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Even without full grant, electric bus a great deal

School boards across the state have been on an emotional rollercoaster this week as the federal government plays yo-yo with grant money for electric school buses. Multiple West Virginia counties thought they were going to get new zero-emission electric buses essentially for free, courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency. And then the EPA re-evaluated its standards and decided nine West Virginia counties — including Monongalia County — weren’t rural enough to qualify for the grant program to buy the buses. And then three counties — Mon, Harrison and Mineral — had ...

The 2 best road bills

And 1 bad resolution Every West Virginia politician campaigns on fixing the roads, and yet every year, our Legislators fail to take any substantive action that would actually improve them. The problem is always complicated by the fact that there are four types of roads: city, county routes, state routes and U.S. routes — and you can have all four types running through any given municipality. Cities are in charge of maintaining city-owned roads; the state is responsible for maintaining all the rest. And the state has fallen far behind on its maintenance duties. There are two ...

W.Va. killed the death penalty 60 years ago — leave it dead

West Virginia Senate President Craig Blair is among the lawmakers clamoring to bring back the death penalty in the Mountain State, but doing so would be a bad idea. West Virginia abolished capital punishment in 1965, but the last execution was in 1959. According to the West Virginia Encyclopedia, 94 men were put to death between 1899 and 1959 — in the early years by hanging and later by electric chair. Unsurprisingly, just under half of the men executed were Black, even though people of color made up less than 6% of the state’s population at the time. We’re not going to ...

The Good, the Bad and the Stupid 3

Good: SB 175 — updates offenses of extortion and attempted extortion. It specifically adds “or other thing of value” (understood to include sexual acts) to the list of things that, if threatened, would qualify as extortion. It also adds that “threaten[ing] to publish in any manner images of another person’s intimate body parts” to the list of acts that qualify as extortion. This bill passed the Senate and currently sits in House Judiciary. Based upon the discussion surrounding the bill, it sounds like lawmakers are targeting a specific phenomenon known as “sextortion” ...

Stop self-serving party switches

As we said last week, we aren’t fond of the idea that candidates should have to run as the party on their voter registration, because that could disadvantage candidates who are registered Independents. (Even though Independents make up about a quarter of West Virginia’s registered voters, candidates running as Independents or on a third-party ticket tend to struggle in partisan races.) That said, we’re tired of politicians switching parties to help themselves get elected. Don Blankenship, who has long been involved in Republican politics and who has run for office as both a ...

A garden for a garden

One of the ongoing controversies surrounding the Green Bag Road/Kingwood Pike roundabout project is that it would require the destruction of the Hastings family’s community garden. Despite the family’s efforts, it seems there will be no way to save the garden, but there is a silver lining: As a requirement for Phase I of the roundabout project, the Morgantown Monongalia Metropolitan Planning Organization and City of Morgantown will administer $15,000 in grants to assist other community gardens in the area.      This solution does not and cannot replace ...