The Coalfield Development Corporation took another step Wednesday in the advancement of a solar institute.
At the West Edge Factory in the Westmoreland neighborhood of Huntington, the Coalfield Development Corporation has a solar training program that teaches former coal miners and others how to install solar panels as a possible career path.
On Wednesday, an award of $150,000 was given by the U.S. Mayors Conference and Wells Fargo to help the program partner with Solar Holler, a company from the Eastern Panhandle looking to make solar panel installation more accessible in the state.
Solar Holler and the Coalfield Development Corporation hope to expand the solar training program into the Solar Training Institute. Dan Conant is the Founder of Solar Holler. He says this change would make a huge difference.
“It’s going to mean that we can build out our facilities, so that everything they could possibly see out in the real world, they’ll have experienced first, it’s going to speed up the installations because they’ll have seen it before,” Conant said.
Conant said they’ll use Coalfield Development workers on solar panel installations throughout the state.
A West Virginia group that helps retrain coal miners who were laid off is receiving an $800,000 federal grant.
U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito announced the grant Thursday for the Coalfield Development Corporation’s factory in Wayne.
The grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families will help expand the group’s community job training programs and social services.
The Coalfield Development Corporation hosted its first graduation of the job training program, Reclaim Appalachia.
The two-year Reclaim Appalachia program provides training in environmental service jobs such as asbestos and lead abatement, mold remediation and meth-lab cleanup as well as offering classes on how to install solar power panels.
Those in the program are laid off from jobs in the coal industry or are struggling to find work fresh out of high school. Brandon Dennison is the Executive Director of the Coalfield Development Corporation.
“These 21 graduates today have worked really hard to develop skillsets in environmental remediation and solar panel installation,” Dennison said. “With their own hands these are the people that are going to rebuild the Appalachian economy from the bottom up.”
Dennison says more than half of the 21 graduates have already obtained employment. A Environmental Workforce Development and Job Training grant funded training. The training started in November.
Since acquiring the old Corbin Factory building in Westmoreland in the summer of 2014, the Coalfield Development Corporation has turned the building, now called West Edge, into a hub of training and opportunity. West Edge has developed a woodworking workshop that’s slowly cutting into the areas unemployment numbers.
Credit Clark Davis / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Glen Wilson works in the Saws Edge shop.
Glen Wilson is a former marine corps veteran from Wayne.
“It’s a passion for me, my papa was into. I was woodworking with him when I was 14 years old, he just got me into it and when he passed away, his shop kind of disappeared and I kind of ventured off of it, but my dream’s always been to woodwork,” Wilson said.
Wilson is one of just a few students involved in a program where participants take classes at Mountwest Community and Technical College in Huntington and earn credits and money to work at a woodworking shop at West Edge, called Saws Edge.
“You’re creating something that’s been put on this earth and comes from a tree and you cut it down and make something beautiful out of it, you can see all the texture and the grain out of it,” Wilson said. “There’s wild stuff when you reveal the wood and what you can see in it, it’s just amazing.”
The workshop has been working on projects for about a year now, but is starting to slowly grow. The group takes wood from old buildings in southern West Virginia, that’s reclaimed by a deconstruction team. The team is part of the Coalfield Development Corporation as well. Coalfield Development Corporation is a community based organization working in the southern part of the state.
They started out building and deconstructing homes and now provide other training opportunities at West Edge. The goal is to create job opportunities in southern West Virginia. They’re funded through private donations and grants.
Using donated wood-cutting machines, they take reclaimed wood to make different things for sale in the local market with the hopes that local groups will purchase them. They have an agreement with West Virginia Living Magazine to make home decor pieces, they’re working with local businesses on making desks and they’ve produced pieces for Heritage Farm.
Credit Clark Davis / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Ashley Wiles works on a project at Saws Edge.
Deacon Stone is president of Reclaim Appalachia and project director at West Edge. He said it’s a perfect opportunity to expose the students in the workshop to private businesses to help prepare them for the job market.
“It’s important for us and critical for the crew members to have a close interface with the private sector and for them to understand the kind of skills that we’re building here so we can achieve good placements for our crew members,” Stone said.
One of the businesses that has purchased wood and the services of the wood shop is a group called Ackenpucky. The name is an Appalachian slang term meaning a stew of unspecified ingredients or in the construction industry like a caulking or glue substance. They’re a design and construction group that specializes in restaurant and kitchen design.
Logan County native David Seth Cyfers and his wife run Ackenpucky, which is based in Huntington. He says they’ve used Saws Edge to cut down on their workload.
“In the last couple of years we’ve just been buying reclaimed products from them to do the work ourselves, but the design business has picked up to the point where it’s beneficial to us and beneficial to them to collaborate,” Cyfers said.
