From the gold-domed State Capitol, in a House chamber packed with lawmakers, justices and department leaders, Gov. Patrick Morrisey delivered his first State of the State address to the West Virginia Legislature Wednesday night.
The roughly one hour speech encapsulated his plans for the state, much of which will need the support of the legislature to accomplish. It also laid the groundwork for extensive cost-cutting measures.
“The most basic rule of budgeting, whether you’re a family sitting at the kitchen table, or you’re the state of West Virginia, is that you can’t spend more money than you make,” Morrisey said.
“The budget that I inherited would have put us approximately $400 million into the red for fiscal year 2026. And over $500 million into the red for 2027, and over $550 million-$600 million annually after that.”
Instead, Morrisey said, the hallmark of his governorship will be fiscal responsibility.
“We inherited a deep structural deficit. It was papered over with one-time money that’s now running out,” he said.
That one time money was billions of dollars in Covid-era federal funding. The state received those extra funds as part of the federal government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic and all the economic fallout that came with it.
Morrisey pledged to cut the general revenue budget by more than 2% and to go after waste, abuse, and overspending in the system.
“I’m submitting the Mountain State Comeback Budget, a balanced budget which represents a down payment on a multi-year plan to solve our state’s financial challenges,” he said.
The Governor also emphasized the future of energy production in the state.
“I know our state and our nation are on our way to a resurgence and a Golden Era unlike anything we’ve seen before. We will once again be the engine that powers our country,” he said. “That means using even more coal and gas, utilizing our rich water resources and developing nuclear powered small modular reactors.”
All this energy is needed, Morrisey said, to power the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI needs lots of power and water to function, something Morrisey said the state has in abundance and that could be used for the new technology.
Much of Morrissey’s agendas for the states were presented as big picture ideas. Some of the more specific and detailed plans he has are to get rid of certificates of need, which are currently required for the creation of new health care facilities. The goal is to restrict duplicative services, he said.
“It’s essentially a permission slip, it’s given out by the government, that you need to open up a new hospital or healthcare facility,” Morrisey said. “It hands over power to unelected bureaucrats and major healthcare providers who decide which committee communities need new or expanded healthcare services. This is big government activism at its worst.”
Another specific goal Morrisey laid out in his speech was to get rid of cellphones in classrooms, which got a standing ovation, even from the Democrats, whose hands for most of the night stayed still.
The governor allocated about a third of his speech to addressing culture war issues like defining gender, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), immigration and what he calls “wokeness in schools.”
Some notable things that were left out: vaccine exemptions and Childcare. For a transcript of Morrisey’s speech click here. To see a video of the speech, click here.