In his final State of the State address, Jim Justice took his audience on a ride through what he sees as his greatest accomplishments as he trotted out person after person who he said had benefited from his administration’s signature programs.
When he brought up Jobs and Hope, the program to reintegrate people recovering from substance use into society, he had a man stand up who had graduated from the program. When trumpeting raises for correctional officers, he had a CO stand up. When he bragged about economic development, he had executives from various companies stand up.
And each time, the 134-member body — along with their guests and an assortment of staffers — all stood up each time to applause.
They clapped for his wife’s therapy dog program, they clapped for the veterans, they clapped for the nurses — they clapped and clapped and clapped. At one point, Sen. Mike Oliverio, R-Monongalia, whispered to the press table, “it’s like a Catholic Mass, this standing and sitting.”
This year’s address — which usually includes a lot of asks of lawmakers for the next year’s budget — focused more on the achievements of Justice’s last seven years sitting in the Governor’s chair. Harkening back to his first address — in 2017, as a Democrat — Justice described the bleak fiscal picture of the state.
Seven years later — and with a Senate run in the mix — everything is fine, according to Justice.
“We don’t just have a seat at the table, we are the seat today,” Justice said.
In terms of big requests of the Legislature, Justice said he wanted lawmakers to continue to work towards the elimination of the personal income tax, and asked them to get rid of the social security tax as well. He also asked for another 5% pay raise for public employees, a few spending requests and a fix for the high school transfer portal; after lawmakers changed the portal last year, more than half of last season’s football games were big enough blowouts to trigger the mercy rule.
“I know you were trying to do the right thing, I tried to tell you before as a coach, this wasn’t a good idea,” he said. “High school sports are really important — you can’t have scores of 93-7 or 86-0.”
But regardless of the picture Justice painted — he did bring some literal pictures for legislative leadership of Babydog — West Virginia still faces some serious challenges. Here are some of the biggest issues Justice didn’t address in his final State of the State speech:
Substance abuse treatment
Entirely absent from Justice’s speech was any mention of West Virginia’s ongoing substance abuse crisis; the state still leads the nation in drug overdose deaths per capita and nearly twice as many West Virginians died from overdoses in 2022 than in 2016.
While he mentioned recovery in passing — touting the success of his signature Jobs and Hope program that matches people in recovery with jobs — there was no mention of specific state policies or investments like the ones experts say would help West Virginians struggling with substance abuse. That could include removing restrictions that prevent people from accessing effective treatments like methadone and increasing financial support for recovery resources like sober living houses.
Education
In his speech, Justice said education reforms would continue to be priorities for his administration.
“I don’t care what the school is,” he said. “Walk into the fourth grade class and maybe Miss Lily’s class, and ask Miss Lily to come out in the hall and leave her out in the hall just a second and go back in and say to the kids, ‘What do you all think of Miss Lily?’ And I’ll bet you overwhelmingly they say we love Miss Lily.”
He touted regular raises for teachers and other state employees, as well as the Communities in Schools program, a drop-out prevention program at selected schools that connects students with services in their communities like tutoring, counseling and safety net programs.
But he didn’t address plans to combat widespread teacher and school personnel shortages; those problems persist despite raises and schools are often reliant on substitutes. Teachers’ unions say they will struggle with upcoming PEIA premium increases and many teachers have left the profession completely in recent years.
He also praised new educational options for parents, like the Hope Scholarship, which allows families to use state money normally allotted to public schools to pay for education options like private schools, tutoring, private services for kids with disabilities, and he promoted $5 million in “seed money” for charter schools.
He didn’t mention that Hope Scholarship and charter school funding comes from revenue that would normally go toward public schools, which are facing widespread teacher and other school personnel shortages. They’re also dealing with extensive system-wide shortfalls for kids who need special education in public schools, since most children with disabilities won’t have access to private or charter school options.
