Curtis is our Energy & Environment Reporter, based in Charleston. He has spent more than 17 years as a reporter and copy editor for Gannett, Dow Jones and McClatchy. He has written extensively about travel, transportation and Congress for USA TODAY, The Bergen Record, The Lexington Herald-Leader, The Wichita Eagle, The Belleville News-Democrat and The Sacramento Bee. You can reach him at ctate@wvpublic.org.
On Monday, the West Virginia Department of Highways began placing 87 signs in three counties.
The old signs said “New River Gorge National River,” a designation it received in 1978. The new signs reflect the change to the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve.
The 7,000-acre park and 65,000-acre preserve stretches more than 50 miles from Hinton to Hawks Nest State Park.
At the park’s visitors center at Sandstone, Gov. Jim Justice, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, Rep. Carol Miller and other dignitaries spoke of the park’s significance to West Virginia.
“This day marks an incredible day,” Justice said. “So many good things are happening in West Virginia, it’s off the chart.”
The New River and nearby Bluestone and Gauley rivers, which are part of the same unit, brought more than 1.3 million visitors to the state in 2019, according to the National Park Service. They contributed nearly $70 million to the state’s economy.
“It was a dream of this region of West Virginia,” Capito said. “It was a dream of those who love the river and love our beautiful landscapes who came to both me and Senator (Joe) Manchin and said, ‘Can you make this happen?’”
Capito and Manchin introduced the bill that led to the national park designation in October 2019. Miller introduced the companion bill in the House of Representatives.
The park made Time Magazine’s 100 of the World’s Greatest Places.
“Because we have the bragging rights here in West Virginia,” Miller said. “This is such a beautiful, beautiful spot.”
Kentucky utility regulators reached a decision this week that could mean a northern West Virginia power plant will have to close years sooner than planned.
The Kentucky Public Service Commission on Thursday rejected Kentucky Power’s request to perform environmental compliance work on the Mitchell Plant near Moundsville, West Virginia.
Under federal rules, the coal-burning plant requires a new wastewater handling system to continue operating through 2040. Without it, the plant will have to close by the end of 2028.
The project’s total cost is $133.5 million, with Kentucky Power’s portion totaling $67 million. The company owns half the Mitchell Plant along with Wheeling Power.
Both are subsidiaries of Ohio-based American Electric Power.Kentucky Power told the commissioners that performing the upgrades to keep the plant operating through 2040 was the least-cost option and it needed the plant to maintain its capacity obligations to the power grid.
The company sought to recover the cost through a surcharge its customers would pay on their monthly bills. Kentucky Power serves about 165,000 customers in eastern Kentucky.
Environmental groups, utility customers and the Kentucky attorney general’s office testified that closing the plant in 2028 would save ratepayers tens of millions of dollars.
They told regulators that natural gas, renewable energy and other capacity could feasibly replace the Mitchell Plant.
In his testimony last month, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron told commissioners that the plant “provides little to no economic value to the commonwealth.”
In its order, the commission said the company failed to demonstrate that the project was the most reasonable and least costly option.
The commission also said the company exaggerated the cost of solar power as a replacement and failed to consider the tax benefits of retiring the plant. Cindy Wiseman, a spokeswoman for Kentucky Power, said the company disagreed with the commission’s findings, but recognized that “this was a close call for the commission given the economics and the overall size of the investment.”
The West Virginia Public Service Commission still has not rendered a decision on Wheeling Power’s portion of the project. It’s not clear what would happen if the commission comes to a different conclusion from its Kentucky counterpart.
Emmett Pepper, policy director for Energy Efficient West Virginia, said the Kentucky commission’s decision showed that the Mitchell retrofits “are not good for West Virginia customers.”
Rejecting them “would help avoid yet another rate increase, and would create savings that could be invested in developing and implementing a real economic transition that would bring new jobs and economic development to the Northern Panhandle,” Pepper added.
The Mitchell Plant supports hundreds of jobs, directly and indirectly, and contributes millions of dollars in annual tax revenue to the surrounding community.Public and written testimony in West Virginia overwhelmingly favors keeping the plant open.
The Mitchell Plant is one of three in West Virginia whose fate could be decided in the coming weeks. The other two, John Amos in Winfield and Mountaineer in New Haven, require the same wastewater upgrades to keep running through 2040.
Like Mitchell, they would close in 2028 if the work is not completed.
The upgrades to all three plants would cost $317 million.The Amos and Mountaineer plants await a similar decision from the Virginia State Corporation Commission. Last week, the commission’s senior hearing examiner recommended that commissioners deny the project.
Environmental and consumer groups have pushed for the early closure of a 50-year-old coal-fired power plant in West Virginia that serves electricity customers in both West Virginia and Kentucky.
They have an unlikely ally: Kentucky’s Republican attorney general, Daniel Cameron.
