Carolyn Wilson sat on her deck, looking out at the railroad tracks that run through Flemington, and reflected on the toll the drug epidemic has taken on her family.

One of her daughters is in prison. She thinks the other one is in Clarksburg, but she doesn’t hear from her.

“You see them destroying themselves, and there’s nothing you can do,” Wilson said. 

Mountain State Spotlight is asking people in all 55 of West Virginia’s counties what they would like to hear candidates talking about as they compete for votes. In Taylor County, residents said they’re concerned about drugs, crime and the rising cost of living.

After seeing her grandchildrens’ experiences, Wilson said she’d like elected leaders to improve the state’s child welfare system by retaining quality Child Protective Services workers and stricter vetting for foster care parents.

“The foster care system is broken,” she said.

Next door, Carol Ware said she likes the slower pace of life in Taylor County. Most of her in-laws live in the nearby houses on the hillside and it feels safe. 

But, she worries about crime and about her daughter who attends West Virginia University, particularly now that concealed carry is allowed on college campuses.

“Teachers should be teaching, not carrying guns,” she said.

Flemington, a town of around 300 people, sits along railroad tracks. The railroad is an industry that was vital to the development of Taylor County. Eastbound trains pass through on the way to Grafton, one of the nation’s first railroad towns and the county seat.

At the turn of the 20th century, Grafton was a boom-town as coal and timber were transported to the nation. Glass factories also provided stable employment.

Today, the largest employers in the county are a coal mine owned by a subsidiary of Arch Coal, the schools, Walmart, the hospital and the state prison in Pruntytown.

Behind the counter at Robert’s New & Used, an antique store in Grafton, Cheryl Austin greets visitors with a smile. She looks after the store for the owner from time to time. A lifelong resident, she homeschooled her kids after her son was bullied in elementary school.

She said she wishes that there were more fun activities like parks or pools in the area to keep kids and adults out of trouble. There’s things to do in Bridgeport, but that’s a 25-minute drive away.

“The kids in Taylor County are not going to go to Bridgeport because a lot of them are poor,” she said.

At the antique store, she said some people come in who are visibly high. Austin said drug addiction has gotten worse and it’s the biggest issue facing the area. 

“It’s horrible in this town,” she said.

She gives each person who visits the store a card about the love of Jesus, and she prays over it, hoping they’ll find Christ.

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Austin isn’t on social media and hardly watches television. But she said she appreciated a candidate who stopped by the store to hand out a brochure that included her personal cell phone number.

“I was like, ‘Wow, I could actually talk to her or read it,’” Austin said, adding that she did vote for the candidate because she wasn’t hiding behind false promises.

On the front porch of his house along the river in Grafton, Doug Spring fiddles with a cigarette and leans back with a calm expression. He moved here when he was six and has lived here most of his life.

“I’m a country boy,” he said. “West Virginia’s country. You either hunt, fish or that’s it.”

For over two decades, he worked at a glass factory in Taylor County until it closed in 2015. After going through a job retraining program, he works at the Clarksburg airport in aviation maintenance.

The biggest issue on his mind as the election approaches is the drug epidemic. He said he’d like to see law enforcement more aggressively investigate and prosecute people who sell drugs. 

It’s been difficult to watch his kids deal with addiction.

“Me and my wife, we’ve had to endure a lot of pain,” he said. “Watching them go through that and not being able to help them.”

His daughter lives in nearby Bridgeport while his two sons still live in Grafton. 

The sons live nearby and work at Rex-Hide Industries, which operates a tire flaps factory just north of town. But Spring said the area needs more jobs and he hates to see his sons have to work just as hard as he did for fewer benefits.

“When I first started — I’m 61 — I did get a pension,” he said. “Now, you don’t get a pension. You don’t get healthcare. You don’t get nothing, unless you pay for it.”

Empty talk from politicians at the federal level frustrates him, and he’d like to hear them talk about the policies they plan to enact. 

“How are you going to save me money?” he asked. “How are you going to lower my taxes?” 

But he thinks West Virginia and elected officials are doing pretty well — not a lot of complaints.

“I think that they are trying to do good for the state.”

As election nears, Taylor County residents look for candidates to address opioid epidemic and bring jobs appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.

When Amanda Saint went to vote in the 2020 election, she didn’t anticipate having any problems. For years, the 36-year-old nurse had been living and voting just outside of Huntsville, Alabama. But when Saint presented her driver’s license to the poll worker, they said it didn’t match her voter registration records. 

The reason was simple: when Saint got married in 2011, she changed her name with the Social Security Administration. They listed her as “Amanda Lenore Saint,” using her middle name. But Saint’s driver’s license says her name is “Amanda Glasscock Saint,” using her maiden name. 

Such discrepancies are relatively common. According to research from the University of Maryland, roughly 12% of Americans have a non-expired driver’s license that doesn’t list both their current address and name. 

“So I go, ‘Yeah it’s my maiden name instead of my middle name, but I’m still the same person. You saw me at the primaries when I voted. I didn’t have a problem then,’” Saint said. 

But poll workers still required Saint to vote provisionally. To this day, Saint doesn’t know if her provisional ballot was accepted. 

“I felt extremely frustrated because I’m just trying to do my civic duty,” Saint said. “I do the state elections and the primaries because they are important, and to not be able to vote in the big one except with a provisional ballot which may or may not be accepted because of a technical error that I had never dealt with? I fumed about it for months afterward.” 

Most Appalachian states require voters to present some form of ID at the polls. Within the region, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia have implemented new voter ID requirements since the 2020 election, according to USA Today. But all across Appalachia, photo ID requirements of all kinds — new and old, stricter and more lenient — are deeply intertwined with a complex web of legislation, lawsuits and logistical barriers. 

The combined effect? A voting process that gets more complicated by the day. 

‘Just a form of suppression’ 

Karen Pawloski has lived in southeastern Ohio for decades. But she didn’t begin working as deputy director of the Washington County Board of Elections until January 2020 — an experience she describes as “baptism by fire.” 

Since Pawloski’s tenure began, Ohio has made significant changes to its voter ID requirements. Previously, voters could bring non-photographic documents — such as bank statements or utility bills — to the polls to prove their identities. 

“We’re trying to do as much public relations as we can and educating the voters that they do have to bring in a picture ID now,” Pawloski said. “We’re using social media, and any time I interview with the local TV station here, we try to make sure that the voters know that…Voters that come and vote every election, they’re fine. But voters that only vote during presidential years, this is something new for them.”

Ohio now has some of the country’s most stringent photo ID requirements for voters. You can’t present a student ID from a public university at the polls. Or an out-of-state driver’s license. Or an expired driver’s license or passport. Since the state made these changes in 2023, more than 8,000 Ohioans have attempted to vote and had their ballots rejected because they didn’t present an acceptable ID. 

But what counts as an “acceptable ID” varies greatly across Appalachia. Tennessee, Ohio, and South Carolina don’t allow student IDs from public universities. North Carolina does, but unlike Georgia or Mississippi, it doesn’t allow driver’s licenses that have been expired for more than a year — unless you’re 65 and older and your ID was unexpired on your 65th birthday. 

And several Appalachian states don’t accept driver’s licenses from other states — including Tennessee. This requirement frequently confuses voters, according to Christie Campion, a former poll worker from Knoxville. Home to the state’s flagship university, the Appalachian city of just under 200,000 is full of college kids, including thousands of out-of-state students. 

