Talk Show Host Asks Important Questions For The State

Questioning the status quo can be difficult. But for change to happen, it has to be done. 

TJ Meadows from the West Virginia MetroNews Network is questioning everything. He stepped into the role as host of the radio talk show Talkline, formerly filled by Hoppy Kerchival, and has been using his background in business and the energy industry to ask questions. 

News Director Eric Douglas spoke with him recently to find out why he is trying to shake things up. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Douglas: I was just glancing back through some of your stuff earlier, to your most recent commentary about the population loss in Clay County. You’re raising questions that are uncomfortable in West Virginia, and so I’m curious, where’s that coming from?

Meadows: Wow, that’s a good question. I think I probably look at the world a little differently than most in public policy. I tend to try to look at the economics, and I tend to try to look at the world through a business lens. That’s really my background. And that kind of thinking to me, it’s not always black and white, but it can be more concrete than some of the political narratives that you hear, and data makes sense to me for whatever reason, if we’re going to do something or not do something, I feel like that it’s better to have a data driven approach than to just have a political win, I guess, for lack of a better term.

I also think we are at a time in our history here in West Virginia that we can no longer afford to be comfortable. We need to be asking uncomfortable questions. Some people took the piece on Clay County as picking on poor people. “Hey, you’re a socialist.” “You want to do the next Arthurdale like Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to do,” “Hey, you’re trying to take a business approach with government that will never work.” So the feedback kind of spans, I think the political array. And all I really want to do is try to encourage people to think about the fact that we can no longer pretend that we can do things the way that we always have, and that’s difficult. 

Change is difficult to get people to want to take a new way of thinking. I understand that, but I’m not picking on Clay County, but just using the example with Black Diamond power. And I think everything that’s being asked is reasonable. I think there should be an investigation. I think it’s reasonable for electric rate payers to have their light come on when they flip the switch and have good reliability. I don’t think any of that is unreasonable. I think an investigation is prudent. I also think if the company doesn’t have a high enough rate base that it can cover its costs, it’s legitimate to go in and ask for a rate increase, but I think that’s a symptom, not so much the problem. And we are so focused on the symptoms that the problem won’t get fixed. 

By talking about things like population density, I compared Clay County to Putnam County, and I said, “Look, both of them are about 342, 346 square miles. Yes, there are a lot of differences. No, it’s not an apples to apples comparison. But when you take the same land mass and one county in Clay County has 22, 23 people per square mile, Putnam has 166, that’s a problem.” It’s tough to have a modern, sustainable economy when you don’t have a population that can support it and pay for it. And so we have two choices. We can just continue to do what we’re doing and let people in Clay County suffer and eventually let it die, because that’s what’s going to happen. And someone maybe absorbs it, another county absorbs the problem. Or we can try to say, do we want to create a Clay County that may look different than what it used to and yes, maybe that’s moving people into the town of clay and having a more centralized base, a denser base, where we may not be able to afford to blanket the county with broadband, but we can get one broadband line in Clay, right? So you can have telecommuting and those kinds of things. That’s the question I’m trying to spur and get people to think. 

My solution is just it’s a spitball, it’s a hypothesis. It’s meant to get people talking. It’s not the end all. And I’m not saying that’s the way that we should go, but until we can at least sit down and have some tough conversations and realize that we don’t have King Coal anymore, and we’re not in the money with coal, and so we don’t have all these severance taxes that can artificially prop up many of these counties that depended on that statewide infusion of tax dollars. We have to start asking some tough and different questions.

Douglas: Are people getting angry with you, or how is that going? 

Meadows: I don’t take it personally. I don’t think people get angry at me. They may take exception with some of the ideas that I have, but again, that’s good, because hopefully they’ll have different ideas. The goal is just to get folks to think differently. 

And this is nothing new. Way back when, and I think he was far ahead of his time. I wish we would have listened to it. Former Sen. Brooks McCabe, he called this, he wanted to try to fix this with metro government, and the politics got in the way. Now I think the economics are different, and maybe we will finally heed his advice and move towards some of these strategies. Do we need all these municipalities in one county, when we could have a smaller number of municipalities and have municipal government working directly with county government. In order to create some synergies, I think we have to look at those things.

Douglas: What’s the next step for that?

Meadows: I think it would be easy for guys like you and me to hear some of this feedback and say, “Hmm, this is kind of ticking people off. We may not want to talk about it.” I think that’s all the reason to double down. And I think the more that people talk about this, and it’s really not a political discussion, it’s an economic discussion, the more we talk about this, the more people we bring to the table. Work with some of the political organizations in the state that carry clout, whether that’s the Association of Counties, whether it’s the Municipal League, whether it’s the state Chamber, and start to facilitate these conversations and have them, have them directly, with county commissioners, with mayors, I have a lot of hope that folks will see that we need change, but I think you just keep doing what we’re doing. We keep having these conversations. We keep talking and pointing out that this isn’t going to work, and we can either try to fix it now or we can let it just all fall apart one day and then very poorly.

Douglas: To the energy question, sure you had a discussion with Sen. Brian Helton. He is proposing legislation that would force coal-fired electric generation plants to run 69% of the time. The idea being that would burn more coal and would benefit the state of West Virginia. You countered back with a lot of statistics that show that from a market standpoint, that that’s just not the case. Talk about that for just a second.

