Representatives with the West Virginia First Foundation — a nonprofit the state tasked with distributing roughly three-quarters of West Virginia’s opioid settlement payments — traveled to Martinsburg this week to voice their vision for disbursing the funds.
Representatives with the West Virginia First Foundation — a nonprofit the state tasked with distributing roughly three-quarters of West Virginia’s opioid settlement payments — traveled to Martinsburg this week to voice their vision for disbursing the funds.
The Stubblefield Institute for Civil Politics, an affiliate of Shepherd University, hosted the Thursday evening panel. West Virginia First Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Board told attendees that the foundation aims to be transparent, with funds targeting different aspects of recovery, from individual to community-level interventions.
“We understand where this money comes from,” he said. “We understand the gravity of this and that every dollar, every every dime, every penny we have represents those loved ones that aren’t with us anymore.”
Speakers at the panel said the organization’s founding guidelines promote transparency, requiring them to report where funds are distributed. Roughly one-quarter of the state’s settlement money goes directly to county governments, which they said helps broaden the geographic extent of support.
These reporting and distribution guidelines also have “an effect on making sure that those monies are going for appropriate uses,” said Matthew Harvey, West Virginia First Foundation chair and prosecuting attorney for Jefferson County.
Tim Czaja, a regional director of the West Virginia First Foundation and the Berkeley County community corrections director, said the foundation also sees a need for public education on substance use disorder and recovery.
He cited pushback from state lawmakers against needle exchange programs as an example of misunderstanding that can harm the recovery process.
“I think providing some education to the legislature over time would be really valuable,” he said.
Panelists agreed that engaging with community leaders and members of the public would remain central to their funding distribution efforts.
The West Virginia First Foundation was legally recognized by the state in 2023. By next month, the foundation will award its first round of funding to diversion and recovery programs statewide, totaling millions of dollars.
To listen to the full forum online, visit the Panhandle News Network’s Spotify page.
Three communities in the northern part of the state are getting some help to improve road safety.
Martinsburg, Wheeling and Star City will share close to $1 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to enhance road safety in their communities. The funds come from the Safe Streets and Roads for All discretionary program of the DOT, established as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. .
All three cities will use the money to create safety action plans focused on reducing fatal and severe injury crashes as well as generally improving safety and equity for all on the roads.
More than half of the money – $552,000 – will be used by the City of Martinsburg to develop their plan and transform the city’s transportation network to provide safe options to travel throughout the community.
The Belomar Regional Council, on behalf of the Wheeling metropolitan region, will receive $240,000. The council was established by the West Virginia Legislature in 1969 as one of eleven regional councils created throughout West Virginia. Belomar’s primary purpose was to foster cooperation for the planning and development of community and economic development and transportation projects. Its service area originally included Ohio and Marshall Counties in West Virginia and Belmont County in Ohio and expanded in 1972 to include Wetzel County.
Star City will receive $200,000.
“I’m pleased to announce these three DOT awards, which will boost road and travel safety for West Virginians and those visiting our great state,” said Senator Manchin. “I look forward to seeing their positive impacts for the Martinsburg, Wheeling and Star City communities for decades to come. As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, I will continue advocating for resources to upgrade and improve our transportation infrastructure.”
Nurses working overnight at the Martinsburg VA Medical Center (VAMC) crossed paths with their morning-shift colleagues Friday at the crack of dawn. Sporting red shirts and handmade signs, they exited the facility’s front gates and joined their peers across the street on the picket line.
Nurses working overnight at the Martinsburg VA Medical Center (VAMC) crossed paths with their morning-shift colleagues Friday at the crack of dawn. Sporting red shirts and handmade signs, they exited the facility’s front gates and joined their peers across the street on the picket line.
Just outside hospital grounds, staff members affiliated with the National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC) gathered to call attention to scheduling practices they say are unsustainable. As they chanted on the roadside, passing drivers blared their horns in support.