Campion remembers having to give a provisional ballot to a college student who came to vote with a Maryland driver’s license. Although she recommended the student obtain a Tennessee driver’s license, she recognized that the process of making it to the DMV is burdensome in itself. 

“It’s a whole effort to go and get the ID, and then you go to try and get the ID, and they’re like ‘Oh you brought the wrong piece of paper. You have to come back later,’” Campion said. “I think being so restrictive on what counts as ID is just an attempt at suppression.” 

Research from the University of Maryland found that younger voters, Black voters and Latino voters are much less likely to have a driver’s license with their current name and address — or any driver’s license at all. And studies show there is virtually no fraud taking place that could be prevented through photo ID requirements, said University of Kentucky law professor Josh Douglas via email. 

“Overall, studies show that both​ sides embellish the debate a little,” said Douglas, who specializes in election law and advised on Kentucky’s voter ID legislation. “ID laws don't improve integrity, but the amount of disenfranchisement is typically somewhat small — ​though again, that depends on the specifics of the ID law and how strict they are.”

Kentucky’s photo ID requirements are relatively lenient, compared to other Appalachian states, but lawmakers recently tried making things more stringent. State senators passed a bill early this year that would’ve removed university-issued ID cards as a primary document for voter identification. The bill never made it out of House committees. 

University IDs are also under scrutiny in nearby North Carolina. There, the state Republican Party and the Republican National Committee sued the State Board of Elections, seeking to prevent the use of digital university IDs from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A superior court judge initially denied their request, but just last Friday, a North Carolina appeals court blocked the use of the mobile UNC One Card. 

The North Carolina Republican Party and the RNC have also recently filed several other lawsuits, including one seeking to revoke the voter registrations of more than 225,000 North Carolinians. 

‘We want everybody to be as informed as they can’ 

North Carolina isn’t the only Appalachian state shaking things up at the last second. In late September, the Georgia State Election Board passed a controversial rule requiring all voting precincts to count ballots by hand on Election Day and ensure the tallies match machine counts. Back in Ohio, days after he suggested banning ballot drop boxes entirely, Secretary of State Frank LaRose issued a new directive in early September, limiting their use. 

Now, if someone delivers an elderly or disabled voter’s ballot to a drop box, they have to physically enter the county board of elections office and sign a form. County board of elections officials have expressed concerns that this will create longer lines on Election Day. 

But amid a flurry of proposed and enacted changes, multiple organizations working on turnout in Appalachian Ohio aren’t sharing their personal opinions regarding voter ID. They’re too busy sharing information with voters. 

“I think our biggest concern when it went into effect was this education piece, ” said Adriane Mohlenkamp, co-president of the League of Women Voters of Athens County. “We were hoping to see some statewide wide-scale education efforts, and I know there's been some efforts around education, but it has not been maybe as robust as we would’ve hoped for.”

Lack of education is a big issue when it comes to voter ID. Fifty-five percent of people living in states with photo ID requirements either think they aren’t in place or don’t know if they are, according to research from the University of Maryland. Among voters aged 18 to 29, nearly 66 percent aren’t sure if photo ID is required — a particular concern in Athens County, home to more than 21,000 students attending Ohio University. 

Over the past several months, Mohlenkamp and the rest of her team have registered plenty of college students — and voters of all ages. They’ve written letters to the editor, posted on Facebook, done interviews with local newspapers and distributed non-partisan voter information cards at libraries. 

And on Ohio University’s campus, students are running their own initiatives to get their peers to the polls. In his capacity as the Student Senate’s Governmental Affairs Commissioner, sophomore Donald Theisen and his senators have spent hours passing out registration forms, preparing slideshows and participating in election-related events, including a recent debate watch party. Theisen wouldn't share his personal opinions on changes to Ohio election law. But he’s feeling pretty optimistic about Election Day. 

“My job is to represent everybody on the campus regardless of how they may feel — whether they may lean left or right, whether they support or disavow the most recent changes to the law,” Theisen said. “Our job is to get everybody engaged in the process, trying to get it so that everybody can be registered and vote as easily as possible. We want everybody to be as informed as they can, and I think that the turnout at OU is gonna be pretty good.” 

The post Across Appalachia, Photo ID Requirements Complicate Voting appeared first on 100 Days in Appalachia.

KERMIT — Jim Webb stands under an awning with produce and jars of sauce lined up on a card table on the side of U.S. Route 52. Webb is a natural salesman – he touts a bottle of barbeque sauce for a limited time only, on account of the lady who made it dying before passing her recipe on. 

Webb, 88, said he might be the oldest man in town. Another gentleman died last week at the age of 92. From his produce stand, he points across the railroad tracks at a gas plant.

“My great-grandfather owned all that property, sold it for $300. That was before my time,” he said. “Now my grandfather retired out of there and had some uncles who did too. They made out pretty good.” 

When the coal trains ran through town every 25 minutes, Webb owned a couple of supermarkets and some other businesses. 

Now, everywhere Webb points, everywhere he recalls, is gone. It’s either been torn down, fallen in, or just turned into something else.

When Webb was born in the 1930s, Mingo County was still growing in population, spurred on by the coal industry. By the time he was a young man in the 1950s, the county had nearly 50,000. Seventy years later, the latest census shows less than half remain. But poverty has ballooned. A little more than a quarter of the residents in the county live below the poverty line and nearly 40% of all children do too. 

When asked by Mountain State Spotlight what he wants to hear candidates talk about in the upcoming election, Webb laughs – he’s served as mayor, councilman and even sheriff at one point. 

“I don’t believe any of them. They’ll tell you anything,” he said. 

With a population around 300, Kermit sits on the northern edge of Mingo County along the Big Sandy River, across from Kentucky. This area is coal country — next to a pawn shop selling revolvers and leaf blowers is the meeting hall for the United Mine Workers local. 

The town was foisted into the spotlight a few years ago when it was revealed millions of painkillers had flooded the community. 

The current mayor, Charles Sparks, was one of the first mayors in the state to file a lawsuit against Big Pharma. Sitting in his office, wearing a pocket t-shirt and a pair of sunglasses on his head, Sparks said he gave interviews to about 16 different reporters, from as far away as Germany. 

“I actually got to the point where I quit doing it because you’re just beating a dead horse at this point,” he said. 

Despite all that attention, all those reports, Sparks said his town is only getting $40,000 out of the settlements with drug companies. He had hopes of building a new community center, a splash pad for the kids and a substation for the fire house, on the other side of the railroad tracks that divides the town. 

“Everytime you go to court, it was Kermit this, Kermit that, Kermit’s the epicenter,” he said. “But when it was all said and done, we got the shaft.” 

Today, drugs aren’t the top of mind for Sparks — it’s the drought. The Big Sandy, which supplies water for the town, is the lowest he’s seen in years. 

“We’re not out of water and we’re not expected to be, but we’re prepared,” he said. 

Despite the problems, Sparks said he has a bit of hope for tourism growth – and that hope comes in the form of dust kicking, engine revving, tire squealing side-by-side riders on the Hatfield-McCoy Trails. 

“I think that could be a good opportunity – it could be a blessing, it could be a curse. I don’t know yet,” he said. 

Investing in state attractions could cause tourism boon

Just a few miles up U.S. 52 in Wayne County, business owners are already competing for tourism dollars, thanks to the large tracts of public land that attract fishermen, hunters, off-roaders and nature lovers. 