The Third Grade Success Act, which was lawmakers’ prioritized education legislation last year, instructed the state to hire 2,500 teachers’ aides for kindergarten through third grade classrooms. Lawmakers have noted that children who lack grade-level expected reading and math skills by third grade are more likely to drop out later on.
But Justice didn’t outline any plans to address some of the law’s ensuing complications, as people move into those newly-created aide positions. That includes the loss of about 250 aides for kids who require special education services, as of the start of this school year, as well as the loss of child care center staff members.
Along with a lack of staff designated to assist students in special education, including teachers and aides, groups that assist families with children with disabilities have warned of a drastic increase, since pandemic school shut-downs, of suspensions and expulsions of children with disabilities. They say that students with disabilities aren’t receiving the services they need, whether that’s therapy, an aide or tutoring. Following a bill last year that allowed teachers, versus administrators, to exclude “disruptive” kids from classrooms, lawmakers are also expected to enact more school discipline legislation this year.
PEIA
For years, West Virginia’s Public Employees Insurance Agency hovered on the brink of a major financial crisis, as frozen premiums left the agency in a growing deficit. Public employees, meanwhile, argued that they were being saddled with health care that was increasing in costs while declining in benefits. Five years after state teachers went on strike over the insurance, and after years of temporary stopgap funding, Justice said last year that PEIA would finally get its permanent fix.
Instead, the state increased costs for the more than 200,000 employees enrolled, raising their premiums significantly. And insurance premiums are set to increase further this coming July, frustrating both public employees at the state level, and county agencies and employees tasked with paying rapidly increasing insurance costs at the local level.
It’s left a lingering irritation that the state’s PEIA “fix” didn’t truly resolve the concerns about costs that were raised years ago, and that the agency still does not have a permanent funding source that can handle continually rising health care costs.
In 2024, the governor is hoping to calm concerns with a fifth annual employee pay raise, proposing a 5% increase that would, in theory, help employees offset insurance costs.
“Hopefully this will more than cover — and it will more than cover — the PEIA extra costs,” Justice said.
But lawmakers have already noted that actually passing a bill giving the raises — which only apply to state employees and do not go to counties or municipalities — will be highly dependent on their willingness to put more money into the state budget after addressing other priorities. And that could potentially be a tall task given the Justice administration’s love of flat budgets.
Crisis in foster care and child protective services
West Virginia continues to have the highest rate of kids in state custody in the nation – currently more than 6,000 kids are in foster or kinship care. But Justice mentioned foster care only to tout lawmakers’ move last year to separate the Department of Health and Human Resources into three separate agencies.
“Our foster care system needs us to continue to step up,” Justice said. “At the end of the day we need to do all we possibly can to help these families and help these kids and we’re going to do it.”
Still, criticism plagues the agency and how it has handled the cases in the past. The state is still battling a lawsuit filed on behalf of former foster kids demanding accountability within the agency for case mishandling and improper investigation into allegations of neglect and abuse. Last year, a judge hit the agency with sanctions for their delay to produce key documents.
During his speech, Justice also gave a nod to efforts to reduce the number of child protective service worker vacancies.
“There’s been real improvement, we’ve gone from vacancy numbers of 33% down to 17,” Justice said. “But there’s so much more to do.”
According to the coordinator of a Kanawha County children’s advocacy center, an organization that supports families of child victims, CPS workers are still facing overwhelming caseloads and find it “impossible” to do their jobs well. In one Sissonville case, neighbors allegedly made calls to CPS workers about the state in which five Black children were kept by their white adoptive parents, since as early as March of last year and as late as October, according to 911 call records.
Last year, the Legislature passed a law instructing state officials to reduce CPS worker caseloads and employ workers in regions based on population to result in fewer delays in investigations. In an internal budget request, health officials asked Justice for a $9 million increase in funding, compared to last year, to accomplish this by hiring 100 new CPS workers.
Jails
While Justice talked about the moves made last year to recruit more correctional officers by raising their pay and promised to have the National Guard out of the jails by the summer, there’s still a long way to go to fix the state’s troubled jails system.
