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Things to know before you decide to recall council

The effort to recall all seven members of Morgantown City Council has stepped up a notch. It seems the more than a month of word-of-mouth recruitment hasn’t garnered the 3,849 signatures required to trigger a recall election, so organizer Todd Stainbrook has said he and others will start going door-to-door. (Stainbrook ran as a write-in candidate for Morgantown’s 7th Ward during the 2019 council race and ran for a seat in the West Virginia House of Delegates in 2020 — and was unsuccessful both times.) Stainbrook has narrowed his focus to the “low morale and mass ...

Get ready — WVU students coming to Morgantown

In case you haven’t noticed the uptick in traffic or the proliferation of fresh-faced youth in the grocery stores — West Virginia University students are coming back to Morgantown this week. “Welcome Week” at the university begins tomorrow and extends through Tuesday, with classes starting Aug. 17. So here are some things to keep in mind as students flood the University City. Traffic will be much worse. We get spoiled every summer with 30,000 fewer cars on the roads and drastically shortened commute times. But, now that students are back, it will take longer to get, well, ...

Taxpayers spent a lot for special session flop

The Legislature’s special session that concluded Friday, July 29, was a massive waste of taxpayers’ money — at $35,000 a day for five days for a grand total of $175,000, to be exact. You likely don’t need us to tell you what that kind of money could have paid for, other than a week of legislators squabbling and producing nothing of value. Even with wasteful spending put aside, the special session was a total flop. Legislators had been clear that Gov. Jim Justice’s income tax cut proposal was virtually a nonstarter. And then, to throw instructions for the Legislature to ...

Tax holiday is your opportunity to save

If you need to do any kind of back-to-school shopping, this is the weekend to do it. As of yesterday and extending through Monday, West Virginia is having a sales tax holiday on back-to-school related items, which means you won’t be charged the 6% (or 7% within certain municipalities) tax on certain items. The hope is to encourage people to shop at local businesses. Broadly, the tax holiday covers clothes, school supplies and instructional material, sports equipment, computers and tablets. The specific list of what is covered is extremely long, but we’d like to make your ...

IRA a mixed bag, but seems to be worth it

Sen. Joe Manchin’s support for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 has given the general populace hope for progress on climate change, health care and tax reform, though Sen. Kirsten Sinema, D-Ariz., could still potentially sink the bill. (The Koch network is lobbying both Manchin and Sinema to change their minds.) However, climate activists decry that it is not enough. The compromise bill pulls back on the more ambitious climate measures and the price of Manchin’s support was to funnel government money to fossil fuels. But, the legislation offers incentives to individuals and ...

W.Va. in trouble with ignorance at the helm

There’s nothing quite like the chill of terror that runs down your spine when you realize the people dictating the laws that constrain your life are a bunch of ignoramuses. This, of course, in reference to some of the stunningly stupid comments West Virginia senators made on the final day of the special session. (We’ll leave our discussion of how the whole effort was a waste of taxpayer money for our Sunday edition.) Sen. Robert Karnes, R-Randolph, posited that he couldn’t support an amendment to allow an abortion for rape/incest victims who report the abuse to a mandatory ...