By Mike Tony
For HDMedia
At a Friday news conference in Charleston, Gov. Patrick Morrisey presented his administration as a force for clean water leading a state where so many desperately lack it.
“Today, we emphasize clean water,” Morrisey said.
But Morrisey’s administration’s actions frequently have contradicted those words.
Morrisey at his news conference announced $9.5 million in Abandoned Mine Land Economic Revitalization (AMLER) grant funding for five critical water and sewer infrastructure projects in McDowell and Mingo counties, where clean water has been hard for thousands of residents to come by as many live with discolored, foul-smelling water and recurring boil water advisories, and cash and infrastructure-strapped public service districts.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s Office of Abandoned Mine Lands and Reclamation administers funding for economic development projects on abandoned mine lands through its AMLER Program.
But Morrisey’s administration renewed its support for measures in the days leading up to Friday’s AMLER funding announcement that could threaten the state’s water quality and supply, in line with past moves Morrisey, long an outspoken critic of environmental regulations, has taken that block clean water protections rather than advancing them.
In Morrisey’s 13 months in office, announced water and sewer infrastructure investments typically have targeted parts of West Virginia other than the southern coalfields despite that area’s comparatively high concentration of residents in poverty shouldering the burden of water they can’t trust.
That lack of trust has led many to rely on costly bottled water while still paying for water they don’t use for drinking or cooking, travel to fill up on “clear” but bacteriologically compromised water from roadside springs, and watch as discolored water stains their clothes, sinks and tubs. Common exceedances of iron and manganese leave their water rusty or black, with a metallic taste, even when those contaminants aren’t considered a public health risk.
And the $9.5 million in support announced by Morrisey, while welcomed by local officials at Friday’s news conference, still leaves an apparent eight-figure gap for those projects when compared with their combined price tags as reported by the state last year.
West Virginia had the country’s highest percentage of public water systems with health-based federal Safe Drinking Water Act violations — 29.2% — in 2024, according to a Gazette-Mail analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data.
Health-based violations represent exceedance of maximum contaminant or residual disinfectant levels.
At what they billed as a “Rural Rally for Safe Water” at the Capitol Monday, water quality advocate members of the faith-based coalfield organizing and advocacy group From Below urged greater investment from state lawmakers in southern coalfield water infrastructure.
“It’s our turn, and our turn is now,” said Rev. Brad Davis of From Below, an elder in the United Methodist Church serving five churches throughout McDowell County. “Water is life, and we in the southern coalfields are fighting for our lives.”
Morrisey administration fought proposed water disclosures
The West Virginia House of Delegates is poised to pass legislation backed by Morrisey that would keep confidential from West Virginians how much water proposed “high-impact” data centers, which often consume massive amounts of water that can strain water utilities, plan to withdraw or use.
The House Energy and Public Works Committee advanced rulemaking in that legislation, House Bill 4983, to do that after it narrowly rejected a bipartisan amendment proposal that would have kept project water use plans confidential but required the Department of Commerce to include in project proposal intake forms questions information on planned project water use.
The committee advanced HB 4983 with that amendment rejected after Garner Marks, general counsel for Morrisey’s Department of Commerce, objected to it and other arguments favoring gleaning more information from data center developers about how much water they plan their projects intended for West Virginia to consume.
The amendment rejected by the committee in a 12-8 vote would have required the Department of Commerce to gather from data center certification applicants:
An assessment of potential water quantity impacts to state water resources of proposed high-impact data centers, including:
- The volume of water to be withdrawn and returned per month
- The groundwater and surface water resources to be used
- The latitude and longitude of the proposed water withdrawals
The amendment was narrowed from a previous version in which the DEP would have been required to review and verify the potential water quality impacts to state water resources after Marks took issue with including a DEP requirement in what he called “a Department of Commerce bill.”
But Marks’ opposition persisted even after the DEP requirement was removed from the proposed amendment offered by Assistant Majority Whip Jordan Bridges, R-Logan, and Deputy Minority Leader Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia, with Marks saying the Department of Commerce “doesn’t have any people to address” or assess the information sought via the amendment “one way or the other.”