A typical nursing shift in the United States lasts 12 hours, according to the American Nurses Association. This can mean entering a hospital before the sun rises, and leaving after it has already set. Nurses generally work six of these shifts in a two-week period, for a total of 72 hours on the clock.
But a typical work week in the U.S. is 40 hours. Some hospitals, like the Martinsburg VAMC, require nurses to pick up an additional eight-hour shift to round out the pay period. Nurses on site say these shifts can even require overtime.
Beverly Simpson is an acute care infection prevention coordinator at the Martinsburg VAMC. She said working several day-long shifts in a single week is a tall order.
“We continually lose ourselves in the service of our vets,” Simpson said. “All that we’re asking is to help us care for ourselves.”
Nurses on the picket line are pushing for a form of scheduling flexibility known colloquially as “72/80.” It allows nurses to drop their additional eight-hour shift, maintaining full compensation and benefits for working 72 hours per pay period.
The policy is not without precedent. Title 38 of the United States Code outlines federal policies on veterans’ benefits. Under the title, health care facilities administered by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) are eligible to implement 72/80 with the department’s approval, although they are not required to do so.
United States Navy veteran and registered nurse Jack Tennant leads his colleagues in a chant alongside Charles Town Road on the outskirts of Martinsburg.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
The Martinsburg facility already practices the policy in its intensive care unit (ICU). But nurses across the hospital’s departments say they want it expanded.
U.S. Navy veteran Jack Tennant has served as a registered nurse at the Martinsburg hospital for 32 years, and helped organize Friday’s picket. He said eight more hours out of his scrubs each week would greatly improve his quality of life.
“Nurses work really grueling shifts,” Tennant said. “It’s really hard to take care of ourselves and take care of our families when we are working so many hours.”
The 72/80 policy is practiced more widely at some VA health care facilities, even in West Virginia.
At the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center in Clarksburg, three departments have implemented the policy, according to a statement from VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes emailed to West Virginia Public Broadcasting by a representative.
This includes the ICU, the medical surgical unit and the float pool — a department of nurses who alternate between different sections of the hospital each shift.
According to Hayes, VA health care facilities adopt the 72/80 model “wherever possible.” He said the policy “remains in effect” for the Martinsburg VAMC ICU, and “will continue to be considered should recruitment or retention issues for inpatient registered nurses arise.”
But Hayes said the VA has already taken significant steps toward improving recruitment and retention, with current staff in mind. Currently, the VA employs 122,000 nationally, “the largest nursing workforce in the country and in the history of [the] VA,” he said.
Hayes added that the VA’s nurse turnover rate outperforms the private sector.
Many drivers passing the Friday morning picket outside the Martinsburg VA Medical Center blared their sirens in support of the hospital’s nurses.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Still, on the ground at the Martinsburg VAMC, nurses like Simpson and Tennant say they feel overworked, and struggle with work-life balance. This can make it difficult to attend doctor’s appointments or fulfill family obligations, they said.
Plus, Tennant said nurses working overtime after long shifts can be a safety issue, making flexible scheduling more important.
“They’re already fatigued,” he said. “Fatigued nurses are at a much higher risk of making mistakes.”
Christle Young, an ICU nurse at the Martinsburg VAMC, has experienced the 72/80 scheduling model firsthand. She said the extra time helps her better serve local veterans.
“I work nights. That extra day coming in, it’s not a day off,” she said. “I sleep that day, and then I only really have one day off.”
Young said expanding the 72/80 policy across the Martinsburg VAMC would help other nurses better care for themselves and boost morale.
“We want to watch our kids grow up. We want to care for our elderly patients. We want to play bingo on Tuesday, whatever it is,” she said. “But the facility doesn’t allow us that flexibility.”
In his statement, Hayes agreed that evidence shows the 72/80 model “reduces burnout, improves satisfaction, improves retention of experienced nurses and also decreases turnover [and] the use of unscheduled leave and overtime.”