For the time being, that’s pretty much the only sector people there can hop onto immediately according to David Lieving, executive director of the county Economic Development Authority.

While the northern portion of Wayne has industry and easy access for goods and services by boat, rail, air or truck, a 20-minute ride south towards Kermit is a different county, he noted. 

And Lieving said that’s mostly due to infrastructure. Most of U.S. 52 is still a two lane road. That’s all supposed to change with the completion of the King Coal Highway and Tolsia Highway which would expand the road to four lanes and link I-77 with I-64, cutting through the southern coalfields. 

But the projects have been on the books since the 1990s, and the Wayne end is not anywhere close to being finished. 

About 30 miles north of Kermit in Wayne County, Joe Bofo stands at the check-in desk at the Rustic Ravines, a cabin resort destination atop a ridge in Genoa. Outside are cabins and yurts, a bar and restaurant, a zip line, archery targets and most important of all, trails. 

The resort is strategically located for ATV riders to tackle both the Hatfield-McCoy Trails and the “outlaw” trails found at the East Lynn Wildlife Management area. 

Bofo doesn’t sound like he’s from Wayne. His accent has a twinge of northeast, mixed with midwest with a sprinkling of Appalachian. He’s from Brooke County originally and spent a portion of his childhood in Columbus, Ohio. 

Bofo looked at Wayne County, with two wildlife management areas, a state forest and a spur of the Hatfield-McCoy Trails, and saw potential. So in 2017-2018, he went in with a buddy of his and started building Rustic Ravines. 

The resort gets reservations from all over the United States. 

While giving an interview, Bofo takes a reservation from a large Ukrainian family living in Cleveland that comes every Thanksgiving and rents the whole place out for a week, riding ATVs and cooking up traditional fare from the old country. 

Setting up shop in Wayne went remarkably well, Bofo said. 

The Department of Highways paved the road all the way to his business, a few miles from state Route 152. The county worked with him to get water service. Some Abandoned Mine Land grants from the federal government also helped out – and he hopes to get more. 

But one thing Bofo thinks could help the area – and possibly turn it into a tourism mecca along the lines of the New River Gorge – is investment in state attractions along Route 152, from Huntington to Crum and beyond. 

And the way Bofo figures it, the state could fund it with those hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue surpluses the Governor has touted over the last several years. 

Managing education among a declining population 

Down the hill from the resort, Jessica Cornett walks through the side door of the Country Boy Market with her son, who is ready for ice cream after a day at Genoa Elementary. Cornett, a native of Eastern Kentucky, has owned the store for about eight years, but it has been open for nearly 40 years in total. 

Business over the years has ebbed and flowed. She said more people did their grocery shopping there during COVID-19, when they got assistance in the form of food stamps. 

She gets business from the riders coming from Bofo’s resort, but it varies. Right now, people are strapped from back-to-school shopping. 

Sometimes customers ask her to open at 5 a.m., like back in the day when coal miners would come through before their shifts. But there just aren’t that many miners anymore, she said. 

“I think people have just moved away to where there’s jobs,” she said. “People thrived on coal, and it’s just not around anymore.”

But there’s a silver lining with the lack of people. Cornett said her son can get individual attention at his school, with only seven kids in his class. 

“I came from bigger schools, so I never experienced that, but it works,” she said. “If one of them fell behind, there was always somebody there to help get them back on track.” 

For Wayne County Superintendent Todd Alexander, maintaining those schools can be tricky with the population decline. Lower population means smaller student bodies, and state funding for schools is tied to the amount of students enrolled.

He said a few years ago, there was a proposal to combine Genoa with Dunlow Elementary about 20 minutes down the road. The school board decided against it. 

“You got to keep an eye on it,” he said. “If we continue to lose enrollment across the district, then we’ll have to look at that again.” 

Down in Dunlow, Bill Likens raises up a platform on a forklift so a man can change a light inside the town’s community center. 

This portion of the center is a warehouse, filled with clothes, food and other donated goods. For the last 21 years, Likens has been a director of this outreach ministry, sponsored by the Cabwaylingo Appalachian Mission. He is a self-described “poor boy from Dunlow.” He spent his youth reading National Geographics at the school library. 

Likens said back then the coal mines were booming, but it wasn’t necessarily good. 

“People get all nostalgic about that, saying it was great then, but it wasn’t,” he said. “You did have more jobs. You had two big mines in Wayne County that employed about 500 people, and another 500 on the side with truck drivers, but other than that, there’s always been nothing here.” 

Just a few miles up Coal Haul Road, past the pavement slipping down the hillside, is one of those mines, shuttered since 2013. All that’s left is some equipment and a couple of guys keeping an eye on things. 

For the people who are left – many of them senior citizens – Likens said it can be tough. During a monthly food distribution, he estimates about 500 people,  mostly elderly, come through for food. 

And it’s not just them. The afterschool program put on by the ministry has about 70 kids come, where they can get a snack and have time to play. 

The ministry also works with other organizations to build houses for people in need – that afternoon, Likens was going to install cabinets in a home. 

But for the people here, just a few miles from the trailhead of the Hatfield-McCoy Trails, Likens said getting basic services, like water and broadband, is still a struggle. For those without cars, getting anywhere – to the doctor, to the grocery store – is a challenge, he said. 

“There’s a lot of young people who want to do stuff like go to school or get a job,” he said. “If they don’t have transportation, they can’t go do that.” 

“It’s pretty rough right now,” he added. 

Southern Wayne and northern Mingo have been hit hard by the decline of coal. For the people left, it’s a struggle to move forward.  appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.

In between shifts at low-income jobs, West Virginians in natural gas country braved the late August heat and lined up at a New Martinsville church in Wetzel County to pick up canned food, frozen meat and back-to-school clothing. Some drove more than an hour to get there. 

Grandparents with custody of their grandchildren, single mothers and people making barely above minimum wage waited their turn to choose from racks of clothes, and a team of about 20 volunteers provided them with lists of other charities that can help.

Since the food pantry opened four years ago, the need has only grown, according to Tina Rucker, who runs it. It serves nearly 1,000 people a month. 

“People are working at McDonald’s, at Wendy’s, Burger King – that can’t make it,” she said. “They make too much to get help from the state. And if it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t be able to feed their families.”

Natural gas companies like Antero and EQT, major oil and gas companies in the region, donate about a third of program costs, Rucker said. 

When the natural gas industry boomed, residents in the area had expected a surge in good-paying jobs. Instead, they’re increasingly reliant on charity.

More than a decade ago, natural gas companies sold West Virginians on a bright and prosperous future with tens of thousands of new jobs. Companies have pulled billions of dollars of natural gas out of the ground, yet many people here still can’t afford basic necessities like food and clothing.  

The American Petroleum Institute, the trade group representing the nation’s oil and natural gas industry, promoted the predicted job growth and didn’t answer inquiries about why it didn’t take place. EQT and Antero also didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In recent years, state officials also said West Virginia was on the verge of what they called a petrochemical renaissance based on plastics developed from natural gas liquids. 

They described a hopeful future for the state, which they said would include the construction of multiple facilities needed to use byproducts of natural gas for the development of plastics. That plan has largely failed. 

“West Virginians enjoy significant economic and environmental benefits thanks to the development and use of our homegrown natural gas and oil,” said Charlie Burd, executive director of the Gas and Oil Association of West Virginia, when touting the release of a report last year showing more than 70,000 jobs in the state from the gas industry. 