They’ve purchased reclaimed wood in the past from Saws Edge for projects like the design and construction of Backyard Pizza in Huntington and are working with the group on bar tops made from old bowling alley lanes for a new restaurant called the Peddler.
Credit Clark Davis / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Old bowling alley lanes that Ackenpucky intends to use in the bar area at the Peddler.
Ashley Wiles, of Wayne, appreciates what the Saws Edge has done.
“It’s crazy because before I started here I never thought I could do it, but realistically I can,” Wiles said. “I can run most of this equipment, you have to be taught and you just have to do it.”
Other students at the workshop say they’re just hoping to earn more business and more opportunities for Saws Edge.
Appalachia, especially its coal mining region, is experiencing a revived bit of attention as shuttered mines, a rise in income inequality and longstanding poverty received flashes of concern from both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
As a native son of the region with many kin and friends unemployed by the decline in coal production, it might be logical to expect I should be optimistic that things are really going to change for the better in the mountains as a result of this latest regional revival.
My experience as a journalist covering the War on Poverty and New Deal legacy institutions like the Tennessee Valley Authority, however, tempers my optimism.
With the region's largest coal companies in bankruptcy or nearly so, I have an idea for Clinton and Trump: Let's buy those bankrupted acres and let's release some of those federal holdings.
After all, Clinton’s standard Democratic formulas of job retraining and federal aid that launched the 50-year old War on Poverty and the Appalachian Regional Commission have turned out to leave the region today in the same relative position to the nation that it was a half century ago: at the bottom of the poorest.
Trump’s vague proposals to make miners “proud” again and to somehow bring the continuous mining machines and Cat bulldozers back to life make me think he understands the business of coal mining no better than he knew the business of gambling in Atlantic City that bankrupted his casinos.
There is another way.
Credit Kate Wellington / creativecommons.org
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creativecommons.org
Could mountaintop removal sites be restored and returned to local people?
Anyone who has spent time in the mountains and hollows from Middlesboro, Ky., to Beckley, W.V., understands that most of the land is owned either by coal and timber companies or the federal government with its national forests and parks. Coal companies alone own 1.3 million acres in the Cumberlands of Kentucky and even more in the Alleghenies of West Virginia. The federal government is actually the largest single landowner in Appalachia.
With the region’s largest coal companies in bankruptcy or nearly so, I have an idea for Clinton and Trump: Let’s buy those bankrupted acres and let’s release some of those federal holdings. And then we can give the people something they have not had since industrialization and coal mining started in Appalachia in the 1880’s — land. Land for farming, for gardens, for housing, for grazing cattle, horses and hogs, and for sustainable forestry.
People have become separated from the land and from hope. Despite that, mountain folks are easily those amongst us who know the most about independent living…
Let’s call this the Appalachian Homestead Act, in homage to the federal initiative that helped settle the West and build wealth in the 19th century. The Appalachian Homestead Act may be today’s single best solution to the enduring problem of mountain poverty. And it may well be the most important opportunity for a new generation looking for a place to build an economy and a community that make sense in a time of global warming and economic dysfunction.
This is the perfect policy for both candidates. Trump could probably make some real deals negotiating with these bankrupt companies. Clinton might find favor in a region that has not looked kindly on her of late, trimming some federal holdings, swapping with others, all the while turning property back to mountain communities.
Now’s the time to act. Over a dozen mountain coal producers have entered bankruptcy in just the last few years. Alpha Natural Resources, the nation’s second largest producer, is bankrupt and owns 97,000 acres of West Virginia property and thousands of acres in its home state of Virginia.
It’s a safe bet that the idled mines in the famous Elkhorn coal seams in Letcher and Pike counties in Kentucky that once fueled the furnaces of Bethlehem Steel and the Harlan County mines that did the same for U.S. Steel, International Harvester and Ford Motor Company will never see miner’s lamps again or hear their lunch buckets bang against mantrips and roof bolters.
Steve Helber
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AP File Photo
Trump at Charleston, W.Va. rally
The appalling drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide rates in the mountains are the most glaring testimony to mountaineers’ despair. People have become separated from the land and from hope.
Despite that, mountain folks are easily those amongst us who know the most about independent living, with a work ethic by coal miners and long-distance commuters that put the lie to tales of Appalachian lethargy. All over the region there are very successful entrepreneurial enterprises, ranging from food co-ops to small manufacturers to 21st century businesses employing the fastest broadband.
Among the best of these restorations, however, would be the restoration of hope. After all, the lack of money and hope is what combines to produce poverty.
