communications Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Full Scale Community Response Exercise Simulates Mass Casualty Incident

Cabell and Wayne county first responders, Marshall University personnel and the military will test an all-agency response to a simulated mass casualty incident during a Thundering Herd football game.

About 150 volunteer victims will be tracked, triaged, decontaminated if needed, and treated by local hospitals.

Jerry Beckett, chairman of the Cabell Wayne Local Emergency Planning Committee, said a mass casualty incident test is required once a year for hospital accreditation.

“It also tests many facets of the hospitals,” Beckett said. “Not only their emergency room, but their operating rooms, or ability to provide blood or pediatrics or burn centers, several different aspects of it, and they ramp up all of that and actually bring people in to simulate these.”

Beckett called the event all-encompassing for first responders.

“We bring all of our community partners together,” Beckett said. “The hospitals, the West Virginia National Guard, our fire departments, law enforcement, health department’s Tri-State Transit Authority, there are several other organizations, including the Salvation Army. We all come together for this community wide exercise to evaluate our resources and see where we have any gaps so that we can fix those in a timely fashion.”

Beckett said in the past, the testing has identified gaps in communications or inter-agency cooperation and allowed for fixes.

“It gives us an opportunity to test not only the equipment that we have, but also the knowledge of the users,” Beckett said. “There could be some training opportunities that come out of this that we may need to beef up. We may need equipment. We have to work those issues out, and it’s best to do that in an exercise rather than a real world event.”

Beckett said the West Virginia National Guard will have a major presence this year, doing some urban search and rescue and will have their own medical unit on-site.

House Speaker: 'No Idea' Why Amendment 2 Is Controversial

In the tax reform battle between West Virginia’s governor and Senate president, the speaker of the House of Delegates has remained largely silent. Until now.

The 58th Speaker of the West Virginia House of Delegates, Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, supports passing Amendment 2. He said the constitutional provision is antiquated and needs revision.

“The provision of our state constitution, that’s at issue in Amendment 2, comes from the antebellum Civil War era of Virginia. We don’t do anything today the same way we did it in 1863, so we shouldn’t necessarily have the same tax structure that we had in 1863,” Hanshaw said. “The purpose of Amendment 2 is to just give the people’s elected representatives the opportunity to discuss what the proper tax structure for this state should be. I have no idea why that’s controversial.”

Hanshaw said he sees the state on a trajectory for fairly substantial sustained budget surpluses at least over the next three to five years. He said there is merit in considering the House Finance Committee’s hybrid plan of phasing in cuts of income, vehicle, and business and inventory taxes.

“You take the proposal that would eliminate, eventually, the tax on business, equipment, inventory and personal property tax on automobiles, as well as the governor’s proposed income tax cut, and phase that in over a period of years, which is actually how most states doing this successfully have done it,” Hanshaw said. “The plan that is out there under consideration now does work mathematically. The one place where we want to really be sure we’re careful and that we’ve thought the circumstances all the way through to their end is — to what extent do we rely upon our natural resource severance taxes?”

Hanshaw said he’s puzzled over comments of losses of county school and emergency services amid a Charleston power grab. He said most legislators live far from Charleston and need the same services for their families.

“We all still want water to come out of our faucets and fire service to come to our homes when we have an emergency. We have to be responsible enough to know that,” Hanshaw said. “If the legislature wanted to make life difficult for counties and municipalities, there’s plenty of room and opportunity to do that. The legislature has plenty of taxing authority and has the ability to push any number of mandates, well thought out or otherwise, off onto the counties. And we don’t do that because we live here too, so that argument is a bit misplaced, in my opinion.”

Hanshaw said he does get frustrated over lapses in communication among government leaders. He said three personal profiles show a “divergence of philosophy.”

“I’m a practicing attorney by trade, [Senate] President Blair is a contractor by trade, a master plumber, and electrician, and Gov. Justice is a businessman by trade. So your approach to government service is formed in significant part by how you’ve shaped your life and those other roles,” Hanshaw said. “The practice of law is a business of communication, it is about communicating your ideas or your clients position. So that’s always come pretty easy to me. Others who are in a position of having unilateral decision making authority in their business and are able to make things happen just by decreeing them, they approach government service differently.”

Hanshaw said the only job that the legislature has is to be a civil and deliberative body.

Committee Approves Bill Incentivizing Broadband Expansion

The Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure approved a committee substitute Friday to Senate Bill 16, a bill that would provide up to one million dollars in tax credits to any company delivering broadband service to certain hard-to-reach rural areas.

Though the substitute does not go into specific detail about what defines an “underserviced” area, Senator Chris Walters, the committee’s chair, said it would come down the bandwidth speed of the homes that are being reached.

Walters is the lead-sponsor of another broadband bill, Senate Bill 315, which would provide the construction of statewide “middle-mile” fiber optic network. The middle mile is like a highway system of Internet fiber built across the state. Walters said both bills incentivize broadband providers to get to hard-to-reach areas.

“My bill builds an interstate system, Senate Bill 315,” Walters said. “This bill helps build off ramps off the interstate to hit the houses. So they really complement each other very, very well. Again, whenever we have more competition out in rural areas because of the interstate systems bill, more companies are going to be able to access the credits, get out to homes faster and really bring the state on-board. Light us up even faster. Together they complement each other very well. I’m hopeful for passage of both.”

The amended Senate Bill 16 was referred to the Committee on Finance, whose members will determine how to fund the bill.