Analysts have cautioned against using that number to determine the industry’s economic impact because it includes indirect jobs like employment at oil refineries and gas stations.

As the industry matures, there are fewer and fewer jobs in the industry, according to reports authored by Sean O’Leary, senior energy researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute. The natural gas producing areas of the state have generated a lot of wealth for companies and some residents, but that is not reflected in average incomes and number of jobs. 

“Generally speaking, the effects on economic prosperity were negligible to downright negative,” said O’Leary.

Population and job loss instead of prosperity

At the Wetzel County Museum, Nathaniel McDowell pointed toward a rendering of a bustling, brightly-lit New Martinsville as it looked decades ago hanging on the wall. Standing next to a display that said “A County is Born,” he said people settled in the town because of nearby gas drilling. 

“This town used to be a very prideful town,” he said. “There were picnics. There were parades out in the street. Everybody knew everybody. Now we’re faceless.”

McDowell, who works at the museum, was wearing an Oil and Gas Festival shirt, one of many community activities that natural gas companies sponsor. But he also talked about how a century ago, oil and gas executives frequented and opened other local businesses. 

“Yeah, they pay you a lot, but none of that goes to the towns,” he said. “None of it gets recycled back into the economy.” 

McDowell also watched many of his high school classmates leave the area. 

As Appalachian natural gas has contributed more and more to the nation’s economy over the last 15 years, people in the counties where it is produced aren’t reaping the same benefits, according to a 2021 report by the Ohio River Valley Institute. Researchers looked at economic data from 22 counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia that produce most Appalachian natural gas.

From 2008 to 2019, income and jobs grew slower in the natural gas counties than both the nation and the combined three states. Population declined by 3.8% in those counties.

Over the course of the natural gas boom, jobs were created but have since declined. Incomes have fallen further behind the rest of the nation, and population loss has worsened in these counties, according to a 2023 update of that report. 

West Virginia counties included in the report were Doddridge, Harrison, Marshall, Ohio, Ritchie, Tyler and Wetzel, located in the natural gas-rich Appalachian Basin.

Technological advances allowed natural gas producers to drill much farther horizontally underground, reaching greater gas reserves. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, pumps huge amounts of water, sand and chemicals underground to free gas from shale deposits.

“Once wells are dug, they don’t require the same amount of attention that they do when they’re being drilled,” O’Leary said.

In New Martinsville, McDowell said he’s seen local businesses struggle because many natural gas jobs went to out-of-state workers, who only stayed for short periods of time.

Many people who owned the rights to natural gas drilled on their land either sold those rights or receive royalty payments, based on a percentage of the revenue from the drilling. Some became wealthy.

But companies said that money would be spent locally. O’Leary said local land-owner royalties largely went to paying down debts, saving the money or making one-time large purchases.

“They might have gone out and bought a car or even a house in Myrtle Beach,” he said. 

A missed opportunity

A 2010 press release from the American Petroleum Institute said West Virginia had a “challenging tax and regulatory climate.” So, companies did slightly hedge their expectations. They said state lawmakers would have to stay out of their way. 

Those lawmakers did. In fact, they rolled out the red carpet by acquiescing to the industry time after time at the state Legislature. 

Among other measures, they rejected plans to require companies to report the number of in-state workers. They also rejected protections for mineral-rights owners and residents who live near drilling operations and worry about the associated pollution. 

Lawmakers have also continued to reject legislation to require companies to clean up abandoned wells that can release the greenhouse gas methane.

But state officials missed opportunities to prepare for the future by planning only to ride the coattails of the industry, according to O’Leary.

“Frankly, a lot of them just stopped looking at or stopped thinking about other ways to do economic development,” O’Leary said. “And so there was a huge opportunity loss associated with the natural gas boom, because folks simply assumed that it would be the savior.”

In the early 2010s, Jeff Kessler, a former Democratic state Senate president and gubernatorial candidate, advocated for a fund made up of taxes from the natural gas industry. He’d said lawmakers would only be permitted to use interest generated by this Future Fund, so it would grow over time. 

Kessler said the Future Fund was meant for investments, like training for trade jobs or infrastructure. Other states, including Wyoming, New Mexico and North Dakota have similar funds, giving officials billions of tax dollars from the extraction of natural resources to reinvest in their states. 

“When the coal’s gone and the gas is gone, there’d be a source of significant wealth built up to help advance services and programs that improve the quality of life for the people who live here, not for the damn companies that have made all the money and left us,” he said. 

But because other lawmakers successfully pushed to include restrictive requirements for depositing money into the fund, no money was ever deposited. Then the Future Fund was repealed last year. 

Kessler said lawmakers could have preserved some of the proceeds for residents left behind and the revitalization of towns once the wells were drilled in the region.

“I think they got bamboozled some,” Kessler said.

Sen. Charles Clements, R-Wetzel said despite fewer than predicted new jobs, some residents  improved their quality of life.  

“And I’ve seen people that just didn’t have anything, then all of a sudden, they run into a lot of money, but a lot of people never changed their lifestyle,” he said. “They put the money in the bank, and it’s probably still sitting there. Their kids are going to be happy maybe someday.”

Clements said that initially many jobs went to out-of-state workers, partly because people were reluctant to move from their hometowns to other counties.

He also said that, since then, local residents have picked up new skills and have taken some of those jobs.

Some schools, especially those in outlier counties like Doddridge County, have reaped the benefit, he said, and are receiving more funding per student than the rest of the state.

Some roads are patched up, but damage is done

The explosion in drilling did bring some improvements. Jobs grew at a faster rate in Doddridge County than in the rest of West Virginia. That county has been able to use taxes from the industry to build schools, a new courthouse annex and an upgraded public library.

And in New Martinsville, the Wetzel County Center for Children and Families is freshly painted due to help from natural gas companies that also sponsor many of their programs for low- income residents. The center has a clothing closet and group activities for kids.

In roads close to towns like New Martinsville in Wetzel County and West Union in Doddridge County, potholes have been patched. 

But farther out on more narrow roads, there is warning tape cautioning drivers because pieces of the heavily-trafficked road are falling off the hillside.

And along the highway in Doddridge County, a massive natural gas processing complex replaced rolling hills and trees. 

Clements said lawmakers have allocated highway funding, and he said some residents don’t realize the companies paid for road repairs as well.

“And they’ve been very generous with charities,” he said. “Of course, they’re making an awful lot of money.”

The natural gas boom was supposed to bring prosperity to West Virginians in poverty. That didn’t happen appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.

WEBSTER SPRINGS — During the pandemic, Michelle Bell opened the Dandelion Boutique, a shop in Webster County where she sold a collection of flowy sundresses, floppy sun hats and denim jeans.

But she steadily lost customers to online retailers, forcing her to close up shop on a snowy day in February, less than four years after she opened. 

Like other small business owners in Webster County, where opportunities are scarce, Bell knew giving up was an option, but she decided to move forward.

“Around here, jobs aren’t plentiful, so people do what they have to do to survive,” she said. 

A few months after the boutique’s closure, Bell and a business partner transformed an empty, grease-stained auto shop into The Groovy Mushroom, a smoke shop with an array of products from flashy vapes and hemp-derived products to custom incense holders and car air fresheners. 

Many businesses have closed, county officials said. Those that remain have either relocated or rebranded in an attempt to survive.

Residents of Webster County say they feel overlooked and forgotten as neighboring counties attract more investments and jobs, leaving Webster County behind. The county has one of the highest rates of unemployment at 7%, compared to 4.2% statewide.   

