This month, Mountain State Spotlight traveled to Pocahontas County to speak with residents about what they want candidates to talk about as they compete for votes. We spoke with residents from Cass, Hillsboro, Marlinton and other communities.
Based on those conversations, we asked Republican incumbent Del. Jeff Campbell and Democratic challenger Paul Detch how they planned to address those challenges as they run for election in the 46th House of Delegates district.
The district includes the southern portion of Pocahontas County and the northern portion of Greenbrier County.
Detch has practiced law for over 50 years in Lewisburg and taught medical law at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine.
Campbell, a middle school social studies and government teacher, did not respond to emailed questions.
Here are Detch’s responses to those questions edited for length and clarity:
While speaking to voters in your district, I heard many were concerned about rising housing costs and a limited supply of units for renters following the tourism boom. This issue is growing nationwide as there is not enough inventory. How do you propose addressing this housing shortage and unaffordable rent prices for residents?
Detch: When I was in graduate school, I studied a great deal of economics. I’ve also been a business leader here in our community for years.
The problem is we have something that is normally taken care of by the laws of supply and demand and the private enterprise system. The government should be very careful about how they start interfering. Housing should be something that the laws of supply and demand create.
The government needs to be able to make sure that the entrepreneurs and the contractors have the tools, the finances and the ability to build. We also are facing a problem in our country of available land.
People need to have access to grocery stores, post offices and police departments, and so we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to have the land and how we’re going to build it, and then how we’re going to keep the costs down so that people can afford to do it.
It’s an extremely complicated question, and you can’t just say, “Oh, we’re going to go in and build government housing.”
I’m not somebody who’s in favor of government housing, but there are ways that the government can promote private enterprise and there are ways that the government can regulate private enterprise.
Pocahontas County residents said they wanted to see more money poured into public schools. They said teachers are underpaid, and students need more resources. How do you plan to bring more funding to public schools in the county?
Detch: My mother was the first woman to be elected to public office here in Greenbrier County, and that was to the school board. Needless to say, after spending eight years in college and graduate school, I’m very pro-education.
West Virginia right now pays 49th in the country to their teachers, and the legislative solution to it was they gave a 5% pay increase at a time when we had high inflation, so basically a cut to their PEIA benefits. They need to be able to have retirement benefits, health benefits, etc, so that we can recruit any teacher. They can go in any direction and get a hell of a lot more of a pay raise, and so we can’t keep good teachers.
We’re going to have to invest money into our school systems. It’s absolutely ridiculous to me. And it’s ridiculous that we’re saying we have a surplus. We don’t have a surplus in this state. We just have a bunch of people that don’t know how to spend it.
We need to increase our educational quality and we need to establish the standards and we’ll have to pay for it, and that’s just all there is to it. I’ll be voting to increase those payments to teachers and education down the line.
Context: The National Education Association’s 2022 report ranked West Virginia 49th in the country for average teacher salaries. As of 2024, the state has dropped to 51st, with an average salary of $52,870. The Public Employee Insurance Agency (PEIA) is considering raising health insurance premiums and deductibles for state employees like teachers, citing rising medical costs.
Residents said they wanted more options for grocery stores and small businesses throughout Pocahontas County. They said they often travel between 30 minutes to an hour to grab their essentials or watch a movie at a theater. How do you plan to bring more business into the county?
Detch: I was once president of the Lewisburg Chamber of Commerce, and a part of the group that started the Main Street project about 30 years ago. What we’ve got to try to do in West Virginia is to preserve our communities and community spirit, and we’ve got to try to maintain the economy of those small communities.
First, we need our government in the community, and we should have some type of community impact statement, to see what we can do and get our government to do it.
Secondly, we need to develop entrepreneurship in this state because we’ve got things that we can sell and things that we can promote. Our small business people and our downtowns are the heart and soul of our history in this state, and we need to try to develop them and that’s what we did here in Lewisburg.
It was an economic plan we put together and we showed people what you could do. It’s not perfect, but we’re attracting people. Lewisburg is one of the only three cities in the entire state that grew in population.
We need to establish tax plans and zoning plans to make communities places where people want to live.
Voters said there was a lack of a diverse job market as seasonal jobs for attracting tourists have become more in demand. How do you plan to bring more stable, diverse jobs to the county?
Detch: Needless to say, that’s a tough question. But the key to it is we’ve got to develop the area so that this is a place that people want to live.
We’ve got to make our communities places where people want to raise children and their families. We have a high quality of life here but we diminish it when we don’t have quality systems. We diminish it when we basically spend our time trying to give the minimal amount of governmental services, infrastructure, etc.
We need to sit and have discussions and say, ‘What can we do? What products can our farmers make that are not just cattle or something?’ We need to look at domesticating ramps or paw paws or the things that are particularly unique to our area. We need to be able to do these things and have assistance to do it.