Debate over issues West Virginians care about can last for hours during a 60-day legislative session.
But no amount of floor speeches about clean water, saving lives from flooding, strengthening public schools or offering a hand to the poor matter if there’s no money set aside to actually address them.
The state’s budget reveals the priorities of lawmakers.
Here are five takeaways from how legislators decided to spend this year’s budget.
Who benefits from the 5% tax cut
Before the session, Gov. Patrick Morrisey called the media to his reception room, looked into the cameras and demanded a 10% cut to the personal income tax.
He repeated that demand during the State of the State address, but his proposed budget included only a 5% cut. Morrisey left it up to lawmakers to find another 5%.
How Morrisey planned to pay for the tax cut was never clear.
On the one hand, his original plan put hundreds of millions of dollars into surplus for programs like Medicaid, which require yearly payments. By putting that line item into surplus, Morrisey avoided counting it as spending in the budget.
“He’s never come to us to talk to us about exactly what he has done on his budget. So it appears that he’s cut his revenue estimate to obtain the 5% tax cut within his revenue estimates,” said Del. Vernon Criss, R-Wood, the House Finance Chair.
The House Finance Committee did not include a tax cut in the budget. Over in the Senate, that Finance committee put forward a 10% tax cut.
Meetings between staffers and lawmakers ensued, and the final product came out to 5%. That is a $125 million cut in revenue.
For most West Virginians, the tax cut won’t amount to much. The West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy estimates 80% of the population will save between $4 to $144.50 per year.
The top 1% would save $2,300 a year.
And at every opportunity, Democrats tried to reverse who would benefit from the tax cut. In committee, Del. Sean Hornbuckle, D-Cabell, proposed tax cuts benefiting those making $75,000 a year or less, including no tax for those below $25,000.
Del. Marty Gearheart, R-Mercer, the House Majority Whip, decried favoring the poor over the rich.
“I have absolutely no intention of voting in favor of class. There is no reason for us not to value every single West Virginian with regard to our tax policy,” Gearheart said.
Del. John Williams, D-Monongalia, rebutted the whip.
“Class Warfare has already been declared in West Virginia,” Williams said. “When you see government services that middle class and poor people are completely dependent upon being cut so that we can give these tax cuts out to the wealthiest among us, that war has already been declared.”
The amendment died in committee. On the floor, Hornbuckle tried again.
The House voted it down 15-80.
Choosing how to fund education
Between the budget and additional spending bills, lawmakers chose to spend nearly $300 million on the state’s expansive — and expensive — Hope scholarship program. A suggestion to cap the scholarship, which will allow eligibility for all children this coming year, caused home school parents to pack the House Finance Committee in protest.
Homeschooled kids crawled around on the floor in the cramped committee room, playing with crayons and reading books.
Even the governor and his wife came to the meeting.
After his impromptu visit, the House Finance Committee backed down from capping the scholarship. At a press conference announcing the opening for Hope Scholarship enrollment, Morrisey took a victory lap.
“As governor, I was proud to make the decision to fully fund Hope. I got lobbied by a lot of people saying no. I put that in my budget for a reason,” Morrisey said.
Meanwhile, lawmakers watered down proposals to fix public education until there was no time left.
House leadership commissioned a study on how to fix West Virginia schools. The report by the RAND corporation recommended changing the school funding formula to weight children needing special education and living in poverty because it costs more to educate these children.
Del. Joe Ellington, R-Mercer, offered a bill that would increase funding for public schools to $6,500 per student. For children in special education, that funding would be $9,750 or $13,000, depending on the severity of their needs.
But lawmakers argued over the amounts and timeline for implementation in the House and Senate, until it was too late.The clock ran out on the final night of session with no vote.
Beating a drum, trying to get some water
An ambitious plan to get $250 million to help repair water lines in the Southern Coalfields died in the House of Delegates before it was even introduced. And so did a couple of other plans that could’ve gotten up to $20 million to the region.
It would take nearly $300 million to fund water projects in just four of those counties, some of which have been waiting decades for clean water.
Activists like the Rev. Brad Davis and the Rev. Caitlin Ware, two Methodist ministers, kept up the pressure online and at the Capitol during the session, bringing bottles of their dirty water to show lawmakers.
Del. Adam Vance, R-Wyoming, on the last day for bills to leave their chamber of origin, took a desperate last stand to have a bill for $10 million discharged out of committee, where it was destined to die, and moved to the House floor for a vote.
“I’ve been four years beating a drum down here, trying to get some water down there or something,” he said. “So that’s why I ask for discharge.”