“My firm belief is that the state has to start with its poorest counties,” said Chris Graham, director of the Webster County Economic Development Authority. “I just keep seeing money going to the panhandle. Little counties like us, we always seem to be at the last of the list.”

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This story is part of Mountain State Spotlight’s initiative to ask West Virginians in all 55 counties what they want to hear from candidates as they ask for votes. In communities from Kingwood to Hamlin to Chloe, residents have said they want candidates to talk about how to create more good-paying jobs.

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As the county’s first and only smoke shop, The Groovy Mushroom sees a steady stream of daily customers. But Bell, who also sits on the county economic development authority’s board, said she recognizes that other businesses in the area are not so lucky. 

“Small businesses need help right now,” she said. “I’m one of the fortunate ones who could do what I did because when businesses die, people just move on.”

Compared to more populous counties, Webster struggles with a lack of interstate access, poor water infrastructure and fewer customers. 

County officials said they’ve also seen a decline in timber jobs as lumber prices have plummeted. With most of the county heavily forested, timber companies were once the largest employers. 

Webster County has a population of around 8,000, but residents say people keep leaving in search of better jobs, hurting the local economy. Since 2010, the county has lost over 1,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census. 

“I grew up here, but things have changed — there’s no economy here anymore,” said Travis Giles, a lifelong resident. “There’s no coal mines, there’s no jobs, there’s nothing, so people have left.”

Giles said he tries to shop locally but has found it difficult as more shops are closing. He now drives at least half an hour to Buckhannon or Summersville to buy groceries.  

With fewer businesses like family-owned grocery stores and boutiques, demand for gathering places like bars and restaurants has decreased. 

Bryan Moore closed his bar six years ago after business stagnated. He said he relied on local customers, but most either moved away or passed away. Shortly after closing the bar, he opened the Springs Sandwich Shop in Webster Springs. 

There, visitors can buy hot paninis with a choice of pickles or chips and an ice-cold drink on the side. He’s now relying on tourists passing through town for revenue and said the shop has seen an uptick in visitors every year. 

“We have our good months and we have our bad months,” Moore said. “The most impact has been transient business from Snowshoe in the wintertime.”

As the local population dwindles, some small businesses are focusing on tourists. Like many places in West Virginia, county officials are turning to tourism to jumpstart the economy and combat slow business growth. 

“I think outdoor recreation is where we’re missing the boat, largely because we have beautiful mountains and we have the best rivers,” said Alex Fliegel, director of the county’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. “There’s just not many businesses or tax dollars being spent specifically around that.”

Her office markets the county to attract visitors but relies mostly on hotel and motel taxes for funding. In Webster County, there are not enough places to stay, limiting both tourism growth and funding for the office. 

To help officials grow the county’s economy and tourism, Fliegel reached out to the nonprofit West Virginia Community Development Hub. As part of the Accelerate WV program, she’s working with Graham to create a county-wide economic development plan. 

In the plan, they are sketching out sustainable projects like biking and ATV trails, and once it is completed, hope it makes the county more attractive to investors and grant funders. Officials have hosted community listening sessions and expect to complete the plan next year.

Back at the smoke shop, Bell said she could see Webster Springs growing to become a place like Lewisburg or Fayetteville, where tourism is key to the local economy. She said the county EDA has ambitious plans like building a county-wide rail biking trail and connecting it to other counties to bring visitors. 

“I care about my community, and I care where it goes and the future of it,” she said. “ We have people coming from all over to come here, we just need them to stay for a little while.” 

As Webster County businesses shutter, residents feel they’ve been left behind by the state appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.

In 2017, when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security declared the electoral system “critical infrastructure,” state and local election officials around the country were forced to take cybersecurity much more seriously. And it wasn’t long before physical threats and misinformation also became a greater concern. 

In North Carolina, state board of elections director Karen Brinson Bell said the DHS’s designation “didn’t take anything off her plate.” Instead, the responsibilities of election officials like her only grew, especially in battleground states like North Carolina.

In the lead up to this year’s election, Brinson Bell said “everything is a concern” when it comes to election security. Like her counterparts across the region, she’s especially focused on cybersecurity, preventing physical threats and battling misinformation around the elections process, while communicating to voters that the electoral system in North Carolina is actually safe and secure. 

“We had to become much more adept at telling our story, being accessible to the public, helping them understand what is really a complex, methodical, multilayer process in all that we do,” Brinson Bell said. “And it’s not soundbite friendly.”

Other states in the region like Pennsylvania, which was at the center of the 2020 election denial campaign and is considered a “must-win” for both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential race, are also confronting the same concerns as North Carolina. 

Earlier this year, Pennsylvania launched a task force focused on election threats like misinformation related to the adoption of new voting systems and no-excuse mail-in voting.  

“In recent years, we’ve seen bad-faith actors attempt to exploit these changes by spreading lies and baseless conspiracy theories, and attempting to delegitimize our safe, secure and accurate elections,” said Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt in a February news release. “This task force has been working together to develop and coordinate plans to combat this dangerous misinformation and continue providing all eligible voters with accurate, trusted election information.”

2020 Hindsight

Many election officials didn’t have a plan for handling the 2020 presidential election fallout, Brinson Bell said. From protests fueled by misinformation and lawsuits seeking to overturn the results, states like Georgia and Pennsylvania were mired in controversy, and North Carolina was “just on the bubble” of facing the same issues. 

“For North Carolina, we have to think about, what can we learn from those states?” Brinson Bell said. “It’s unfortunate what they went through, but it’s unfortunate if we don’t learn from it.” 

In North Carolina, according to one recent poll, nearly 50% of those who responded said they won’t believe the results of the election.  

One major focus for Brinson Bell is making sure that voters understand the election process and how it actually operates — even promoting physical transparency at the county level, like urging election staff to use clear plastic tubs with labels to store ballots instead of recycled cardboard boxes. 

“That’s not election jargon,” Brinson Bell said, “but it’s something clear to the public.” 

Now, Georgia, another battleground state in the region, is mired in controversy surrounding its state election board, which recently approved new rules that critics believe will “sow confusion, compromise ballot security and potentially enable rogue county boards to block certification of election results in November,” according to reporting by the Washington Post.  

Later this month, the board is scheduled to vote on whether to require counties to count ballots by hand at each precinct, which critics believe could produce inaccurate results and be less secure. 

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger described the election board as “a mess,” and told the Washington Post, “Legal precedent is pretty clear. You shouldn’t change rules in the middle of an election.” 

Physical Security, New Rules and Turnover

Elections officials are also working to boost physical security in the lead-up to the election. 

In North Carolina, Brinson Bell said workers are securing doors and installing panic buttons at county elections offices. Staff are also being trained in de-escalation techniques to counter voter intimidation and other physical threats. Earlier this year, Georgia passed an election security law requiring police to take a one-hour class on election laws, which also included training in de-escalation, though the new law doesn’t go into effect until 2025. 

In North Carolina, a 2023 voter identification law will be in effect for this year’s election and photo ID will be required. Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee and Ohio also have strict photo ID requirements for voting.

Staff turnover, specifically county election directors, has been another concern of Brinson Bell, who earlier this summer said more than 60% of county election directors have left their post since 2019. For many of the replacements, she said, this will be their first presidential election. 

