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At the Capitol: Conclusion of 2018 W.Va. legislative session anticlimactic

By Phil Kabler

For West Virginia Press Association

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — While the 60-day 2018 regular session of the Legislature ended Saturday night, in many ways, it seemed the session really ended four days earlier, with passage of a 5 percent across-the-board pay raise for teachers, school service personnel and state employees that helped end the statewide teachers’ walkout that had closed schools for nine days.

Phil Kabler

On Tuesday morning, Senate leadership, which had previously refused to budge on limiting the raise to 4 percent, relented, and within hours, the bill (HB4145) passed both houses unanimously and was signed into law by Gov. Jim Justice.

Justice staged a bill signing ceremony Tuesday afternoon in the Culture Center theater, a ceremony attended by hundreds of red-clad teachers, most of who had been in the Capitol earlier, cheering and celebrating word that a deal had been reached.

“This is the beauty of this whole system. It worked. It was a rough road, but it worked,” Justice said of the arduous route to final approval of the pay hike.

“Today, we are making an investment,” Justice added. “We are making an investment to put education where I think it ought to be, first.”
The Senate’s capitulation came after teachers and school personnel turned out at the Capitol Monday in the largest numbers of the walkout, in numbers so large that access to the Capitol had to be temporarily shut down after more than 5,000 people had packed into the Capitol, raising safety concerns. Those who couldn’t get into the Capitol formed a human chain around the perimeter of the Capitol grounds.

For Justice, resolution of the pay raise impasse and of the teachers’ walkout may have been somewhat bittersweet – since legislators helped find funding for the $107 million cost of the pay raises by slashing initiatives Justice had sought from the state’s 2018-19 budget bill.

That included eliminating most of $35 million in increases Justice sought for the state Development Office to recruit new business investment to the state, and all but $2.5 million of a $14 million increase he wanted to expand state tourism advertising and marketing.

In all, the Legislature cut more than $80 million of funding increases the governor sought, in order to pass a $4.38 billion state spending plan (SB156) that covers the pay raises, and a $21 million appropriation to “freeze” PEIA health insurance premiums and benefits for another plan year, without raising taxes or raiding the state’s Rainy Day emergency reserve funds.

(As part of the agreement to end the teachers’ walkout, Justice on Thursday announced appointments to a 23-member Task Force on PEIA Stability, which is to spend the year studying the plan to come up with ways to control and reduce medical costs and find cost-efficiencies in PEIA. A day later, heeding complaints that the panel has only two women, Justice announced he will be appointing six additional women to the task force.)

Ending a historic week, the Legislature made a little history of their own on Saturday, passing the budget bill and sending it to the governor prior to the end of the 60-day regular session.

That marked the first time the Legislature had completed the budget without an extended session since 1982.

It also was in sharp contrast to the lengthy budget impasses of the past two years, when a  combination of severe revenue shortfalls and reluctance of legislative leadership to raise taxes resulted in the Legislature failing to pass the 2016-17 and 2017-18 state budgets until mid-June each year.

In 2016, the Legislature spent three days in extended session and 17 days in special session, at a cost of about $600,000, before passing a $4.18 billion budget on June 15.

In 2017, the Legislature spent a total of 21 days in special session, at a cost of $860,000, before passing a “bare bones” $4.22 billion budget on June 16, that Justice allowed to become law without his signature. (In an earlier veto, Justice had showed his displeasure with the budget bill by putting it on a silver platter filled with what he called “bull you-know-what.”)

While the end of the teachers’ walkout and early passage of the budget made for a slow final night of the session, it was not entirely without drama, highlighted by the passage of a controversial measure to eliminate the Department of Education and the Arts, and dispersing its agencies – including Culture and History, Public Broadcasting, Rehabilitation Services, and Library Commission among others – to other departments (HB4006).

“It’s unnecessary. It’s not helpful,” Delegate Larry Rowe, D-Kanawha, said of eliminating Education and the Arts, currently headed by Gayle Manchin, wife of U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.

Justice said Saturday he will evaluate whether the bill would have “unintended consequences.”

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