After 20 years of red tape, business dealings and broken promises, a Mingo County drag racing strip may finally open
MYRTLE – On a cloudy Saturday in April 2016, a crowd gathered on a former Mingo County mountaintop. Hundreds of car enthusiasts and residents joined to celebrate completion of a new drag strip on a ridge flattened off by coal mining.
Local politicians showed up too, eager to promote a rare and long-awaited win in Southern West Virginia: an economic development project coming to fruition on a mountaintop removal mining site. They promised crowds would bring tourism and excitement, and show that this land, even damaged by mining, was still valuable.
“Once you mine the coal, you leave the water, the power, the sewer, then you can bring a plan in, just like we did on this racetrack,” said then-state Sen. Art Kirkendoll, a Democrat from adjacent Logan County.
Nearly a decade later, this community is still waiting. There has been false start after false start. Promoters are optimistic the drag strip will finally open this fall. But the story of its delays, its ups and downs, and the long road to getting this close paints a picture of the hurdles the residents face as they search for a post-coal economy.
Don Blankenship’s post-coal mining plan
This tale starts about 20 years ago, with Mingo County native Don Blankenship. The hard-nosed former CEO of Massey Energy thought if the county built a racetrack, tourists would come.
Blankenship spent a year in federal prison, convicted of conspiring to violate mine safety standards at the Upper Big Branch Mine, where 29 workers died in an April 2010 explosion.
But he remains popular with some in Mingo County who see him as a benefactor behind community projects. His racetrack idea resonated.
Blankenship joined forces with the late Mike Whitt, a respected former long-time director of the Mingo County Redevelopment Authority, to get more than $2 million in grant money to get the project off the ground.
Since then, dozens of people have tried to help to get the track up and running. But racing fans who’ve followed this journey have seen the project met with hurdles at every turn.
Mountaintop removal sites were supposed to be developed. Flattened land was intended to be turned into things like industrial sites, public parks, schools and residential communities. But state and federal regulators for years allowed coal operators to level the hills, looking the other way and not enforcing post-mining development mandates of environmental laws.
And the story of the Mingo racetrack illustrates the struggles that local leaders, developers and citizens are left to overcome: a maze of red tape, government loans that are hard to pay back, confusing instructions from public agencies, clashing agendas of public officials and a lack of help where local resources are in short supply.
“In the big picture, we didn’t transition fast enough from a coal economy to a tourist economy,” Blankenship said. “We had the connections, but we couldn’t get it put together, because the political environment just doesn’t allow you to move quick enough.”
‘Playing in the dirt’
Not far from the drag strip along the Logan-Mingo county line, ATV riders speed around curves on the rugged Hatfield-McCoy Trails, bringing tourism dollars to the area.
As coal jobs have declined, investors have built ATV rider lodging on former strip mines and new restaurants have opened up for riders. But while it’s made progress, the effort hasn’t yet lived up to lofty economic promises. And there are still signs of economic distress and population decline, driven by the continuing decline of coal.
Terry Sammons, who’s worked on economic development in the county for decades, believes tourism will need to be an essential component of economic growth for years to come.
“When I was a child, no one came here,” Sammons said. “They always were leaving, and now it’s just so refreshing to see people recognize the beauty of West Virginia and embrace it.”
A former board member of the Mingo County Redevelopment Authority and now an adviser to it, he noted that years ago, the county enacted a plan in preparation for the decline of coal.
Sammons rattled off examples of local efforts: the Coalfield Development nonprofit is training locals to construct lodging, and mined land is being used for farm animals and growing crops.
Blankenship remembers the Hatfield-McCoy Trails project was increasingly bringing visitors to the area when Massey workers started carving out an oval dirt track on the mine site in the Myrtle area, several miles from Delbarton. He’d learned about dirt track racing from his son, a fan of the sport.
“I saw a link between the trail system and dirt track racing, because it seemed that people that enjoyed the outdoors and enjoyed, so to speak, playing in the dirt, were also fans of dirt track racing,” Blankenship said.
He said he and Mingo County officials approached federal and state economic development officials, and they received about $1 million for the project from then-Gov. Bob Wise’s administration and $1.2 million in funds from the U.S. Economic Development Administration.
Blankenship had big plans for the grand opening. His son was going to race Nascar driver Kyle Petty on opening day. The Goodyear blimp was going to be there. The World of Outlaws racing series was interested.