“While there’s much that’s the same processes and routines, the volume, the intense scrutiny and being a battleground state with so many high profile contests on our ballot this year, it’s just a different environment to be a new director,” Brinson Bell said.  

Urban-Rural Divide

It’s not just Appalachia’s battleground states taking election security seriously. Other states in the region are also working to combat misinformation and thwart physical and cybersecurity threats.

Deak Kersey, chief deputy and chief of staff for the West Virginia Secretary of State’s Office, said the state has focused on cybersecurity since DHS’s critical infrastructure designation went into effect. 

“West Virginia was not in a great spot eight years ago,” Kersey said. “Nobody knew what cybersecurity really was, as far as the Feds really considered it.” 

Since then, the state has pushed to disperse Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, funds to counties, which have used the funds to update voting equipment, like purchasing new ballot-marking equipment that’s ADA accessible and electronic poll books. In August, the state election commission approved sending nearly $1 million in HAVA funds to 24 counties. 

DHS also awarded $1 million to North Carolina this year, but the money can’t be spent until the state’s General Assembly authorizes it. If and when it does, then the state elections office will have to decide whether to disperse it between counties or keep some of it at the state level to continue funding a statewide cybersecurity expert to monitor for doxing, denial-of-service attacks, phishing schemes and other online threats.  

“I don’t mean to make light of a million dollars, but that doesn’t go far in a state with 100 counties,” Brinson Bell said.

The funding issues hit especially hard in the state’s rural counties.

“I think some of the concerns in Western North Carolina really are reflective of sort of that rural-urban divide in North Carolina — the economically distressed counties versus those that are prospering more,” Brinson Bell said. 

It’s a concern across Appalachia, where most of the region is rural. And while federal funding will help, elections officials have less than two months left before the election to see how far it will go to update equipment, implement new security measures and hire new people to replace outgoing directors.

The post In Appalachia’s Battleground States, Election Officials Worry About Cyber Security, Physical Threats and Misinformation appeared first on 100 Days in Appalachia.

In a series of conversations and interviews this month in Wheeling, voters said they feel like politicians aren’t responding to urgent, unaddressed problems in West Virginia.

This is part of Mountain State Spotlight’s ongoing effort to talk with residents in all of West Virginia’s 55 counties in the run-up to the 2024 election. We’re asking a simple question: What do you want to hear candidates talking about as they compete for your vote?

Earlier this year, Sarah Elbeshbishi visited the broader Northern Panhandle where residents said they want better roads, more jobs and solutions to the opioid epidemic. 

Here’s what people in Wheeling told us this month.

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As Mariah and Kenny Burnley were getting ready to have their second kid in 2020, they decided to open a Wheeling child care center. They knew that without child care, many parents can’t work. 

At first, the Ohio Valley Child Learning Center was financially stable.

There was lots of demand from parents. And pandemic-era funding supplemented the center’s budget.

Now, most of that funding has ended, and child care centers are feeling a financial squeeze. 

The Burnleys said private tuition payments, ones that some parents already struggle to afford, don’t cover the cost of keeping the lights on and paying staff. And some of the Center’s students qualify for low-income federal subsidies, which compensate child care centers with even less money. 

To reduce costs, the Burnleys are cutting back hours for already stretched-thin employees. Kenny had to step away from the center and get a new job, and Mariah hasn’t taken a paycheck for herself for the last two months.

“You can’t budget when there’s no money,” she said during a community roundtable hosted by Mountain State Spotlight at the Ohio County Public Library last week.

It’s a problem that’s set to become even more urgent. State funding for a child care subsidy program is set to run out at the end of the month, and the Burnleys said more centers will close if West Virginia lawmakers don’t address that financial gap.

“It’s nice to run on it for an election, but where’s the action?” Kenny asked.

Outside the library, security guard Charles Works described himself as “a big pro-gun activist.”

“I hunt, I fish,” he said. “That’s pretty much my relaxation time.”

But he’s invested in other local issues too, like Wheeling’s homeless population. Works said there seem to be more unhoused people because of addiction, and he’d like to see the city offer fewer services in hopes many would leave.

A recent state report on homelessness found that the majority of unhoused West Virginians are working, and more state resources are needed to combat the problem.

It’s something that’s hit close to home: When his daughter regularly smoked methamphetamine, Works recalls searching creek banks in the early hours of the morning to find her. She’s since been clean for several years, but he said he doesn’t understand why she gave up life at home to use drugs.

Works said that, recently, he feels like the cost of everyday items has gone up. “I hate grocery shopping anymore,” he said.

While he makes above the minimum wage, he would like to see it increased.

After grabbing a drink with his wife Jody near Wheeling’s Centre Market, Mike Usenick, a coal miner who retired after working 43 years underground, said his family is also feeling the squeeze of inflation.

“Groceries, fuel, all kinds of fuel, electric for your house, everything’s going up out of the price,” he said. “I don’t know how some people even pay for it.”

The Usenicks said they want to see politicians answer questions about whether they would listen to regular people and look out for the little guy.

After decades living in Wheeling, they’re encouraged by the ongoing downtown redevelopment project. Officials replaced aging underground infrastructure and are now redoing streets and sidewalks. A downtown hotel is also in the works.

“It doesn’t happen overnight, but what they’re doing is good,” said Jody, a part-time occupational therapist. Since her 31-year-old daughter died of colon cancer in 2018, Jody has also run a charity to support people in similar situations. 

The couple likes to travel to other small towns that are trying to attract tourists. As they think about the next generation — especially their young grandchildren in nearby St. Clairsville, Ohio — Jody said it’s good to see new businesses opening up to attract visitors and improve quality of life for residents.

“I hope it continues for the grandkids and all and and I hope they can stay in the area, you know?” she said. “I hope that there’s still a place for them here.”

But not everyone is excited about the Wheeling redevelopment. As he started to hang a left down an alley in his black pickup, lawyer Ted White said he worries that more tourists will make it more expensive to live in Wheeling and that the jobs at places like the planned hotel will be low-paying. 

He sees the $3 billion Nucor steel mill being constructed in Mason County as the type of economic development that West Virginia needs. The plant expects to employ 800 people when fully operational.

“That’s a real job,” he said. “That’s a steel job.”

A few blocks over, Nick Chancey paused his evening walk to talk about the upcoming election. The Ripley native and his wife moved to Wheeling about a year ago with their two young children for his job at the Catholic Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston.

He’s the director of the Diocese’s Office of Youth and Young Adult Discipleship and said he worries about today’s kids who’ve grown up during the opioid epidemic.

Around town, he sees kids being raised by their grandparents, not their own parents. And in the news, he reads about children being abused or going missing.

“The system is sort of failing them,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of deep problems here in the state.”

Growing up, he remembers a lot of people leaving their doors unlocked and being friendly. As the opioid epidemic is “rearing its ugly head,” he said he sees people scared by those who are homeless or addicted to drugs. 

West Virginia needs someone to address the underlying issues that have caused the opioid epidemic, Chancey said. But he’s disappointed by the hyperbole from politicians. 

“I often don’t feel like I’m really treated as an educated citizen,” he said. “I feel like I’m treated more as another vote.”

In Wheeling, residents are worried about children, inflation and jobs appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.

“I’m not talking about, you know, behind the Walmart,” said Jennifer Garner, describing her visits to rural communities on behalf of Save the Children, the global charity that supports families in need. “I’m talking about the town behind the town behind the town, [folks] who can get to Walmart with a group of people maybe once a month because that’s how often they can afford gas.”

