Berkeley County Council Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Eastern West Virginia Regional Airport Receives Education Funding

An outdoor education center and an airshow are coming to the Eastern West Virginia Regional Airport with a $300,000 contribution from the Berkeley County Council.

The airshow is set for August 26 and 27 of next year to recognize a century of flights at Berkeley County’s Shepherd Field. Flights from West Virginia’s oldest airport began in 1922 and officially opened the following year on June 17, 1923. It has the state’s longest runway at nearly nine thousand feet.

Airport CEO Nic Diehl says the event could revive a string of airshows in the region.

“In 2005 through 2012, I think we had a total of six shows, three of them on the civilian side of the airport and three of them on the military base side of the airport,” Diehl said. This will be back to our roots on the civilian side of the field. We anticipate about 50,000 people over the course of the two day event.”

The airport’s education center will include an observation area for visitors to watch aircraft fly in and out of Shepherd Field, as well as activities for children. The center is set to be open in the spring of next year.

The funding for the airport was allocated from the county’s Quality of Life fund. A release from Berkeley County Council says total budgeting for the airport has recently increased to nearly $3.5 million.

Diehl said these projects are a way to help expose locals to aviation and help continue what’s becoming a growing field in the region.

“We have over a $300 million economic impact on the Eastern Panhandle annually. There are over 2,000 people employed on the field here. And we continue to see growth,” Diehl said.

The contribution comes as other investments are being made in the Eastern Panhandle’s flight industry. Shepherd University is set to launch an aviation program through their business school next fall.

Berkeley County Receives Federal Funds For School Safety

It’s part of the DHS’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Program, meant to prevent “domestic violent extremism” within small communities. DHS is providing more than $380,000 to the Berkeley County Council for the local program.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is helping establish a “threat assessment and management task force” for schools in Berkeley County.

The money will fund a local network to watch for — and stop — targeted violence, like school shootings or other types of domestic terrorism. Three thousand public school employees will receive training on what to do in such emergencies. The county is one of a small handful of 43 local governments and organizations nationwide to get the funding.

“It’s more of a complement to existing training initiatives that we build upon, like the train-the-trainer style courses,” Berkeley County sheriff Nathan Harmon said. “So we’ll identify in educational systems who those trainers are, and then we’ll build upon what their expertise is.”

Harmon says it’s a way to prevent such incidents before they happen.

“As much as we would love to think that a terrorist act would not happen here, or an active shooter incident would not happen here, we’d be behind reality if we told ourselves that,” Harmon said.

Aside from educational sessions, the program will create unique emergency guidelines for each school in the county by the beginning of the next school year.

Flowers and Loss: A Memorial Day Snapshot

On Monday, Americans will celebrate Memorial Day. The holiday came to represent the unofficial start to summer. But for many, the day also reminds us to take a few moments to stop and remember a loved one who fought and died for our country on the battlefield. The holiday is steeped in rich history dating back to the American Civil War.

The exact beginnings of this federal holiday are debated, but most scholars say Memorial Day began after the end of the Civil War as a way to remember the vast numbers of dead. It’s recognized during springtime, because that’s when flowers bloomed and could be placed on gravesites.

Berkeley County Council member Elaine Mauck is a retired schoolteacher and lover of history. She spoke about the holiday at a recent Berkeley County Council meeting.

“Memorial Day started, more or less, as the families were reinterring their members that had been killed during the Civil War, and they were going from different battlefields and bringing their family members home,” Mauck said.

There were 750,000 casualties during the American Civil War, according to the National Park Service — and around 3,000 Union deaths in West Virginia, and more than 30,000 Confederate deaths in Virginia, according to the American Battlefield Trust.

Mauck said there was never an official Memorial Day recognized before the Civil War, because there had never been that sheer number of dead before.

“It was the massive numbers. I mean, Antietam, there was 25,000 killed. It was massive numbers.”

The National Park Service reports the battle of Antietam left 23,000 people dead, wounded or missing, and it lasted for just 12 hours.

Mauck also describes the importance springtime played in the creation of Memorial Day, and how today, we ended up having the holiday at the end of May.

“It was because the flowers in the South were available in April, and then it became, for regular Memorial Day, on May 30; your flowers in the North; your peonies, and the lilacs and things were more available May 30. So, the date was kinda changed to work for everybody.”

Today, our nation’s more than 130 national cemeteries often provide a place to celebrate Memorial Day. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reports the first national cemeteries were also created as a result of the Civil War.

In 1971, Memorial Day was officially recognized as a federal holiday.

Two More West Virginia Counties Sue Drug Companies

Two more West Virginia communities have joined others around the state in suing drug companies over the opioid epidemic.

Media report the Berkeley County Council and the Jefferson County Commission filed lawsuits recently against drug manufacturers and distributors, accusing them of fueling the local opioid epidemic by shipping too many pain pills. The companies have denied wrongdoing.

The move comes shortly before a hearing where a panel of judges will decide whether to consolidate dozens of similar lawsuits filed across West Virginia and other states.

Martinsburg lawyer Stephen Skinner, who’s representing the two counties, says he favors consolidating the cases to get efficient justice. Media report at least eight local governments in West Virginia oppose combining the lawsuits, saying it would drive up costs.