Multiple investigations by Mountain State Spotlight have shown the reckoning at the Southern Regional Jail wasn’t out of nowhere — issues and concerns with the jail’s condition had been ruminating for months prior to a deluge of bad press in spring 2022.
At the time, Justice’s assurances that everything was fine at the jail didn’t match what a specially-trained team of correctional officers found when they performed a cell-by-cell inspection of the facility.
Today, there are still hundreds of vacancies in the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation and a $100 million appropriation earlier this year for maintenance only addressed a portion of the division’s needs for locking doors, roofs that keep water out and fences that keep people in.
Legacy pollution costs
Justice gave a nod to West Virginia’s historical role as an energy powerhouse, reminding those listening to “never forget” about the state’s coal and gas workers and fossil fuel industry. But absent from his speech was any mention of the environmental problems energy extraction has caused.
Recently, the federal government’s prioritization of tackling legacy pollution and curbing the release of methane — a greenhouse gas that greatly contributes to global warming — has renewed attention to the damage left by the oil and gas industry across West Virginia.
The state is peppered with both orphaned and abandoned wells, which no longer produce oil or gas but can still leak methane. While abandoned wells still have a solvent owner, orphaned wells don’t — either because the company went out of business or there is no record of the driller. Because of this, the responsibility of plugging and remediating these wells falls to the state, an undertaking that West Virginia regulators don’t have the resources to thoroughly tackle.
While new federal funds from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law could help state regulators plug roughly 1,700 wells, it’s only a fraction of the documented orphaned wells in West Virginia. And even then, the exact number of wells isn’t known. Since wells drilled before 1929 were not required to be registered with the state, there are tens of thousands of undocumented orphaned oil and gas wells scattered throughout the state, according to the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey.
“This is just scratching the surface,” said Ted Boettner, a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute. “That’s just the orphaned wells. There’s another 12,000 abandoned wells and tens of thousands of undocumented orphaned wells in West Virginia.”
Affordable child care
As pandemic-era subsidies expire, working families across West Virginia are facing challenges paying for child care. At the same time, child care centers are struggling to stay open due to a combination of lack of funding and losing staff to a newly created elementary school aide position. Now, both Justice and some lawmakers have signaled support for a new tax credit for families.
During his last State of the State address, Justice said that West Virginians “need this and need this very badly, right now,” as he proposed an independent Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit for “those folks who are struggling with child care.” A similar proposal was also introduced in the Senate by a bipartisan group of lawmakers.
But no mention was made of the other side of the equation: improving access to child care across the state. As of November, there were an estimated 25,828 children under age 6 who needed care but didn’t have it.
Increasingly, elected officials are starting to discuss child care as an economic issue, recognizing if there is no solution in the near future, the state’s economic growth could be stunted. During a panel discussion in November, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner acknowledged the importance, saying “for our economy to grow, we have to address the issue that is affordable child care.”
The ways West Virginians die
West Virginians face tremendous public health problems. The state not only has the worst fatal drug overdose rate in the country but also alarming rates of firearm, traffic and suicide deaths.
Public health researchers often group these types of deaths, along with a few others like homicide and falls, as injury deaths. As a whole, injuries are the most common way U.S. residents under 45 die. And in West Virginia, the situation is even bleaker.
In 2021, state residents were nearly 40% more likely to die from causes like firearms and overdoses than they were in 2016. If deaths continue to accelerate, West Virginians could soon be dying of injuries at double the rate of Americans.
The state government could help reverse the trend and prevent more West Virginians from dying. Among other policies, lawmakers could improve access to gun safety tools, syringe services and suicide prevention resources.
But in recent years, the West Virginia Legislature has sometimes left the issue unaddressed. In other cases, it’s passed bills that could worsen the problem. State laws that approved permitless concealed firearm carry in 2016, restricted the ability for people who use drugs to get clean needles and syringes in 2021 and authorized college campus gun carry in 2023 have all been cited by experts as policies that could harm public health.