Garner, the veteran actress who most recently appeared in this summer’s Hollywood blockbuster Deadpool vs. Wolverine, grew up in Charleston, West Virginia. In previous campaigns, she’s raised funds for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. This year, she brought her star power to an August 6 “Rural Americans for Harris” Zoom call.

The two-hour online session, which drew over 2,000 participants and raised some $20,000, did not have the high profile of other affinity groups that have emerged in recent weeks to back Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president. Initiatives like “Win with Black Women,” “Black Men for Harris,” “White Women Answer the Call” and “White Dudes for Harris” have attracted hundreds of thousands of supporters and added millions to campaign coffers.

But rural Democrats insist the party can’t afford to bypass their communities, which account for 15-to-20% of the U.S. electorate, or some 25 to 30 million voters. According to data from the Pew Research Center, Donald Trump won a whopping 59% of the vote in rural areas in 2016, and he did even better in 2020 with 65%. Joe Biden won in 2020 by flipping the script in the suburbs. Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton among suburban voters in 2016; Biden won them by an 11-point margin in 2020.

Opportunity knocks

Still, there are rich opportunities outside of cities and suburbs—for instance, leaders like Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, one of the organizers of the “Rural Americans” call. Her husband is a cattle rancher and she’s delighted with the choice of Tim Walz; he grew up in rural Nebraska and taught high school in Mankato, a small city in Minnesota. But Democrats first have to break what she calls “the cycle of mutual neglect.”

“We neglect to invest in rural America,” says Kleeb. “So [rural Americans] don’t hear our message, they don’t see our faces, they don’t know our platform. So they don’t vote for us—so we don’t invest in rural America.”

Walz was scheduled to headline Tuesday’s event but was named as Harris’s running mate that same day and made his first public appearance as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee with Harris at a rally in Philadelphia. In his stead was Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota’s Lieutenant Governor, a member of the White Eart Band of Ojibwe, who could take over for Walz as the state’s governor if he is elected in November.

During the Zoom session, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat and chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, who is retiring this year, pointed to her party’s record of accomplishments for rural America. She ticked off increased broadband access, funds to support rural hospitals and nursing homes, and “the largest investment in rural electricity since the New Deal,” to back renewable energy projects.

The Trump-Vance campaign did not respond to an email query from Barn Raiser for information about Republican priorities for rural America. The GOP platform, approved at the party’s July convention, includes “Protect American Workers and Farmers from Unfair Trade” as a chapter heading—but the bullet points beneath make no mention of either farmers or rural communities.

Voting for values

By itself, a list of policy priorities or legislative accomplishments is not likely to move the needle for rural voters, says Dan Shea, professor of government at Colby College in Maine. He is the co-author, with fellow Colby faculty member Nicholas Jacobs, of The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America. The book is based on a 200-question survey completed by more than 10,000 rural residents, the largest and most detailed research ever conducted among this population.

Rural residents, he says, are looking for empathy from political leaders, and a sense of shared values. “A common assumption,” Shea says, “is that rural communities are withering away, a wasteland of alienation. We find the opposite: Rural Americans are proud of their communities. They are connected and they want to stay in the community.”

Rural communities, he says, are typically more integrated than suburbs or cities, with well-to-do families living nearby those who are less well off, often attending the same schools and churches. As a result, although rural residents have a strong belief in hard work and self-reliance, they are also highly attuned to how well—or how badly—their community is doing as a whole.

Over the past decades, rural families have suffered severe economic shocks, first from the farm crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, then from manufacturing job loss connected to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and unrestricted imports from China. As more family farms disappeared, rural factory jobs became an important source of income—until they weren’t.

“In many communities,” Shea observes, “there was just one factory, and it defined the identity of the town.” When that plant closed “NAFTA ghost towns” were left behind.

Even prior to the collapse of rural manufacturing, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s sweeping victory in 1980, the prairie populists who could once win over the heartland electorate began to lose steam. Democratic senators like Idaho’s Frank Church, Iowa’s John Culver and South Dakota’s George McGovern lost their seats, and rural voters are now “overwhelmingly conservative.”

His students are shocked, says Shea, when he tells them that probably the most liberal Democratic presidential nominee ever—McGovern—was from South Dakota.

“My best guess,” he says, “is that the worry and anxiety that all Americans have about the future is dramatically heightened in rural parts. Rural Americans are anxious for something different.” He’s not surprised to see the Harris-Walz ticket focused on a forward-looking message. “It’s by design they’re saying, ‘We’re not going back.’ “

Neighbor-to-neighbor

Several speakers on the “Rural Americans for Harris” Zoom event warmly remembered time-tested values of mutual support that are still a source of strength for rural communities. Jennifer Garner recalled how her mother, a schoolteacher, was often not around when she came home from school.

“I would go right down the street to Marge,” she said, “and I would know that she would have a key for me. And Mrs. Moore would have a snack for me, and I knew I was taken care of in my community.”

Trae Crowder, a comedian from Celina, Tennessee, and co-author of The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin’ Dixie Outta the Dark,” remembered what happened after the death of his father 10 years ago. “I had two babies, and I was living paycheck to paycheck,” he said. “After the funeral is over, I go back to the office to check how am I going make these payments. And the guy goes, ‘Oh you don’t owe us anything. Everybody in town chipped in … so it’s covered.’ ”

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat who represents northern New Mexico in Congress, talked about the irrigation channels—acequias—that are vital to farmers in her district. The acequias “make sure that the snow that falls on the mountains in the winter can flow down to nourish our fields in the summer.”

Shared ownership of a vital resource, she explained, is a unique feature of this centuries-old system “The farmers each own a little share of the water,” she said, “and we protect and take care of those ditches together because without them we would not survive.”

“The acequias are older than America,” said Fernandez, “but there is something American about them, that shared belief and commitment to something that’s bigger than each of us.”

Tough losses, tough fights ahead

Several speakers acknowledged that running for office as a Democrat in rural communities—and in states with a significant rural population—isn’t easy.

Brandon Presley, who is the cousin of Elvis Presley, nearly pulled off an upset during a run for Mississippi governor in 2023, winning 47% of the vote. Mandela Barnes lost a U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin in 2022 by just 26,000 votes. Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, pointed out that Biden lost North Carolina by 74,000 votes—“42 votes for every precinct in every county in the state of North Carolina.”

Rural Democrats are also focused on the need to run candidates in as many races as possible. One goal is to erase GOP supermajorities in all-red state legislatures, which allows the party to write its most extreme policy planks into law. And in swing states, said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the pro-democracy activist group Indivisible, down ballot races can make a big difference.

“I know some of you are thinking, hey Ezra I’m in the heart of Trump country we can’t elect a dog catcher,” he said. “That might be true. You might not be able to elect a dog catcher. But you sure as hell can run a dog catcher; you sure as hell can get votes out for that dog catcher, and get votes out for the state rep, state senator, U.S. rep, city council person.”

“You can get votes out for those candidates. They might win, they might not win. But regardless they’re going to get votes out for themselves and the top of the ticket for Harris for Walz, for Democrats running statewide. We need those votes.”

“When I ran [for state legislator] in 2022, 40% of the seats in Missouri were uncontested,” says Jess Piper, a teacher with a large social media following, and currently chair of Blue Missouri. “Because of all the work we’ve been doing, 18% of the seats are going uncontested. So we are making progress.”