Meadows: So markets are agnostic to politics. That’s why I always like to say economics trumps politics, and while I think Sen. Helton is well intentioned, he talked about, I think, 2,500 jobs, and he wants to talk about the macro economy and how it would benefit from a resurgence in the coal industry. I can appreciate that. And I think the more that we can put coal miners to work, the better. I’m not against the coal industry. I’m not against mining more coal, but energy is a lifeblood of everything that you want to do, especially if you want to have a diversified economy. 

I talked about Nucor. If we want the next Nucor to come here, we need to ensure that we have the absolute most economic electricity possible. We participate in a grid with 13 other states, and it’s there for reliability, and it’s there to promote the most economic and best economic outcome that it can. That’s why when we have coal-fired capacity bidding, other states have natural gas, they have nuclear, everybody bids in every day, and whatever is least cost should run, because that’s really what consumers are paying for in that energy market. They’re paying for the cost of fuel, and they want whatever electron is cheapest. The grid doesn’t care. 

In my experience, what would actually happen is, if we artificially ran these plants 69% of the time, 100% of the time doesn’t matter. Whatever number, if it’s 69% of the time, 69% of the time, we would be going against the market, and there is a very real chance, based on market dynamics and the abundance of natural gas that’s out there, and the fact that nuclear is very cheap right now, that citizens in this state would be paying higher bills than they otherwise would, at a time when we have so many other economic challenges, at a time where we know people can’t pay their electric bill. 

I think it’s important somebody has to have these conversations. And it just so happens that’s my background, and that’s what I spend a lot of time in. And I think somebody needs to call this out. And sometimes if the utilities do it, just to be honest with you, people may not want to listen to the utilities. Now, full disclosure, I spent my career as a public policy director on the federal level for American Electric Power, but I know how these markets work, and so I want to give people the facts. They can take Helton’s facts and what he wants to do, and they can decide. But my fear is that this doesn’t work out, and these rate payers are the ones that are left holding the bag for much higher bills than they otherwise would have had. 

Douglas: It just seems it’s kind of frustrating to me.

Meadows: Businesses are like humans. Industries are like humans. We are dying from the day we’re born. I mean, Bezos will tell you that about Amazon, right? You have to continually innovate. And coal is no different. Natural gas is no different. Our industry is no different. I mean, look at podcasts and everything else that have come along. 

So the coal industry, folks that have diversified, that have got into met [metallurgical] coal, and are really looking at met resources and how coal can be used for steel. Met coal can be used for steel. 

I grew up in a family of railroaders. What did they move on the railroad? Coal, and coal put food on the table, and so did CSX. So I have a great passion, growing up in very rural Boone County, for the coal industry, but it’s just not the least cost anymore, and when you look at things through an economic paradigm, you can appreciate that more so than the political paradigm, which I think brings back fond memories and different things. But if we want to get the next Nucor here, if we want to encourage entrepreneurs, our best and our brightest to go through our schools graduate here, to start a business, artificially raising the cost of energy which they need to run that business is the wrong way to do it. And so we have to look toward the future.

Yes, we can be true to our roots and coal has a place with the explosion of AI and more and more energy needed. You know, coal may find itself back in the money. And coal-fired capacity, there’s no reason to build a new power plant if the coal plant can be online when it’s absolutely needed. That’s another part of this. So coal plays a role in terms of capacity and keeping those plants going. I’m not saying it doesn’t have a role. I’m just saying day to day, 74% of the time, natural gas sets the market. I don’t make those rules. That’s just because we have so much of it and I’m not sure that propping up the coal industry artificially doesn’t hurt the natural gas industry, which we also have here. So I think the economics, there’s some questions there, and that need to be weighed, and we just need to look at this holistically.

Douglas: Is there anything we haven’t discussed? Any points you would like to make?

Meadows: I think, look, coming into Hoppy Kerchival’s chair, Hoppy had such a voice in doing what he’s done, and he’s been a great mentor for me, and one of the things that he has encouraged me to do is to not back down from the opinions that I have and write about these things that are uncomfortable, and I’ve tried to take that to heart. 

It’s really as simple as doing things the way we always have, and being so rigid and so inflexible that we can’t talk about new ideas, especially when it comes to industry and economics, I just don’t see how you grow that way. I don’t see how you keep people here. So the brain drain problem becomes more profound, and I think it’s a great way to remain dead last. So my one goal here is to just question the status quo and say, well, have we thought about this differently or that differently? And just try to get people to talk and have honest conversations and not be afraid to be wrong. I may be wrong, but if people start talking about it and come up with a better idea, then I can go to sleep at night feeling like I’ve done something good, not only for my career, but more importantly, for this state, for my kids, who I hope will be able to stay here and just try to change things for the better, because that’s the only those of us who have stayed here and are committed to here, the only way we get better is we start to question ideas and raise new ones. So that’s what I’m trying to do. 

Douglas: No more sacred cows, right? 

Meadows: No more sacred cows. You can either have a strong, prosperous West Virginia that can sustain itself, or we’re going to continue to lose people and be worse off tomorrow than what we are today. And be lucky to stay here. I didn’t have to leave. I have been blessed, my wife and I both, that we did not have to leave our family. We’ve also been blessed that we’ve traveled a lot throughout the world, and I think when you have both perspectives, and you’ve seen outside of West Virginia at a national and an international level, and you’ve seen what we have here and just how special this place is, it’s worth trying to fight to make sure that more and more people can stay here. 

It’s going to look different, but at least we’ll still have a West Virginia that hopefully can maintain itself and sustain itself and have a modern, sustainable economy, yet have everything that we love about our woods and our hollers and these kinds of things.