CHARLESTON — As the old proverb goes, hindsight is 20/20. Leaders of the Republican and Democratic members of the West Virginia Legislature have taken the last week since the end of the 2022 legislative session to assess what bills passed and what bills were lost.

According to the Legislature’s website, 2,216 bills were introduced during the 60-day session between Jan. 12 and March 12.

By the time the gavel came down and the clock struck midnight last Saturday, 293 bills had completed legislative action, with 143 state Senate bills and 150 House of Delegates bills making it over the finish line. Of those bills, 45 have been signed by Gov. Jim Justice with no bills being vetoed as of Thursday.

Senate President Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, and House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, believe several bills passed this year that will greatly improve economic conditions in the state and benefit all West Virginians. But Senate Minority Leader Stephen Baldwin, D-Greenbrier, and House Minority Leader Doug Skaff, D-Kanawha, said too much focus on culture war issues ultimately resulted in good legislation dying.

UNSILENT MAJORITY

For Blair, the 2022 session was a bittersweet one for him.

“That’s the way it is for almost all of them,” Blair said Thursday during an interview in his office in the Senate wing of the State Capitol Building. “Do I think we had a good session? Yes. Do I think more could have been done? Yes.”

Many of the priorities he laid out at the beginning of the session made it across the finish line. These include Senate Bill 1, creating a private mining mutual insurance company.

The company, modeled after successful attempts nearly 20 years ago by the state to create a medical professional liability program for physicians (now part of MagMutual) and the workers’ compensation program (now Encova, formerly Brickstreet), handle mine reclamation bonds. The Legislature is jumpstarting the new company with $50 million in tax dollars that can be paid back over time once the company starts earning through the bond programs.

Blair, the lead sponsor who championed the bill and lobbied for its passage in person in the House, believes the new company will save the state from future financial liabilities from the way mine reclamation bonds are handled now. If just one of the current bond companies fail, it would leave West Virginia’s emergency special mining reclamation fund on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It’s no different than Brickstreet and the physician’s mutual was except for one thing: this is proactive instead of reactive,” Blair said. “We’re not waiting for this crisis; we’re trying to get out in front of it.”

Another success for Blair passed very early in the session. Senate Bill 4 repealed the ban on construction of nuclear power plants in West Virginia. While Blair doesn’t expect to see a nuclear power plant in the state during his lifetime, he believes it sends a signal to businesses and manufacturers considering a move to West Virginia that the state is open to alternative forms of energy.

“This sends a clear message out to corporate America that we are an all-of-the-above energy state, even though Senate Bill 1 demonstrates clearly that we want to protect our fossil fuel industry as well. All of the above. Those things are important to industry.”

A priority for Blair that didn’t make it out of the Legislature this year was an effort to reform the way the state deals with unemployment. Senate Bill 2 would have lowered the maximum number of weeks for unemployment benefits from 26 weeks to 12 weeks.

The number of weeks of benefits would increase depending on the state’s unemployment rate. A companion bill, Senate Bill 3, would have required those on unemployment to show four attempts at job placement activities each week to WorkForce West Virginia. It also would have allowed workers on unemployment to continue receiving benefits if they took a part-time job while searching for full-time employment.

With the seasonal unemployment rate in West Virginia at record lows, including coming in at 3.9 percent for February, Blair said the bills made sense to both encourage people to find jobs and provide a break to employers paying into the unemployment system.

“When we’ve got the lowest unemployment rate of all time, now is the time to be able to make changes,” Blair said. “It was a missed opportunity, though we’ve still got into the future to be able to get that across the finish line. It would have lowered even more our unemployment tax rates.”

Hanshaw lost several of the bills he championed at the beginning of the session. However, he said some of the bills that went under the radar this session will go a long way in helping the state’s economy and infrastructure.

“A lot of (bills) are things that won’t necessarily have made headlines or grabbed a lot of attention during the session,” Hanshaw said by phone Thursday.

One of those bills was House Bill 4002, creating the Certified Sites and Development Readiness program. Taking lessons learned from the recruitment of North Carolina-based steel manufacturer Nucor to Mason County at the beginning of the year, HB 4002 would require the Department of Economic Development to develop criteria and site certification levels depending on the infrastructure of the potential site.

From there, the department would grade each site based on its readiness for development, help site owners get their sites prepared for development, and even provide micro-grants to fund improvements to sites.

“The purpose of that legislation was to create more and better pieces of developable land here in West Virginia that are ready to go and ready for our development office and all the economic development professionals around West Virginia to market as immediately available and ready for an investor or an entity that is looking to expand into West Virginia to come and occupy,” Hanshaw said.