“I was running in a district that hadn’t elected a Democrat in 32 years,” Piper said. “Because I was raising money, that Republican had to stay in his district. I forced him to talk about abortion bans and the fact that we don’t have shoulders on our roads and that 30 percent of the schools in Missouri are on a four-day week. I forced him to talk about that when he was wanting to talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop.”

“The road to democracy,” Piper said, “is going right through rural America.”

The post Can Tim Walz Help the Democrats Win Back Rural America? appeared first on Barn Raiser.

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.

Many young Appalachians, regardless of later political affiliation, can recall the childhood moments they learned how free they were to voice their own thoughts about contentious topics with family members. Julia Pritt, 24, originally from Hurricane, West Virginia, recalled her excitement the week gay marriage was legalized in June 2015. Pritt and her mother were driving to visit her mamaw and extended family that summer. “We were talking about it in the car,” she said. “And I remember, she told me not to bring it up when we got there.” 

Pritt did experience strong objection to gay marriage from some of her extended family. However, before the Supreme Court opinion had come down, Pritt had a different conversation with Mamaw, the family matriarch. “I remember my mamaw saying, ‘I never understood why that’s such an issue for people because that’s love. And that’s beautiful.’” Pritt remembered how her grandmother had spoken about gay marriage when she herself came out as bisexual: “I felt comfortable to have an explicit conversation with her even though it was really hard and scary.”

Within the national media, stories about adults who feel their children have shut them out over political or social issues are common. But for some young adults, there is eagerness to start those discussions, especially about issues that directly impact them, like poverty, workers’ rights and gender. Sometimes, that can be difficult.

When Grace Davis, now 20, was 17 and living with her devout Catholic grandparents in Hurricane, she was reading articles about abortion, which she was aware her grandparents opposed under any circumstances. But she was compelled to tell her grandfather how she felt: “we shouldn’t ban it, because even though they’re banning it, they’re really not. They’re just — like, I had to explain to him that they’re banning it being done safely.” With a “seventeen-year-old explaining things to a seventy-something-year-old man,” she said, the conversation got “a little heated.”

Others echoed Davis’ experience. Levi Cyrus, 23, a registered Independent who described himself as “open minded,” takes issue with his family’s belief that “[Trump is] the best option for everybody” and voiced his own thoughts. “That conversation didn’t go over well,” he said. Now he sometimes avoids talking politics: “I don’t like being put in the middle of things.”

Cyrus said he believes people of all generations are too focused on issues of identity rather than putting resources towards issues that affect everyone, such as policing, homelessness and schools. He says his experience as a customer service representative has taught him that “everybody wants the same thing…living somewhere where you don’t have to worry about your next meal.” 

Media and the political moment have super-charged conversations 

Many of those who spoke to 100 Days in Appalachia noted that political discussions had become harder to have over time, and some attributed this difficulty to Fox News, the Trump presidency or social media. 

Reid, a 22-year-old librarian in eastern Kentucky, asked his last name be withheld to protect his privacy. He said has noticed a change in the way older Appalachians learn information. “I find especially with older people that I work with, not just my relatives…they don’t know how to sort misinformation because they have, at least a decade ago, decided that this was a trusted source. They haven’t re-decided if it’s still a trusted source now.” Pritt mentioned that a lack of broadband internet in rural areas means many older Appalachians may be relying only on cable TV for information, with no chance to evaluate different sources online.

One study from Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review found that the “prior exposure effect” — a phenomenon in which the more a person sees a claim made, the more accurate they think it is — is stronger in older adults. This may create outrage over a handful of flashpoint issues. 

Reid, who is transgender, explained that while trans issues are important to his everyday life — “my ability to access health care, and my ability to attend my friends’ weddings and to see people and to have a community and to exist” — his family members are stuck on his identity as a point of debate. 

“It doesn’t matter what conversation I’m in, even if I don’t bring it up, I tend to have the adults in my life, especially my relatives, bringing it up for me,” he said. Not only are arguments over “why trans people exist” dehumanizing, said Reid, they dominate conversation and exhaust him. “Not to look at the concepts with sort of rose colored glasses,” he said with a pained laugh, “but I think I’d like to be able to go to a cookout and not get berated.”

Some young people find alternative partners for conversation and information outside of their parents or grandparents. For Grace Davis, it was a campus pastor who was willing to have an expansive conversation about abortion. Still, she says, she doesn’t know “if I would have those types of conversations with like, anybody older than me, without…reading the room.” When talking to members of older generations, she censures herself: “‘Is this actually a good idea to think these thoughts out loud?’” 

Intergenerational communication is a two-way street 

Reaching out for conversation happens in reverse, too, with some older adults trying to stay involved with the young people in their lives. Julia’s mother, Dreama Buck, 54, recalled her approach to talking about politics with her children. In 2010, Buck went back to school to become a college English teacher and brought the classroom discussion techniques home. “As I was processing critical thinking and research skills, I was sharing those with them and really instilled in them that you can argue whatever you want to argue, but you better bring the receipts,” she said. 

These days, Buck chats often with her kids’ friends, who are typically open to discussing political and social issues with her. Buck also prioritizes asking clarifying questions “when I feel like I don’t know enough about what they’re talking about, or if maybe I disagree.”

She said that while, in her view, older adults might be more likely to be closed-minded, she’s seen the tendency across generations and believes social media algorithms contribute to that. Buck attributed this attitude to “an unwillingness or maybe just a lack of awareness that things that are outside [one’s] experience can be true.” 

Chris Bailey, 36, is the campus minister who has become a conversation partner for Davis. He enjoys conversations with college students in his ministry group because they are “still open to experience.” 

“There’s a lot more work that has to be done to deconstruct and get at the heart of a real deep talk with someone who’s more certain of their beliefs,” Bailey said. He explained that being willing to learn about each other, and developing a “relational foundation,” is key to intergenerational conversations.

Hovering over much discussion of intergenerational conflict is the assumption that young people are too quick to pull away from older relatives over “differences of opinion.” Several young people expressed that a difference of political opinion, when it concerns identity issues or civil rights, can cross the line into personal disrespect. For young people who “feel unsafe around someone or feel degraded to such a degree that their humanity is being taken from them, that’s not a relationship that [they] need to pursue,” Bailey said.

Young Appalachians emphasized their longing to have conversations with older generations that have shared goals of understanding and listening with curiosity, habits they are working to develop, too.

Alex Monday, 24, a lifelong West Virginian, found she was unable to have “polite discussions” with most family members growing up. When she was young, she felt she was “the only person to defend me at any point. So I became a fierce defender.” She credits therapy with helping her have complex conversations as an adult: “communication errors happen all the time, you’re going to hurt your friends’ feelings…that’s always going to happen in any relationship, regardless of everything. It’s having the resolve to sit and talk about it [that’s important].” 

Monday is still learning, and knows perception isn’t foolproof. She recalled a moment recently where she was at the mall and saw two men wearing t-shirts with pro-gun slogans and trucker hats — she assumed they had nothing in common with her. 

“And then they put their hands in each others’ back pockets, and then they kissed, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I was so wrong about you.’” 

Originally from Virginia, Hannah Wilson-Black is an environmental writer and 2023 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow based in Huntington, West Virginia. Her work has appeared in Grist, Terrain.org, and The Daily Yonder. She is at work on a novel about a disgraced coal baron.

The post Young Appalachians Want Better Intergenerational Political Conversations appeared first on 100 Days in Appalachia.