A group of retired workers from Century Aluminum says the company has agreed to pay $23 million to help cover their health care.
Benefits were taken away shortly after the plant in Ravenswood closed in 2009.
WSAZ-TV reports the money, if approved by the court, will provide health benefits to more than 700 retirees and their families. The group Century Aluminum Retirees announced the settlement Tuesday, six years to the day since the group’s first meeting.
A member of the group, Karen Gorrell, said the settlement was reached in August, but court papers weren’t filed until last week.
Efforts to obtain a special electricity rate for the plant failed almost two years ago, and the company said the plant would not be restarted.
State officials say wholesale grocery distributor H.T. Hackney Co. is opening its first warehouse in West Virginia and creating an estimated 70 jobs.
The state Department of Commerce says in a news release that the company will locate a 246,000-square-foot warehouse in Milton.
The company is accepting job applications at Milton City Hall starting Thursday for drivers and mechanics, office and warehouse workers, maintenance personnel and sales staff.
Knoxville, Tennessee-based H.T. Hackney stocks more than 30,000 different products and serves retailers in 22 states.
The West Virginia University Institute of Technology campus could become a college for former foster care children.
The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports KVC Health Systems is hoping to turn the Montgomery campus into a college for children who have aged out of the foster care system.
Tommy Bailey, a lobbyist at Spilman, Thomas & Battle, has helped the Kansas-based nonprofit with negotiations to lease the campus then purchase it.
Bailey says WVU and KVC Health Systems have reached a general agreement, but no lease-purchase agreement has been signed yet.
WVU plans to announce more details of the agreement Wednesday.
If an agreement is reached soon, Bailey says KVC would hope to attract a group of about 50 students to the college within a year.
A federal agency has approved construction plans for one of the major natural gas pipelines planned in the region. The 4.2 billion dollar Rover pipeline project is slated to begin phase one of construction this year.
The 510-mile, interstate Rover pipeline is designed to move 3.25 billion cubic feet of Marcellus and Utica shale gas from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio to Michigan. Despite objections by landowners in Ohio and the Sierra Club, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says the market benefits of the 42-inch pipeline “outweigh any adverse effects … on landowners and surrounding communities.”
About a quarter of the planned path is along existing pipeline corridors, and the agency’s approval means the company may claim eminent domain for other sections of the route. The mainline would start in Monroe County, Ohio, with branches stretching into West Virginia’s Doddridge and Ohio counties, and across Hancock County into Pennsylvania.
Several other pipelines are still waiting for federal approval, including the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
In a conference call with the press on Friday, Department of Revenue Cabinet Secretary Dave Hardy said West Virginia revenue collections for the month of January came in about $18M short of state estimates.
In other words, he said the state essentially took about an 8 percent pay cut.
“Most of it is caused by the drop in energy prices. But we also had a downturn in some of our other industries,” he explained.
The consumer sales tax was the largest source of the drop in revenue, followed by the personal income tax.
7 out of 12 months into the fiscal year, the state is $116 million short of revenue estimates. But Hardy predicts that will grow to as much as $123 million before the end of the fiscal year in July.
Hardy says will lawmakers return to Charleston for their annual legislative session next week, they’ll have to quickly find money to fill this year’s budget gap before they can move on to balancing the 2018 budget.
That budget could have a revenue gap as large as $600 million.
Tens of thousands of retired coal miners and their families in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia face another deadline on expiring healthcare benefits and pensions. A temporary extension Congress funded late last year expires in April.
A regional Senate Republican and Democrat have offered competing bills to address the issue. The two measures differ sharply in the support offered for miners’ benefits and in the strings that would be attached to the funding.
West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin has reintroduced the Miners Protection Act with bipartisan support. The bill, which would include protections for health benefits and pensions for miners, was approved by the Senate Finance Committee last year but did not get a full floor vote before the end of the session.
Credit U.S. Senate
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U.S. Senate
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
Many miners blamed Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, for that delay. McConnell has denied that and has now offered an alternative bill. McConnell’s proposal would fund only health benefits, not pensions, and would tie that funding to other changes in environmental regulations affecting coal mining.
“My legislation calls on Congress to work with the incoming Trump administration to repeal regulations that are harming the coal industry,” McConnell said in a floor statement.
McConnell said regulations on damage from mining and pollution from burning coal have raised costs, making coal less attractive as a fuel source. Most industry analysts, however, say market forces and cheaper natural gas have been greater factors in coal’s decline.
United Mine Workers president Cecil Roberts supports the Miners Protection Act reintroduced by Manchin. In a statement, the UMWA said that while the union “appreciates very much” McConnell’s support for miners’ health benefits, “we need to preserve their pensions as well.”
Groups working on both labor and environmental protections are unhappy with McConnell’s bill. Retired miner Carl Shoupe is with the group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, which focuses on economic justice and environmental issues. He accused McConnell of “playing politics” with miners’ benefits.
Shoupe doesn’t think the Trump administration will revive the mining industry. He’d like lawmakers to help out-of-work miners find jobs in the clean energy sector.
“We’re figuring it out that coal is not going to come back, and a lot of us are trying to move on into the 21st century,” Shoupe said.
In order for his community to do that, Shoupe said, miners and their families need the health care and pension benefits they worked for and were promised by the federal government.
Credit Alexandra Kanik / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
That pledge of “cradle-to-grave” health and retirement benefits dates to a deal Congress struck in order to settle a national coal strike in 1947. The agreement used royalties on coal production to create a retirement fund for miners and their dependents in cases of sickness, disability, death and retirement.
That legislation has been renewed at various times over the years. Now with many mining companies in bankruptcy and coal production in sharp decline, it’s feared that there will not be enough money to fulfill pledges to retirees.
The Miner’s Protection Act seeks to address the potential shortages by tapping the Abandoned Mine Lands fund and redirecting some of the interest on the fund in order to safeguard pensions and benefits.
