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Task Force

A local task force, which is now in its fifth year of working to find solutions to thorny community issues, recently hosted its annual public forum in Elkins. The Regional Task Force on Addiction, Homelessness and Mental Health offered its forum last week at the Phil Gainer Community Center, with more than 25 community members turning out for the event. Two guest speakers addressed the crowd: Joshua Barker, the director of Substance Abuse Prevention and Recovery under the Office of the West Virginia Attorney General, and Dr. Stephen Loyd, the director of the Office of Drug Control ...

Assessment

Sian Leah Beilock, president of Dartmouth College, a private Ivy League research university located in Hanover, N.H., presented a bold assessment of higher education in this country in an opinion article she wrote for the Jan. 26 edition of the Wall Street Journal. No doubt the bold assessment presented by Beilock was not received kindly by many educators across America. Therefore, Beilock’s views should be a starting point for in-depth discussion and debate even in places like the six-county Southern Alleghenies region (Blair, Cambria, Somerset, Bedford, Huntingdon and Fulton ...

Resistance

As West Virginia state officials have been doing for several years now, Secretary of State Kris Warner pushed back against federal overreach this week when he announced the Mountain State “will not volunteer the release of personally identifying information of every registered West Virginian to the U.S. Department of Justice. Warner said the Department of Justice has sent requests to almost every state seeking registered voters’ information such as ID numbers, Social Security numbers and other identifying information. His office was having none of it. “West Virginians entrust ...

New Office?

A 99-yard kickoff return touchdown would be nice for West Virginia, in the economic Backyard Brawl, but the state needs to get a few first downs, too. One idea for helping make some of those smaller plays successful is the formation of an Office of Entrepreneurship, through state House Bill 5200. The bill is sitting in the House Government Organization Committee, and has some big supporters. Among them is West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner, who on Wednesday encouraged lawmakers to support the measure. “Entrepreneurship has always been a cornerstone of strong, resilient ...

Hopeful Sign

Are you tired of the cold and snow? Have you had it with experiencing, day-after-day, weather forecasts that call for overnight temperatures that start close to zero and afternoon temperatures that are consistently below freezing? Have you resorted to cursing the groundhog and started to wonder out loud how the woolly bear caterpillars you so carefully studied last fall could have been so wrong? Relax — spring is on the way. And while we haven’t seen the grass in a couple of weeks and the trees are still waiting for their first buds, we would remind you that there’s an even ...

Good Health

As a few attempts to address West Virginia’s woeful health indicators and perpetually bottom-of-the-barrel quality of life rankings have made their way into public policy over the past year, lawmakers have continued to look for new ways to address the matter. As it seems these days everything must have a call back to some other well-known political slogan, the Make West Virginia Healthy Act of 2026 is meant to get ahead of some of our state’s worst health challenges. “We all know the numbers … West Virginia leads the nation in chronic disease, disability, preventable ...