“I had the connections at that time, with the Pettys and with the people in NASCAR and everywhere else that I could have been a big influence,” Blankenship said.
Funding was spent on track utilities, according to county officials.
But there was a major hurdle. By 2008, Joe Manchin was governor, and he decided to make local officials pay back state funding, which had previously been described as a grant.
“He just said he didn’t think it was a priority for the state,” Blankenship said. Manchin, now a U.S. Senator, did not respond to questions about that decision sent to his press office.
When Donnie Bishop heard about Manchin’s decision, he and a friend gathered and brought 20,000 signatures to the West Virginia Capitol in Charleston to ask Manchin to forgive the loan, but he said Manchin told them Mingo County needed public water and sewer more than a racetrack.
The project remained a priority for Mingo County. But promoters of the track were still searching for someone to improve the facility.
At the same time, CONSOL Energy wanted to mine coal from an adjacent site. But, under pressure because of significant water quality damage from mountaintop removal, federal regulators were making it hard for companies to get permits to bury waste rock and dirt — the material that used to be the mountains — in nearby valleys, burying streams.
Locals who were bigger fans of drag racing also pushed for a drag strip instead of a dirt track.
So CONSOL struck a deal with county officials. The coal giant would build the track, if it could first dump its waste rock and dirt from the adjacent mine onto the racetrack property.
Bill Runyon, a former superintendent for CONSOL Energy and also a member of the Mingo County Redevelopment Authority board, estimated the deal preserved about 100 mining jobs.
Runyon noted that someone could have then leased the property from the county and operated it years ago. “Nobody would take the bull by the horns and do it,” he said.
But the deal set the project back, and it meant that CONSOL ended up covering over infrastructure, including water and sewer lines, that officials said public money had paid to install in the initial dirt track.
A straight track with twists and turns
Once the track was built, county officials needed someone to add other necessities like restrooms and concession stands, and then promote the races and operate the facility.
In 2018, Pete Scalzo and Tom Wilson, business associates who were in the racing business in Florida, decided to take on the challenge. County officials leased the property to Green Cove, Scalzo’s company.
Green Cove agreed to pay for lighting, a scoreboard, safety equipment, utility construction and spectator insurance, and hold events by the second year of its lease.
But before the work was complete, Wilson and Scalzo’s partnership ended. Wilson continued the project, but he said he couldn’t meet all of the lease requirements. For instance, the lease said he had to install all of his own infrastructure and hold multiple events. He had to use temporary generators, and build fencing and bleachers.
Wilson also says he didn’t realize he was expected to pay the state’s $1 million loan back within seven years.
Even though Consol had made road upgrades, the state Department of Transportation spent $700,000 on re-paving, guardrails and drainage to meet state highways requirements.
Eyes on the road
By 2022, Wilson and public officials finally held what they called a “soft opening.” Thousands of racing fans backed up traffic to watch about 250 dragsters race.
Bishop and other local racing fans had been saying for years that the racetrack would bring people and much-needed revenue to the area.
Two years later, Bishop believes county officials asked too much of track developers. The county should have had infrastructure ready to go.
But he still sees promise. He said the venue would also give ATV riders and locals, especially youth, an evening activity.
In May, Gov. Jim Justice removed a major hurdle, forgiving the $1 million Economic Development Authority loan. A month later, with that loan no longer looming over the project, county officials announced the new owners bought the property for $200,000. Since they purchased the property, instead of leasing it, the new owners are freed from some of the restrictions that hampered earlier developers.
On a cloudy July day, those new owners — father-and-son team Doug and Justin Kirk and brother-in-law Ronnie Herald – met at the track and talked about the work yet to be done.
Doug Kirk gestured one direction and talked about the need to weed-eat, then to a section of the field where they might have county fairs behind the bleachers. Spectators would see the racing dragsters, and in the background the gray remnants of what used to be the mountain.
In years to come at the newly-named 304 Motorsports Park, they want to construct courses for other kinds of races, like mud bogs and motocross.
For now, they say they’ll stick to drag racing. They hope to hold events by September. But there are more challenges coming. There are bumps on the track, where ground on the former mine has settled. Getting there is going to take even more of an investment.
“We’re staring at a million dollars,” Justin Kirk said.
But as a light rain started to fall, Doug Kirk was confident. The past, he said, is “water under the bridge.”
“Let’s go.”
After 20 years of red tape, business dealings and broken promises, a Mingo County drag racing strip may finally open appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.