Heather Niday
Allegheny Mountain Radio
West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrissey made a swing through our region October 2 and stopped at Cass Scenic Railroad State Park to take advantage of the Wi-Fi and also checked in with Allegheny Mountain Radio. He was admiring the beauty of the fall season.
“It’s one of the many reasons why West Virginia was recently named the second most beautiful state in America,” he said. “Of course, I was bummed, I wanted it to be number one!”
“The good news is we just invested close to $20 million into our parks for refurbishing and I think that’s going to make a difference.”
Morrissey said the program funding will affect parks across the state, saying he believes when you are doing well in tourism, you need to, in his words, “double-down,” especially for an industry that provides more than 61,000 jobs throughout the state.
Acknowledging the importance of tourism and the long history of extractive industries in the state, I asked the Governor what other ideas he has for diversifying the state’s economy.
“What we’re working on is we’re trying to make sure that on the fundamentals, our taxes are competitive with the other states that we touch, so one thing that helps facilitate small business growth and also is helping lure a lot of medium and larger companies in, is when your tax code becomes more competitive with the other states we touch,” he said. “We’ve been working to lower the personal income tax and we were able to make some progress this year.”
The Governor said they are also working on easing regulations to make it easier for companies to relocate to the state, particularly in the areas of energy and manufacturing. He says those plans also include health care options.
“I was in Greenbrier County announcing many components of the Rural Healthcare Transformation to try to make people’s lives a little bit easier,” he said. “And that’s important because this is a part of the state that really could benefit from telehealth and from mobile health care.”
Morrissey said the federal funding provided by the U.S. Congress and administered through the Rural Healthcare Transformation fund will administer about $200 million to be spread out among hospitals and health facilities throughout the state, including Pocahontas Memorial Hospital.
“We’re also working to make sure that there will be adequate reimbursement; that’s a constant effort, we have to advocate through the feds to make sure the state will be able to keep the hospitals in good order. I would say that in recent years the extra boost we’ve seen from rural health and through some other payment provisions, has strengthened the hospital network in a way that the state’s never seen before. We feel pretty good that we’re on a good pathway.”
Another topic on the minds of West Virginians – the looming presence of data centers. The Governor acknowledges there is a lot of concern regarding data centers, but feels West Virginia can be smarter about addressing those concerns.
“For example, you have to have the closed-circuit water,” he said. “We’re not going to let any water get polluted. Second, if they come, we have to make sure that these developers are paying for all the build out costs so that no citizen’s electricity bill can rise. In West Virginia we’re asking everyone to sign a rate payer protection pledge and everyone that we’ve talked to across West Virginia has agreed with us on this.”
Morrissey said he sees a possibility of significant dollars coming into the state with a data center build out.
“There will be significant dollars that flow in that will go back to the people through lower income taxes; two, there will be money to the counties; three, there will be money for water infrastructure; we always have a need for more water and sewer money, and also for ways to strengthen the power grid,” he said.
Morrissey said whatever happens, any data center coming into the state has to be done the right way to protect the people and address their concerns.
Finally, with school funding from the state traditionally based on the number of students in the county, I asked the Governor how he and the legislature can ensure that funds are distributed equitably between counties with larger or smaller student numbers.
“We’re working right now,” he said. “We’ve had some conversations with the legislature. We briefed them on some of our ideas, so I do think there will be a lot of discussions about that.”
He said he does anticipate education reform and funding issues to be on the agenda for the legislature during the next session. But only time will tell if the Governor and legislature will find agreement on this and other issues facing the state.