“We really learned a lot from helping land the Nucor announcement here in the early part of this calendar year,” Hanshaw continued. “Nucor is already on the ground right now performing work on-site here in West Virginia. They were not willing to wait nine months to a year while we prepared a site for them no matter what other carrots we could have offered them. If we didn’t have a site ready for construction, they would have gone elsewhere.”

Another bill, House Bill 4003, establishes clear legal rights for ownership of rare earth elements retrieved from treatment of acid mine drainage. Rare earth elements are used in everything from commercial electronics to electric vehicle batteries, but are largely imported from countries, such as China.

The Legislature also passed several bills dealing with helping local and county governments better leverage their federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars for infrastructure projects, including matching grant programs. One of those bills, House Bill 4479, establishes the Coalfield Communities Grant Facilitation Commission.

“One of the things that is a reality right now is that counties and cities have gotten huge infusions of cash from the federal government,” Hanshaw said. “In lots of cases, they’re sitting on more money than they ever had before with perhaps not as much direction as they might like or we might like in respect to how that money gets used … we want those entities to get the best possible bang for their buck as far as spending those dollars.”

Other bills were not so lucky, including bills dealing with education. House Bill 4467, which would have put additional assistant teachers in elementary school classrooms, and House Bill 4510, which would have required that third graders entering fourth grade be proficient in reading and math before moving to the next grade both failed to be taken up by the Senate.

“Anyone who thinks the Speaker gets everything he wants just need to look at those particular bills,” Hanshaw said. “(HB 4467) had a fiscal note of more than $60 million … it’s a big ticket item, I won’t deny it. I think it’s important and those investments need to be made.”

MINORITY REPORT

While Blair and Hanshaw can point to the success of many of the 293 bills that completed legislative action, Baldwin and Skaff said more good bills could have made it over the finish line had the Republican majority focused less on legislation aimed at perceived culture war issues and traditional conservative red meat politics going into an election year.

“I we look back on the past 60 days, what have we done to bring people home and keep people here,” Baldwin asked. “I think the predominate thing this session was wasted time on social bills most of which did not end up happening. I think that drama and debate does nothing to keep people. It just drives them away.”

“Our message from the beginning of session was we need to do whatever it takes to keep our young people here and attract people back to West Virginia,” Skaff said. “I don’t feel like we did anything this session that focused on that. Quite frankly, we did the opposite. They introduced pieces of legislation that were divisive and took a lot of oxygen out of the room that did nothing to keep people here.”

Baldwin and Skaff point to all the wasted time spent on House Bill 4011 and Senate Bill 498, dealing with the teaching and discussion of topics derived from critical race theory. The bill was watered down over time as it made its way through the session but it resulted in hours of lengthy debate only to die in the final second of the session last Saturday.

“The last thing you want to do is tell younger West Virginians that you can’t learn about this part of history or what we can or cannot teach in the classroom,” Skaff said. “Everybody is going to get this information, but we’re telling teachers you can’t talk about certain subjects? Come on.”

One of the big losses during the legislative session was House Bill 4344, the foster care bill. The bill included a foster care placement database, a data dashboard to provide greater transparency of the foster care program, and increases in pay for Child Protective Service workers. The bill was gutted by the Senate Finance Committee, while the Governor’s Office said it would allow the Department of Health and Human Resources to fund those raises by collapsing some of the more than 1,400 vacant positions within DHHR.

“It did not have the Chairman’s (Senate Finance Committee Chairman Eric Tarr, R-Putnam) support. It also didn’t have the support of DHHR,” Baldwin said. “They were very supportive when it came from the House, but when it came to the Senate they were sort of tepid in their support publicly and lobbying against it behind-the-scenes. It was a shameful moment for the legislature this session.”

Baldwin and Skaff said the legislative session wasn’t all bad. They supported the 5 percent average pay raise built into the budget, the bill codifying the pay raise for teachers and school service personnel, the additional $10,000 raise for West Virginia State Police troopers and certain support staff, and the proposal by Justice to allow DHHR to increase Child Protective Services worker pay.

Another bill touted as a success was Senate Bill 656, which would provide a tax credit for certain corporations with child care facilities for employees. But Baldwin and Skaff said that focus on the anti-CRT bill, bills limiting abortion access, and legislation feeding into anti-COVID-19 vaccine and mask hysteria did much damage to the state this year.

“I don’t know that we did a lot to move the needle to get people to move to West Virginia,” Baldwin said. “The Nucor announcement was a positive step in that direction, but all the time we spent on social bill just drives people away.”

“We stopped a lot more bills than went through that would have hurt a lot of West Virginians,” Skaff said. “They might have a super-majority, but it’s a good thing that the minority was there to help magnify and bring people’s attention to how bad some of these bills were.”