In a filing last week with the Kentucky Public Service Commission, Cameron recommended the commission reject Kentucky Power’s request for $67 million in upgrades for the Mitchell Plant in Marshall County, West Virginia, paid for by its customers with a surcharge on their monthly bills.
Instead, Cameron said Kentucky Power, which owns a 50% share of the plant with Wheeling Power, should let it close in 2028. Both are subsidiaries of Ohio-based American Electric Power.
The Mitchell Plant, which opened in 1971, “provides little to no economic value to the commonwealth,” Cameron wrote.
Cameron noted that none of the plant’s workers live in Kentucky, it uses very little Kentucky coal and contributes no tax revenue to Kentucky communities.
That’s precisely the opposite of the case West Virginia officials are making to that state’s public service commission to keep the plant open until 2040. The plant employs more than 200, uses West Virginia coal and contributes millions of dollars in tax revenue to the nearby community.
One official making that case: Patrick Morrisey, Cameron’s counterpart in West Virginia.
Both Republican attorneys general are on the same side in a legal challenge to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate emissions from power plants.
Both are from states that are heavy producers and consumers of coal and where fossil fuel production is embedded in the culture and history.
But on the fate of the Mitchell Plant, they’re at odds.
“Retirement of the Mitchell plant in 2028 opens up wide-ranging opportunities for Kentucky,” Cameron told state utility regulators.
Kentucky Power serves about 165,000 customers in eastern Kentucky. The average customer would pay as much as $2.26 each month to cover the cost of upgrading the Mitchell Plant.
In its own presentation to the commission, Kentucky Power testified that the plant would continue to be economical to operate through 2040.
The company’s analysis was flawed, Cameron wrote, echoing the Sierra Club’s testimony in Kentucky and West Virginia.
For example, he wrote that the company vastly overstated the cost of solar energy as a replacement. Kentucky Power’s analysis assumed a price of $55 a megawatt hour.
Cameron noted that Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities recently entered a 20-year solar power purchasing agreement for $27.82 a megawatt hour.
He said the company failed to consider the tax benefits of retiring the Mitchell Plant in 2028. According to Cameron’s estimate, the savings could approach $29 million.
“The savings to ratepayers from retiring the units in 2028 rather than 2040 are substantial,” Cameron wrote.
Cynthia Wiseman, a spokeswoman for Kentucky Power, said the company disagrees with Cameron’s analysis.
She said making the upgrades to the Mitchell Plant “provides greater benefits to customers including providing reliable, low-cost baseload generating capacity and delaying the need to procure hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of replacement generation.”
Elizabeth Kuhn, a spokesman for Cameron, said the attorney general “unequivocally supports the operation of Kentucky coal plants for as long as possible.”
She said he “advocates for Kentucky Power to use energy resources located in the commonwealth, which would benefit Kentucky’s economy and Kentucky ratepayers.”
Kentucky regulators will issue a decision on the Mitchell Plant by Aug. 8.
The Mitchell Plant could close before 2040 even if the full upgrades are completed due to changing economic, political and environmental factors, Cameron argued. Those include a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, increased operating costs and the availability of natural gas and renewable energy.
“Kentucky Power’s proposal to invest millions of dollars to enable continued operation of a West Virginia coal plant through 2040 fails to adequately address the risk exposure inherent in that approach,” he wrote.
A civil liberties and LGBTQ rights group are suing West Virginia and Harrison County officials, over a law targeting transgender athletes.
House Bill 3293 is slated to take effect July 8. It bars transgender girls and women from playing team sports with other girls and women, from middle school through college.The West Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Wednesday with Lambda Legal, one of the largest national law firms for LGBTQ rights. They’re suing on behalf of an 11-year-old transgender girl who wanted to join her middle school’s cross-country team.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Charleston, names the state board of education and the Harrison County Board of Education.
The complaint said the law violates the U.S. Constitution and Title IX, a 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in school sports.
The national ACLU is challenging similar laws in other states.
West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito is the senior Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and is a lead negotiator on infrastructure legislation. No matter who controls the Senate, West Virginia has perhaps more influence in Washington since the days of Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller, decades ago.
To Manchin, who grew up in Beckley, West Virginia, it’s about time.
“I think sometimes West Virginia has always felt that it was behind the eight ball or never quite getting its fair share,” she said in an interview about a week into her new job. “And I would say right now, the stars have just lined up in our favor.”
Curtis Tate
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Gayle Manchin, center, shares a laugh with first lady Jill Biden, left, and actress Jennifer Garner, right, at an event to promote COVID-19 vaccinations in Charleston, West Virginia.
West Virginia lost 60,000 residents in the most recent Census count. It has struggled to keep young people from leaving and to attract industries. Its historic dependence on coal mining has left the state pockmarked with abandoned mine sites and hollowed-out towns. As the struggle continues in Manchin’s home state, the commission she now leads could help turn things around.
