Charleston Gazette-Mail. December 12, 2023.
Editorial: Battle joined against ‘Maryland Mooney’
A nickname for an opponent is a true sign that a sludge-throwing, eye-gouging fight of a primary is underway.
Gov. Jim Justice, or his backers, seem to have found one for Rep. Alex Mooney, R-W.Va., as the two battle for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination next year: “Maryland Mooney.”
For anyone unfamiliar with why that adolescent alliterative alias works, Mooney moved to West Virginia to run for office after his political career in Maryland fizzled out. Indeed, Mooney barely lives this side of Maryland and is notorious for his rare appearances in the congressional district he represents outside of election season.
The “Maryland Mooney” moniker was unveiled in a new TV ad calling Mooney a Washington insider and an opponent of former president Donald Trump, who has endorsed Justice in the race. The ad comes as a Club for Growth political action committee ad backing Mooney has been airing, asserting that Justice is tied to Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton through campaign donations. The new, pro-Justice ad was paid for by the Conservative Americans PAC.
Justice and Mooney are both highly flawed candidates with enough ethical and courtroom baggage to fill all the steamer trunks in an ocean liner. So, at least for now, the PACs are veering around those entanglements and shaping strategy in very broad but definable terms: Justice was elected governor as a Democrat (although he switched parties eight months into his first term in 2017) and Mooney is anti-Trump (which, in West Virginia, is bad, regardless of two impeachments, four criminal indictments and a riot at the U.S. Capitol, never mind that such a claim ignores Mooney’s consistent, over-the-top Trump cronyism).
Mooney’s camp would seem to have the more difficult path forward if this is how the race ends up being defined, if for no other reason than West Virginia voters don’t seem to care much about party switching.
Evan Jenkins was a Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-Republican when he knocked off Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., in 2014, after Rahall had held office for nearly four decades. Justice’s own party switch didn’t hurt him in his election to a second term in 2020.
Last year, voters put former long-time Democrat Mark Hunt in the state Senate after he switched to the Republican Party. Voters in ruby red West Virginia only seem to care that the “R” is there behind a candidate’s name, regardless of how it came about (which might be one of the reasons Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., isn’t defending his seat and also why most presume the vacancy will be filled by whoever wins the GOP primary).
Justice was also a Republican before his first-term gubernatorial run and made his party switch back to the GOP so long ago (with Trump by his side, no less) that tying him to a president who’s been out of office for nine years and another politician who achieved the Oval Office only as a first lady in the 1990s seems like a real stretch.
Of course, this is only the beginning. With powerful backers prepared to unleash millions of dollars in the primary, it’s safe to assume that the worst is yet to come.
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The Herald-Dispatch. December 12, 2023.
Editorial: Chesapeake bypass will advance plans for an outer belt
Ohio is doing its part to complete the Huntington outer belt highway plan. Now it’s up to West Virginia to say whether the last part will be built.
Last week, Ohio state Rep. Jason Stephens, R-Kitts Hill and speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, announced the Connect4Ohio program had approved $126 million for construction of the remaining part of the Chesapeake bypass, a new connection between Chesapeake and Proctorville, Ohio.
Construction of the two-lane, limited access, 5.2-mile section could begin as soon as next summer and be completed by 2026. The road would connect the East Huntington bridge in the Proctorville area to Ohio 7 in the Chesapeake area near the bridge between downtown Huntington and Chesapeake.
It looks like it pays to have a Lawrence County resident head up one house of the Ohio General Assembly. Scioto County learned that a few decades ago when Vern Riffe, D-Lucasville, was speaker.
(Side note: $126 million for 5.2 miles of two-lane road shows that building a new road is getting expensive at $24.23 million per mile).
The Chesapeake bypass earlier this year secured $30 million for right-of-way acquisition from the state Transportation Review Advisory Council, which approves road construction projects in Ohio.
The outer belt has been a work in progress for more than 60 years. Interstate 64 south of Huntington was built in the early 1960s, followed by the West 17th Street bridge later in the decade, the bypass around the western part of Chesapeake in the 1980s, the Merritts Creek connector between U.S. 60 and W.Va. 2 in the early 2000s and, most recently, the bypass around Proctorville about a decade ago. With the bypass around the eastern part of Chesapeake about to begin, all that’s left is a bridge over the Ohio River on the eastern end of the belt.
Lawrence County officials hope Ohio’s decision to complete its part of the outer belt will give their counterparts in West Virginia the encouragement they need to build a new bridge over the Ohio River near Fairland East Elementary School. The bridge project seems to have gone underground since the pandemic hit in early 2020.
The bypasses Ohio has built and is building won’t be complete without the bridge. The Merritts Creek connector won’t reach its full potential without the bridge.
The new bridge would relieve congestion on U.S. 60 between the East End bridge and Interstate 64. It would provide people in Ohio with easier access to commercial development and health care providers in the Barboursville and Ona areas. The down side (for West Virginia) is that it could open up the eastern end of Lawrence County to more residential development to compete with housing in eastern Lawrence County. The thing is, though, that with industrial development in the Apple Grove area of Mason County, enough growth could come to benefit both Cabell and Lawrence counties.
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The Intelligencer. December 8, 2023.
Editorial: Better Controls Needed on Spending in West Virginia
It seems no matter what level of government is being examined, here in West Virginia we live down to our reputation of being poor followers of rules and bad stewards of taxpayer money. Last month, lawmakers learned problems with spending COVID-19 money made their way into many of our county school systems — not just the couple of which we had already been made aware.
“It seems like there is a massive problem and we should be reviewing everything,” Delegate Kayla Young said. “It seems like that we don’t have full control over what these (county school boards) … are spending.”
“Full control” might not be quite the right solution, but members of the Joint Standing Committee on Government Organization were told legislative auditors found numerous concerns with how county public school systems handled COVID funding.
“The frequency of improper purchasing procedures and other … grant violations warranted a reassessment of risk and adjustment to the system’s capacity and structure,” said Brandon Burton, a research manager with the Legislative Auditor’s Office. “The current monitoring process lacks appropriate structure due to a lack of written policies and procedures for the cyclical monitoring process.”
According to a review of monitoring by the Department of Education’s Office of Federal Programs, 37 counties out of 54 monitored were found to be non-compliant for not following proper purchasing procedures, spending money on unallowable expenses, or exceeding indirect cost rates.
Again, while “full control” over what county boards are spending is a step too far, it is essential lawmakers find a way to clean up the mess. If the DOE’s job is to monitor that spending on behalf of the federal government, a reworking of the rules and renewed emphasis on monitoring and enforcement is essential.
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