When we visited northwestern West Virginia, students frequently said they’re worried about school and campus safety. Others interviewed in the region often brought up violence and threats, including bullying and family violence like domestic and child abuse. Another common theme was financial stress.
As part of Mountain State Spotlight’s “Citizens Agenda” approach to covering this year’s elections, we asked candidates for the area’s 9th District House of Delegates seat about these issues. Trenton Barnhart is the current Republican delegate and is running unopposed for reelection.
Find out which House district you live in here.
These interviews have been edited for clarity.
MSS: Residents wanted to talk about types of violence. Charities told me they often see single mothers who were once in abusive relationships. They also see grandparents caring for abused children. School-age students mentioned two recent suicides at Tyler Consolidated that followed bullying. And I spoke to many young people who had also been bullied. Young people in high schools worried about school safety and college-age youth worried that struggling other students who conceal carry could hurt them.
So the question would be, as a lawmaker, how have you worked to prevent violence like bullying and abuse, and what will you commit to doing in the future to prevent violence in schools and families?
Barnhart: The biggest thing that I feel that we need to do in those areas is, and as a member of the health committee, we certainly want to prevent any types of abuse.
And as a member of several committees, we want to do that. We want to listen to stakeholders. We want to be proactive in what we do.
For example, for victims of these types of abuses, we want to have harsher penalties for the perpetrators of the abuse, so that way that the victims get justice. We always want to seek to do that. I always feel that when it comes to people that commit harsh crimes, there has to be a harsh penalty to be something that sort of is preventative.
As they look at it, they say, ‘Well, I don’t want to commit something like this, because if I do, the state of West Virginia is not going to tolerate it, and we’re going to strike back in a harsh way.’”
So, we want to make sure that the criminals that aim to harm people or to harm those who basically are in a situation of not being able to speak for themselves, so to speak, we want to make sure that there’s harsh penalties in there to try and prevent those types of things from happening. That’s my biggest thing.
Context: According to the U.S. Department of Justice, people planning to commit crimes are less likely to do so if they believe there’s a high probability they’ll get caught, but laws and policies to increase the severity of punishments are ineffective, generally because the people committing crimes are unaware of those laws.
MSS: Do you want to address bullying specifically? I’m wondering if you have the same answer for that, since that’s about kids?
Barnhart: When it comes to bullying, I can speak as somebody who has relatives in the school system to know that our school system is working every day to try and provide outreach services and wrap-around services to help those students and to help facilitate those relationships.
It’s very difficult to address, obviously, because at the end of the day, that’s interpersonal student relationships, and I think we need to provide more tools in the tool chest for our educators and for our administrators in our school systems to be able to try and address these issues as best that they can.
But there’s really not a one-size-fits-all answer to that issue, because it’s hard to police something that can happen in many different ways. It’s not all just what happens in the school system. It could be online. It could be outside the traditional school setting, maybe on the way home or on the school bus, or out in the community somewhere.
And I think we have to realize that in order to address that issue, we need to work with our stakeholders. We need to work with our school system. We need to work with local law enforcement. We need to work with our counselors and our school system as well. Listen to the people who are involved and try to help find solutions and provide more tools in their tool chest to address those problems.
MSS: People in these communities frequently brought up their finances. Working people are struggling to make ends meet as they deal with rising costs. Charities are seeing increased need. They didn’t see oil and gas jobs reduce the number of people who rely on them. Additionally, some said that people are sometimes in predicaments that force them to use social programs, like single mothers. Some people said they don’t believe people want to work, but I personally didn’t find anyone who admitted that in an interview. And lots of residents also spoke about low-wage jobs in the area. They said higher-paying oil and gas jobs have sometimes gone to out-of-state workers or require travel outside the state.
As a lawmaker, what have you done, and what will you do to help people in this area boost their incomes, and what will you commit to doing in the future to help people become more financially secure?
Barnhart: So multiple things. Let me start by saying this. I just finished my fifth legislative session, and during that time a lot of people asked me, “Why did you get involved?”
I got involved because of the issues you’re talking about. I’m seeing too many people have to leave our state, leave our communities to find work and other opportunities. My goal as a lawmaker has and always will be that no matter what your child decides to do with their life, whether they want to go to college or they want to go to the workforce or they want to go to the military or learn a trade, whatever they wish to do, I want them to be able to do that vocation here in the state of West Virginia.
So you say, “Well, how do we get to that point?” Well, we need to continue to provide economic development opportunities. We need to work with our stakeholders in our Department of Economic Development and our Department of Commerce, and empower those people to go and find the businesses, recruit the opportunities to our state, and on a regulatory side, we need to look for the regulatory barriers that are keeping those entities from coming to West Virginia. And we need to remove those barriers, make our state truly open for business, and realize that no dream should be too big for the state of West Virginia, and we should be striving each and every day to realize that our best resources are people, and if we want our state to grow and prosper, we have to find ways to keep them here, and that’s going to be what’s going to help our economy, ultimately.
I would also say as far as specifics, I want to note that during my time in the Legislature, which coincides with much of Governor Justice’s term, we have cut taxes in West Virginia by a billion dollars, a billion dollars. That’s almost a fifth of what would have been the state budget. And as a result of doing that, we’ve been able to help people out on their income tax, on their vehicle tax rebate, which will come into effect in this coming 2025 tax year, for small businesses on relief for the business inventory tax on their tax liability if they’re under a million dollars in total assets.
We’ve tried to reduce the tax burden and reduce the regulatory burden, to bring those opportunities to our state, but also respecting what is already here and trying to perpetuate that as well. And you mentioned about some of our oil and gas resources we’re blessed with, we’ve tried to invigorate that too. We’ve tried to keep our opportunities to support our natural resources, to respect what we have, and also look at the future as well, with making sure that we support all opportunities to make West Virginia and America energy independent.