Human Infrastructure
The Appalachian Regional Commission was established in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. It encompasses 420 counties in 13 states, including all 55 of West Virginia’s counties. The agency consists of a federal co-chair and the region’s 13 governors.
It is the only lasting federal component of the War on Poverty.
Biden nominated Manchin as the top federal official at the commission in March, and the Senate confirmed her unanimously in April.
For decades, the ARC was best known for building a 3,090-mile network of improved highways throughout the region. The system is complete except for a few hundred miles.
Some of the toughest, and most expensive segments yet to be built are in West Virginia, such as Corridor H in Grant, Tucker and Hardy counties.
Manchin said the highways are a priority. However, she brings a background in human infrastructure to her job. She served as president of the state board of education and secretary for education and the arts.
ARC
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Gayle Manchin is the new federal co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission.
“One of my priorities, of course, going back to my past is education and education being the foundation if we want to strengthen communities, and build economic vitality and build the workforce,” she said.
In one example of how the commission’s work extends beyond the region’s highways, an ARC grant provided computers for every middle school student in McDowell County in Southern West Virginia. McDowell, where a third of residents live in poverty, according to Census data, is the state’s poorest county.
The work doesn’t stop there. Manchin said the ARC should help expand broadband internet throughout the region so those students are connected at school and at home. When they graduate, they need the appropriate job training and workforce development opportunities.
That’s where the commission comes in, too: Helping young residents get the right job skills so they’ll stay in West Virginia. And if they stay, that will help reverse the state’s population decline.
“So whether it be at a career tech center, a community college,” Manchin said, “(it) does not have to be a four year college degree but they need training and job skills. And we need to fit those job skills to what is available in that area.”
Eller said in the beginning, the governors wanted to build physical infrastructure so they could cut ribbons and show that the region looked like other parts of the country. They didn’t pay as much attention to human capital: education, health care, housing and economic empowerment.
University of Kentucky
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Historian and author Ron Eller.
“In the last 20 years, however, we’ve begun to see that infrastructure and human capital go hand in hand in economic development,” Eller said. “It takes much longer to develop human resources and human capital.”
That kind of infrastructure has become even more important throughout Appalachia with the long-term, structural decline of the region’s coal industry.
The ongoing loss of jobs at coal mines and power plants will mean that communities will need something to fill the void.
Eller said Manchin’s background makes her well-suited to take the commission in that direction.
“Frankly, I think that’s a direction that the commission needs to take,” Eller said. “There’s a lot of promise for that within the region.”
Working Together
In addition to her education credentials, Manchin was West Virginia’s first lady from 2004 to 2010. She knows most of the senators and governors.
Her current state co-chair is Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. Northam’s term as governor ends this year, and the 13 governors rotate the state co-chair role every year.
One of those governors is West Virginia’s Jim Justice, a Republican.
Justice appointed Manchin as secretary of education and the arts, a cabinet-level position, in his first term in 2017.
Then things went sour. Justice, who ran as a Democrat with Joe Manchin’s endorsement, switched parties. Their relationship deteriorated. There were rumblings that Joe Manchin would challenge Justice for the governor’s mansion. Justice fired Gayle Manchin in 2018.
Now, Manchin said they’ve moved on.
“Governor Justice certainly wants what’s best for West Virginia,” she said. “I certainly want what’s best for West Virginia, and that we know that working together, we can make some great things happen.”
Manchin’s mission extends beyond West Virginia, as far north as southern New York and as far south as northeast Mississippi. Manchin said she’d like to think of the region as one big state.
She said she plans to first visit the states within driving distance, and eventually work her way to every part of the region, something that was not possible during the height of the coronavirus.
“I have not traveled to all these areas,” she said. “One of the first things I want to do is to travel and visit and listen.”
Manchin said she wants to bring the states together on a single project that could benefit the entire region. The tour will be the first part of that effort.
“I want to hear what their issues are specifically, and what are their ideas?” she said. “I mean, you can talk on the telephone and you can do a Zoom call, but it’s not like going and shaking hands and walking down the street of these little towns.”
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“The most important thing we can do is get this virus behind us,” said Garner, who attended crosstown rival George Washington High School. “And in order to do that, we have to get anyone with vaccine hesitancy into these chairs.”
Biden tried to address the hesitancy problem.
“Now, there’s a fair amount of misinformation out there, and some of my friends have asked me, ‘Is the vaccination safe?’” she said to a small audience of state and local officials. “And you all know, the answer is yes. I got my shot, and I promise it didn’t even hurt, and I hate needles.”
Biden also met separately with West Virginia first lady Cathy Justice.
Gov. Jim Justice has attempted to woo more West Virginians to get vaccinated by offering a $100 savings bond to anyone up to age 35 who receives or has received a shot. Earlier in the year, the state led the nation in vaccines, but demand has dropped.
