Author: Ashton Marra

Ten Charged in Logan County Extortion Scheme

Federal charges have been filed against ten southern West Virginia men in connection with a pay-to-play scheme at a Logan County mine.

U.S. Prosecuting Attorney Booth Goodwin announced the filings in Charleston Friday which involved an elaborate extortion scheme surrounding the Mountain Laurel Mining Complex owned by Arch Coal.

The site’s former General Manager David Runyon of Delbarton was said to be at the center of that scheme, charged with extorting vendors for cash kickbacks in order to ensure the vendors’ contracts for work at the mine site. Court documents show Runyon and other Arch Coal employees received nearly $2 million between 2007 and 2012.

“[Vendors] were able to guarantee that they got and kept these contracts and many of them, as you can appreciate, are very, very lucrative contracts,” Goodwin said.

“I mean, if they’re willing to upwards of $2 million in total to keep them, you can imagine how big these contracts are.”

Goodwin said Arch Coal cooperated fully with his office during the investigation.

The company released a written statement Friday saying:

“When we raised concerns about certain irregularities at one of our West Virginia operations, federal authorities responded quickly and with the utmost professionalism. While it was extremely disappointing to find that former employees had failed to live up to our trust in them, we are pleased and relieved to have this behind us.”

Aside from Runyon, Gary Griffith of Oceana was charged with making false statements to the FBI and State Police about receiving cash kickbacks of at least $250,000 for himself and Runyon. Griffith is the former maintenance manager of Mountain Laurel.

Stephen Herndon and Scott Ellis, both of Holden were both charged with structuring cash withdrawals from a local bank, taking out money to pay nearly $425,000 over five years to secure rebuild work at the mine site for their company, Tri-State Mine Services.

Alvis Porter of Holden was charged with failing to collect, account for and pay over trust fund taxes for an employee. His company Quality Oil, Inc., operating at the time as Southern Construction of Logan, was providing construction services for Mountain Laurel.

David Herndon of Chauncey was charged with engaging in an unlawful monetary transaction of criminally derived property of a value greater than $10,000. Herndon’s company MAC Mine Service, Inc., provided contract labor to Mountain Laurel. Herndon paid kickbacks of approximately $340,000 to ensure his contract would be renewed each year.

Ronald Barnette of Holden was charged with lying to the FBI and State Police about paying kickbacks for his company to receive work rebuilding miners and bolters at the site. Barnette’s payments totaled about $300,000.

Gary Roeher of Holden was charged with filing a false tax return after he deducted about $43,000 as a business expense for his company CM Supply. Charges say Roeher used the money to install an in-ground swimming pool at his home.

Chadwick Lusk of Davin was charged with mail fraud after charges say he defrauded Arch Coal of its right to honest services. Lusk received cash kickbacks from Roeher for crib blocks Arch Coal had purchased for roof support in underground mining areas of Moutain Laurel.

James Evans II of Verdunville was charged with conspiracy to omit honest service fraud. His company, Baisden Recycling recycled scrap metal from the mine complex. Evans paid Arch’s $30,000 commission on some scrap cable to Runyon through Stephen Herndon rather than to Arch.

All charging documents were filed as informations, which typically means the accused have agreed to cooperate in the investigation.
 

W.Va. Supreme Court Denies Request to Suspend Prosecutor's License

The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals has denied a request to temporarily suspend the law license of Kanawha County Prosecutor Mark Plants and has upheld a circuit court decision. That decision disqualified him from a prosecuting certain types of cases pending an outcome in criminal proceeding against him.

Plants is charged with misdemeanor domestic battery and violating a protection order after beating his son with a leather belt in February.

Last week, Plants agreed to a deal offered by prosecutors to drop the charges after a year if he participates in a pre-trial diversion program.

The West Virginia Office of Disciplinary Counsel filed the request with the Supreme Court to suspend Plants’s license until the completion of his criminal proceedings because of a conflict of interest between his own defense for his actions and his job to uphold state law and protect the public. In a hearing before the Justices earlier this month, the ODC claimed Plants posed a threat of irreparable harm to the public.

The Court, however, disagreed with that assessment in their per curiam opinion released Wednesday.

Justice Brent Benjamin disqualified himself from the proceedings, but the remaining justices ruled an order by Kanawha County Circuit Judge Duke Bloom issued last month removing Plants from any cases of abuse and neglect and violations of domestic violence protection orders was sufficient in protecting public interest.

Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper expressed interest Tuesday in filing a petition with the state Supreme Court to have Plants removed from office but said in a release Wednesday:
 

“I am very grateful to the Supreme Court for their timely and succinct judicial determination.  The Kanawha County Commission will completely and fully abide by the opinion and direction of the Supreme Court, as we should.”

The Supreme Court opinion concludes by saying:

West Virginia Storage Tank Website Up and Running

Members of the public now have full access to comments collected by the state Department of Environmental Protection on a newly passed law. That law…

Members of the public now have full access to comments collected by the state Department of Environmental Protection on a newly passed law. That law requires the DEP to create a regulatory program for above ground storage tanks in order to protect the state’s water.

The Above Ground Storage Tank section of the state DEP’s website isn’t fully complete. Some pages are still under construction, but for now, members of the public have access to the language of Senate Bill 373, a bill written in response to the January 9 chemical spill in Charleston that contaminated the drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians.

The site also contains links to organizations that create standards for tanks, definitions of terms and contacts at the DEP who deal with tank policy.

What you can’t find, however, are specific regulations for above ground storage tanks in West Virginia because they just don’t exist yet.

Scott Mandirola, director of the DEP’s Division of Water and Waste Management, told a legislative committee last week they’re in the process of writing those regulations which must be approved by the legislature during the 2015 session.

But before they complete the new rules, the DEP is reaching out to stakeholders and members of the public for their input on what they think should be included. Those comments are fully accessible on the DEP’s site, which is a result of many of the public comments themselves.

The site contains comments from more than 60 individuals, 20 organizations and 16 businesses.

Many of the public remarks and some from organizations were very similar in nature and even format. The West Virginia Rivers Coalition provided a template for multiple grassroots like Friends of Water and the West Virginia Citizen Action Group who then passed them on to members.

Those comments asked for transparency in the process, the closing of regulatory loopholes and adequate fees to cover the administrative costs of creating a regulatory program.

Some comments from business and industry representatives asked the DEP to consider regulatory programs they are already subject to when writing new rules to avoid a duplicative process that could harm businesses.

For example, the West Virginia Coal Association called any further rules to regulate tanks at mine sites unnecessary and said additional regulations would only confuse and frustrate the agency’s ability to carry out its current inspection process.

The Independent Oil and Gas Association commented increased compliance costs associated with regulations, like fees for signs on tanks, could outweigh the profits at some drilling sites and cause a loss in production.

Senate Bill 373 requires the tank registration process to begin on June 6, which Mandirola said they will be ready for, but he anticipated the electronic registration site to go live on June 10, allowing them to deal with technical issues at the beginning of the week.

The DEP is asking tank owners who are not already registered in its Electronic Permitting or Electronic Submission System to go ahead and create a username on their site to streamline the process.

The DEP also has an online quiz available to see if you tank falls under the guidelines of Senate Bill 373.
 

CTCs Helping Students Get Out of Developmental 'Quicksand'

Community and technical colleges have started noticing a trend that’s consistent not just here in West Virginia, but across the country.

That trend: students who are enrolled in developmental courses when they enter a higher education institution are less likely to graduate.

“Thirteen percent of the students that go into developmental or remedial courses graduate, only 13 percent,” Chancellor of West Virginia’s CTC system James Skidmore told members of the state Board of Education during their May meeting.

Skidmore said 64 percent of first time community college students in the state test into developmental or remedial courses, meaning they aren’t ready to take on college level classes in English or math.

“What’s happening, they’re getting caught up in the developmental education process,” he said. “Some students have to take three levels of developmental, some students have to take one, some have to take two.”

“I refer to it as the quicksand of higher education. Students get in developmental and they never get out.”

Complete College America statistics show similar numbers nationally and the organization, of which West Virginia is a part, has come up with a method to reduce those numbers. Skidmore said West Virginia is looking to take that approach.

Instead of taking remediation courses which do not count for college credit, West Virginia community colleges will begin offering co-requisites. These are courses that count as a college level English or math class, but have additional support for the students that need it.

That support can come in three forms:

  • Bootcamps: a five week prep course to prepare students for college level classes
  • Additional Time: 45-minute tutoring meetings following each class or additional class sessions
  • Proctored labs: scheduled computer labs where students work on the areas the struggle in with a member of the college’s faculty

Each community and technical college across the state will choose which of the three models will work best for them based on the programs they offer and the types of students they attract.