What would people do with this new land? Besides producing food for themselves and nearby coastal cities, they could replant the region with blight-resistant chestnut trees that once fattened hogs to beyond bacon tasty and furnished fine homes with some of America’s most beautiful wood.
They could reforest the ravaged strip mines with apple, peach, pear and cherry trees. They could create a recreational paradise with hiking and biking trails along restored rivers and creeks.
But among the best of these “restorations,” however, would be the restoration of hope. After all, the lack of money and hope is what combines to produce poverty.
For Clinton the Appalachian Homestead Act could be the ultimate vindication of the idea that it “takes a village” to solve enduring problems. For Trump, buying land at historically low prices could be the deal of his lifetime. For Appalachian communities, this could be “the change we can really believe in.”
Mountaineers saved the American Revolution at the Battle of King’s Mountain in 1780. Let’s give them a chance to lead again.
Jim Branscome is a retired managing director of Standard & Poor’s and a former journalist whose articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Business Week, and The Mountain Eagle of Whitesburg, Ky. He was a staff member in 1969-71 at the Appalachian Regional Commission, a lobbyist for Save Our Kentucky in Frankfort, and a staff member of the Appalachian Project at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee. He was born in Hillsville, Va., and is a graduate of Berea College.
Despite a recent drop in West Virginia’s unemployment rate, many of the state’s industries continue to see a decline in jobs. One company is using federal grant money to help improve the lives of those who have found themselves out of work in the southwestern part of the state.
Brian Spence is from Wayne, West Virginia. He’s one of many people who were laid off from the Rockspring mine in May He said it was time to find something else.
“I’m getting too old to learn new stuff, but it’s time to do it,” Spence said. “Want to get a job, something different, see daylight now.”
Spence was one of 15 people this week who took part in asbestos abatement training sponsored by the Coalfield Development Corporation. The company is working with the Center for Environmental, Geotechnical and Applied Sciences at Marshall to offer job training at West Edge, an old factory they took over outside Huntington.
The job training is funded through an Environmental Workforce Development and Job Training grant from the U.S. Department of Environmental Protection. The two-year program is offering training in environmental service jobs such as asbestos abatement, lead abatement, mold remediation and meth-lab clean-up. Adam Warren is President of Revitalize Appalachia, an enterprise of the Coalfield Development Corporation.
“So it’s just trainings for things that are going and will be needed in the area with the dilapidated buildings that will be torn down and be reconstructed,” Warren said. “It covers a wide spectrum of all these things that are going to be needed here in the near future with a lot of people that are doing those fields now coming of retirement age, so a lot of those fields are going to be opening up.”
Coalfield Development Corporation held a week-long class in October for hazardous cleanup. Asbestos abatement training took place this month and in December, they’ll offer another one-week course in lead abatement.. Then in January they’ll start offering the training in five consecutive week-long courses with the hope of attracting even more participants.
“Our focus group is really unemployed or underemployed and there is laid-off coal miners and veterans and then just an age group of 18-25-year-olds that we kind of try to hit really hard because that’s the group that tends to be leaving and we want to try to get them a job and keep them in the area so that we can keep this area alive and well rather than having it slip away off like a lot of small communities have,” Warren said.
And according to Workforce West Virginia, there is a great need for the training being offered by the Coalfield Development Corporation. The number of unemployed West Virginians fell by 3,500 to 54,300 in October. But industries like the trades, transportation and utilities lost 1,300 jobs and Government jobs fell by 300. The mining sector also lost 800 jobs and manufacturing 400.
Amber Jackson is an employment program specialist with Workforce West Virginia. She said they have several programs around the state that are becoming more popular for those who find themselves unemployed.
“The programs seem to continue to be successful, we’re able to recruit large numbers of indivuduals to participate in the program and get them the training they need to transition,” Jackson said. “Our hope is that we continue with that success and motivate individuals to access the training funding while it’s available. “
Those who are looking for work can sign up for training and classes in their region at Workforce West Virginia’s website. Workforce can help find training in jobs that are in need of workers and often connect jobseekers with the employers. And even when the training doesn’t immediately lead to employment, it gives those receiving the training extra experience and certification. That’s what many at Coalfield Development Corporation’s job training had on their mind.
Alexander Brogan is taking part in the training program.
“It’s experience and that means more than schooling to a lot of people,” Brogan said. “I just got out of construction and into agriculture and that’s just more experience in another field and a field that I more want to go into and this is more certifications and the more you know, especially in a place that doesn’t have a lot of job opportunities, the better off you are if you are out of work.”
To graduate from the Coalfield Development job training program, participants have to complete the hazardous material cleanup training and two additional courses, such as asbestos abatement and lead renovation.