He said the VA plans to expand it to the Clarksburg hospital’s emergency department, but additional expansions will be considered on a case by case basis.
Nurses at the Martinsburg VA Medical Center typically work six 12-hour shifts and one eight-hour shift every two weeks.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Meanwhile, Martinsburg members of the NNOC say they have been pushing for change at their own facility for more than a year. They began surveying their fellow nurses in September 2023 and found widespread dissatisfaction over current scheduling practices, Tennant and Young said.
Young said the nurses collected a petition with more than 200 signatures from coworkers in favor of implementing the 72/80 policy, and drafted a “mock schedule” with plans for how to implement it.
When the nurses brought these documents to hospital administrators, Young said no commitment to reconsidering current scheduling policies was made.
“It is still falling on deaf ears,” she said. “So we’re outside today to make some noise.”
Hayes did not directly address any previous scheduling policy discussions between the VA and the NNOC-represented nurses. But he said the VA continues to support staff members and their union representatives, including National Nurses United, the NNOC’s larger-scale affiliate.
“We greatly value our collaborative working relationship with our union partners and remain aligned in our goal to strengthen our nursing workforce,” he said. The VA “deeply appreciates our partnership with National Nurses United and will continue to work with them directly to resolve their concerns.”
Martinsburg nurses with the NNOC, however, say the hospital has not taken enough effort to reevaluate scheduling policies. Tennant said Friday’s picket marked the first union action taken at the Martinsburg VAMC since it was founded in 1944.
And, until changes are implemented, he said it is unlikely to be the last.
“We’re willing to do whatever we need to do,” he said.
North Raleigh Street funnels traffic from downtown Martinsburg to U.S. Route 11. But peel onto a half-paven path near the train tracks and you will find pops of color peeking through the overgrowth.
For more than a decade, skateboarders walked this route, boards in tow, to reach the local skate spot. The city’s indoor skating venue had closed due to financial concerns in 2013, just four years into operation. Skaters were not ready to put down their boards, so they scouted out the abandoned lot uptown.
And Martinsburg’s “do-it-yourself” skatepark was born.
Local skaters regularly gathered on the empty stretch of pavement, and reached an understanding with its property owner to keep the space clean and trouble free. Then came the rails and hand-poured concrete ramps, all on their own dime.
More than ten years later, the DIY park is a sight to behold, with sprawling spray-paint murals and features of all kinds. Just one thing is missing: the skaters.
A recent change in the property’s ownership led the park to fall out of use. But it has also reinvigorated county-wide calls for something permanent.
A skate scene, but no skatepark
Many of Mark Peacemaker’s early skateboarding experiences began with a carpool; his buddies piling gear into minivans and bumping elbows in the backseat.
Parents took turns driving them to skating venues in Frederick, a city in Maryland about forty miles east of his hometown. The trips were fun, but today they remind Peacemaker of how far he had to travel to access action sports as a preteen in Martinsburg.
“Growing up in the panhandle of West Virginia at the time I did, there weren’t as many amenities around,” he said.
Back in the 2000s, Peacemaker said skaters were viewed as trouble, a sentiment that traces back decades.
In 1991, the City of Martinsburg banned skateboarding on public property. This meant police could snatch boards from skaters doing tricks in the local park, or nail them with fines just for riding down the street.
An old sign outside Martinsburg’s city offices threatens police action against skateboarders.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Martinsburg Mayor Kevin Knowles sits in his office.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
“I ended up with some stuff on my record that really didn’t help me out, and took some other friends of mine in some bad directions,” he said. “The first strike of that was skating in public places.”
When the city skatepark closed in 2013, Peacemaker and his friends said gathering someplace else seemed obvious. They did not necessarily have bigger plans in mind.
“We were all kids, so I think everyone within the scene just congregated back there and organically started to make stuff to skate on,” he said.