Skidmore said colleges are not limited to one method, but they must have at least one for both math and English fully implemented by the fall of 2015.

Lawmakers Receive Update on Magistrate Court Study

In between debating special session bills this week, lawmakers managed to have a few of their regularly scheduled interim meetings. During one of those meetings, legislators were updated by a national group on a study of the state’s magistrate system.

The study of the state’s magistrate system started following the 2013 legislative session during which lawmakers faced some debate over magistrate pay.

Currently, magistrates in the state are grouped into two classifications based on county population. It has been the practice of the state to compensate magistrates in larger counties at a higher level, under the assumption that they see more cases.

“There was a lot of discussion about the varying workloads of magistrates in different counties to try to make sure we were comparing apples to apples as compared to apples to oranges,” Senate Judiciary Chair Corey Palumbo said Tuesday.

As a condition of passing the salary increase for a small number of magistrates, lawmakers required a study into the court system. It is being conducted by The National Center for State Courts, a non-partisan, nonprofit research and consulting service based in Williamsburg, Virginia.

“Imagine that you have one county that has primarily traffic cases and one county that has primarily misdemeanor cases even though they both have the same case load. The county with more misdemeanor cases is going to have more work in its courts,” Cynthia Lee with the NCSC told lawmakers.

The NCSC has come up with their own method to determining the workload for magistrates and from that system, they can determine how many magistrates are necessary for a given county.

The system is called a weighted caseload model and is calculated using three factors:

  • case filings- the number of cases of a certain type filed each year
  • case weights- the number of minutes it takes a magistrate to complete a specific case
  • year value- the total number of minutes a magistrate has per year to do case work.

The model is focused on the types of cases, not necessarily the number filed and helps show the actual workload for magistrates, deputies and their clerks.

Of the 97 percent of magistrates who participated in the West Virginia study, they on average spent the most amount of time with mental health cases at 213 minutes per case, the least on traffic citations at about 4 minutes.

Juvenile abuse and neglect cases average at 91 minutes and personal safety, similar to domestic violence cases, averaged 80 minutes per case, both on the higher end of the time spectrum.

With the break down of time spent, the center then added up those minutes and divided by the year value. That gives them the specific number of magistrates that county needs to run its judicial system properly. With this method the center is determining how West Virginia should allocate its magistrates.

Lee said sharing magistrates across county lines could create efficiencies but it must be done in a way that preserves the integrity of the court system.

Lawmakers questioned if sharing magistrates between counties was legal in terms of election procedures, but Lee said that’s a determination legislators themselves will have to make.

Palumbo expects the final recommendations from the center to be available in the fall so the legislature can discuss those findings and possibly propose legislation to change the state’s magistrate system during the 2015 legislative session.
 

Tomblin: "I Will Veto Abortion Bill Again"

Governor Tomblin released a statement Thursday discouraging lawmakers from calling themselves into a special session to take up previously vetoed abortion legislation.

House Bill 4588 would have created a statewide ban of abortions after 20 weeks. Both the House and Senate passed the bill, but Tomblin vetoed the legislation calling it unconstitutional. Several courts in other states have knocked down similar bans.

“Should members of the Legislature take the same action again, I will again veto the bill,” Tomblin said in a release.

“I am proud of my pro-life record, and I would be happy to work with members of the Legislature during the 2015 regular session to pass a bill that is constitutional.”

The message comes after lawmakers reported West Virginians for Life was passing around a standard letter for lawmakers to sign petitioning themselves back into session to take up the issue.

Kanawha County Republican Delegate Patrick Lane said Wednesday the three-fifths threshold had been met in the Senate and was close to being met in the House. If that threshold is reached, Tomblin is constitutionally required to call lawmakers back into session.

House Speaker Tim Miley also commented on the matter, stating that, while he voted in favor of the bill, questions regarding its constitutionality remain.  

“I understand there must be a great deal of disappointment by any special interest group when its bill is vetoed, but I am troubled by the demand that the Legislature be called back into a special session, at taxpayer expense, to revisit the very same legislation that appears to be legally flawed,” said Miley in the statement issued Thursday afternoon.  

“I don’t believe West Virginia taxpayers will understand why lawmakers would be so eager to quickly return to Charleston at great expense to attempt to pass legislation destined for a long legal battle and a very uncertain future.”

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