The House voted 52-41 to discharge the bill from committee. But in order to meet the deadline, the House needed to also suspend its constitutional rules requiring a bill be read three days before passage.
That requires four-fifths of the chamber.
That measure failed 46-47, effectively killing the bill.
During the weekend that followed, House Republicans embarked on a mission to explain their vote as “procedural,” stating the bill hadn’t gone through the proper process.
The new budget includes$76 million for the West Virginia Infrastructure Council, which oversees funding for water projects. That money is being paid out of the lottery and surplus, and could be distributed to any of the state’s 55 counties.
The state estimates that it needs between $16 and $20 billion to fix water and sewer service in its communities.
A compromise on flooding
Last year, Hornbuckle pushed for $50 million from the state’s Rainy Day Fund to fund the state’s Flood Resiliency Office.
The Republican supermajority shot it down.
Shortly before Hornbuckle’s request, floods had ravaged McDowell County in February, killing three. Flash floods once again damaged cars and homes in his district in Huntington. In June, another deluge would wrack the northern areas of the state taking seven more lives.
During this year’s State of the State, the governor addressed flooding head-on, calling for $10 million to be invested into an early flood warning pilot program. Delegates from counties who experienced recent floods expressed support, but did not have the details.
To get that money, Morrisey needed to pass a couple of pieces of legislation, one to allow the resiliency office to spend money on the project, another to get money for it.
Both bills failed.
But this year, Hornbuckle managed to get some money into the budget for the office. When the House heard the budget on the floor, he successfully amended $25 million into the surplus section.
But not without debate. Del. Daniel Linville, R-Cabell, questioned if Hornbuckle’s move actually would help, citing the exorbitant cost for a floodwall in his district in Milton.
“It’s a start. It’s a compromise,” Hornbuckle said. “I really want to deliver relief and faith to the people of West Virginia, all to the spirit of bipartisanship.”
But when the compromise version came back to the House, the Senate had cut the funding to $5 million.
“We want to recognize that this is an important step in order to make sure that flooding occurs less frequently and when it does, it’s less costly and less deadly,” said Del. Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia, on the House floor.
Social safety net and the purpose of the budget
In July, Congress passed President Trump’s spending bill, which will substantially cut federal spending on Medicaid and food stamp benefits over the next decade.
About half of the state’s total budget comes from the federal government. But there was little discussion this session about putting more money into these programs to prepare for federal cuts.
Medicaid is among the biggest programs, costing around $5 billion alone. About $4 billion comes from the federal government, while the remainder is covered by the state.
Morrisey’s budget originally tried to fund a chunk of Medicaid with surplus money. Lawmakers on both sides of the capitol rejected that plan. But they still funded the state portion of the program through a patchwork of different sources — regular tax money, shifting around money from the current budget, lottery and a special tax on providers.
Williams, the Democratic delegate from Monongalia, expressed some concern about how this program, which provides health insurance to one-third of the population, is being funded. He tried to get an amendment that would give more money to the program out of surplus funds.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re on a private plan, if you’re on the Affordable Care Act, if you’re a Medicaid recipient, health care is one of the biggest issues that people face,” Williams said.
But the supermajority voted that down.
Not every piece of the social safety net costs billions of dollars. During the last couple of years of the Justice Administration, state budgets included around $10 million for funding to food banks.
Morrisey hasn’t funded that program in either of his years as governor, even after relying on foodbanks last fall to bridge a gap in benefits for food stamp recipients during the government shutdown.
As the budget discussions proceeded, some Republicans like Sen. Ben Queen, R-Harrison, promoted it as a balance between helping those with the least by fully funding programs while giving back tax money to pump the primer on the economy.
“I think our Medicaid budget is massive. I think we have a lot of people who rely on the 34 members (the Senate) here to make sure that they have a system that supports them,” Queen said. “But we also need to build a system that helps them get to the next level. If there’s not a job, if there’s not a career ladder, where they’re at, it’s hard to build hope around that.”
Gearheart, on the floor, said he would’ve shaved more off the budget if it were up to him. He said the purpose of the state budget isn’t to help the most people.
“I believe that our budget should, in fact, reflect our values. It shouldn’t always reflect how many people we can help,” said Gearheart, the House Majority Whip. “I think it needs to reflect how many West Virginians can now help themselves.”
But Williams, the Democrat from Monongalia, said this budget and past years budgets aren’t addressing the issues faced by everyday people.
“We are deteriorating our ability to help our people,” he said. “I would use as an example, should we vote on a budget without having money in there to solve the problem of dark, cloudy water coming out of the tap in our southern coal fields? Should we vote on a budget that doesn’t really attack and help the child care issue?”