million, and nearly $1 billion dollars to our Economic Development (aka ED) agencies, distracted the legislature from focusing on and paying for our real crises.

The same day we voted to better pay our Corrections personnel, a major federal lawsuit began against the Justice administration due to conditions in our prison, largely as a result of underfunding of our Corrections system. The lawsuit potentially will require nearly $300 million additional pay for Corrections personnel and maintenance to facilities - coincidently, about the same amount we gave Form Energy.

If this lawsuit is sustained, we will forfeit much of our remaining budget surplus due to our socialist spending spree, and may also be forced to halt elimination of our income taxes, and possibly be forced to raise taxes.

The Governor saw another opportunity to add to his spending spree, and we got SB 1029 and HB 129 to pay $25 million for a new airplane hanger for Pierpont Community and Technical College. This is another bill that should have gone through regular session, where it would have been vetted in the Education Committee. The Conservatives raised this issue, but the answer back from the proponents was that this was an opportunity to help another impoverished area of the state, and thus couldn’t wait. The real answer is that this was another opportunity to slip more in spending in, hoping the People of West Virginia would not notice. Pierpont currently has a hanger being used by Boeing, Mitsubishi, Pratt & Whitney, and others to help train aircraft technicians and maintenance personnel. The aerospace industry has major personnel shortages, including pilots and mechanics. The new hanger will help with this training. When I asked the proponents on the floor if these massive companies were asked to help build the hanger that would primarily benefit them, they could not answer this fundamental question. If this had gone through the Education Committee, we would have known.

Boeing is a $137 billion dollar company. Mitsubishi has $35 billion dollars. Pratt and Whitney had $21 billion in revenue in 2021. This hanger could easily have been funded by these companies and the other beneficiaries of the Pierpont program. So why do the taxpayers of West Virginia get stuck with the bill? And why didn’t the ED Authority pay for this via the nearly $1 billion we gave them in the regular session? The answer, of course, is that the ED folks were busy spending that money on more Green energy companies.

The Conservatives raised these major questions and objections during the floor debate. Conservatives came close to defeating this and pushing it to the coming regular session, but once again the Democrats, with the corporatists and to many others voted to try to buy would-be jobs with millions.

I’ll finish up in the Special Circus – Part Four

MONTANI SEMPER LIBERI

Bill Ridenour