“[I]t seems like this would be better [as a] subject of a different bill,” Marks said.
HB 4983 is a measure authorizing the Department of Commerce to issue a legislative rule to set the framework for certifying a high-impact data center or microgrid district under another controversial piece of legislation, last year’s Morrisey-requested House Bill 2014.
HB 2014 is a 2025 state law that has drawn widespread opposition by stripping communities of local control and requiring most of the property tax revenue the projects would generate from local taxing bodies, a move estimated to cost counties and school districts millions.
The planned rule advanced by and within the Energy and Public Works Committee would deem confidential all petitions seeking certification of a high-impact data center and all letters of intent seeking certification of a microgrid district.
A high-impact data center could be any data storage or equipment facility with a critical power demand of at least 90 megawatts. A microgrid district, under HB 2014, would be a zone up to 2,250 acres where electricity generated is used only within or delivered to the wholesale market.
HB 2014 holds that any information provided by a data center that it identifies as confidential business information is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The law requires the Department of Commerce secretary to make available to the governor and Legislature a list of all certified high-impact data centers “and all relevant information,” with specifically identifying information to be removed to ensure confidentiality.
The combination of HB 2014 and HB 4983 would be a state setup in which West Virginians are in the dark about not only data center plans but potentially resulting water impacts in their neighborhoods.
Those impacts could be significant.
Large data centers can consume 3-5 million gallons of water per day — roughly 5-8% of the total amount withdrawn for public water supply throughout West Virginia in 2023, according to DEP data.
Marks told the House and Energy Public Works panel on Feb. 10 that the state is “working through” an intake form that does ask for water use information, although he was “not sure it’s live just yet.” Marks said the state already had received “a few” high-impact data center certification petitions, though none had been deemed “administratively complete.”
HB 2014 gives the department 14 days to approve data center certification proposals, a time frame that committee Vice Chair Mark Zatezalo, R-Hancock, called “difficult” and made him not want to put the DEP in the position of evaluating proposals in that time frame. Even though the amendment as voted on wouldn’t have required DEP involvement, Zatezalo voted against it.
DEP officials testified to the committee before its votes to reject the Bridges and Hansen amendment proposal and subsequently advance HB 4983 without it that water users have no duty to report their plans for withdrawing large quantities of water, that the DEP can’t control where developers withdraw from, and that there is no state permitting program for large water quantity consumption.
Bridges told the committee prior to its votes that his amendment was an “acknowledgment for the people to understand that we’re trying to do something for the water in our area.”
“Our area in southern West Virginia is just devastated, from Wayne County to McDowell, to Mingo, Logan,” Bridges said. “We’re hurting for water. We’ve got an extremely bad water situation. This is just an extra step.”
The discussion over data centers on Monday spilled onto the House floor, where the House rejected proposed amendments aimed at strengthening water protections from data center use after a 90-minute-plus debate.
An amendment proposed by all nine House Democrats and rejected in a 70-23 vote would have set the same requirements for assessment of potential water quality impacts as Hansen had proposed in committee, with that assessment to be made available to the governor and Legislature after removing specifically identifying information to ensure confidentiality of the information for any planned high-impact data center.
An amendment proposed by Delegates Henry Dillon, R-Wayne, and Chris Anders, R-Berkeley, and rejected in an 87-6 vote would have went further by prohibiting data centers under the rule from withdrawing groundwater or aquifer water for cooling purposes and accessing groundwater under emergency, temporary or conditional permits, while requiring cooling water be sourced from municipal reclaimed water systems or non-potable surface water sources expressly approved for industrial use.
“It’s not just these far-left, tree-hugging activists who send us the mass emails which we all get,” Dillon said in a House floor address Monday. “It’s not those people we’re talking about here today. It’s those people who stop us at the gas station, in the grocery aisle, that say, ‘What are you doing to protect us?’”
HB 4983 is scheduled for a vote on its passage Tuesday.
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