But news about the spot spread, giving rise to a whole community of DIY skaters, like those that have popped up around the world in areas without public skate spots. From a run-down tennis court in Maryland to an abandoned strip mall in Texas, skaters far and wide have converted derelict urban spaces into grassroots parks.
Martinsburg Mayor Kevin Knowles said the local DIY skaters never caused problems, and were not the city’s responsibility to monitor.
“It didn’t affect us one way or another, because the liability wasn’t falling on us,” he said. “The liability was falling on the individual that was allowing them to do that.”
The DIY skatepark became well known in the local community, hosting recurring park cleanups and competitions called “skate jams.” The events brought out dozens of community members, at times even including Mayor Knowles.
“Watching what they’ve been doing over there at the DIY, they made some really great progress,” he said. “But they didn’t own the property.”
For Knowles, a lack of formal ownership over the skatepark put its long-term viability into question. When a new owner bought the property last year, the city got an answer.
Under new ownership
In November 2023, Tim Pool, an online conservative commentator based in Harpers Ferry, purchased the DIY skatepark property.
This September, Pool made national headlines when the Justice Department said a company he was affiliated with had taken money from Russian state media to spread propaganda. Pool has stated he was unaware of any such scheme.
Back in West Virginia, Pool’s profile was growing, too. He and skatepark regulars disagreed about how the spot was used, but no Martinsburg skaters who spoke to West Virginia Public Broadcasting for this story agreed to discuss the situation.
Regardless, the fallout again left Martinsburg residents with nowhere to skate. Knowles said he is unsure where they ended up.
“I don’t know where anybody is going at this point. I’m not seeing a huge running, within the city, of people on skateboards,” he said. “So they’re going somewhere. They’re not coming to the city of Martinsburg right now.”
Recurring events at the Martinsburg DIY skatepark brought dozens of skaters to West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
The DIY park has largely fallen into disuse since its purchase by a new property owner in November 2023.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
But Peacemaker said he knows where they went: back to out-of-state venues in Maryland and Virginia, like the ones he frequented growing up. Skaters in the Eastern Panhandle again must decide between driving tens of miles out of the city or simply putting away their boards.
“There’s tons of parks around, man. Martinsburg’s kind of like that center point that doesn’t have one,” Peacemaker said.
Peacemaker pointed to the Hagerstown Skatepark, a Maryland venue about 25 miles from downtown Martinsburg, as a vision of what local skaters want for their own community: a permanent place to skate, funded by local officials. And their idea is gaining traction.
Pushing for something permanent
Last month, the Martinsburg City Council revoked their no-skateboarding ordinance after three decades.
Mayor Knowles and Joe Burton, executive director of Martinsburg-Berkeley County Parks & Recreation, acknowledged that skateboarders have historically been seen as troublesome by some members of the community because of their ties to an alternative scene.
“Skateboarders are their own type of people. They dress differently, they talk differently and their activities are a little different than other people’s,” Knowles said. “People just identify individuals by what they see, not what they know. So they see something different. They don’t like it.”
But Burton said officials in the Eastern Panhandle today think recreational activities like skateboarding can keep kids safe.
“With drug use or kids getting in different kinds of trouble, everything suggests that more activities help those problems. They don’t make it worse,” he said. “So more safe, recreational activities are a good thing to add to the community.”
Joshua McCormick, another Martinsburg DIY skater, agrees. He said there is something meditative in the rhythm of the sport.
“You’re constantly falling. You’re falling, but you don’t give up,” he said. “It’s all worth it for that little bit of joy of landing a trick and having your homies shout you out and cheer for you.”
Martinsburg residents Joshua McCormick and Mark Peacemaker stand with their boards at the Hagerstown Skatepark.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
McCormick performs a trick at the Hagerstown Skatepark, located about 25 miles away from Martinsburg in western Maryland.
Photo Credit: Jack Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Knowles and Burton said the city and county governments are actively looking to secure property and funding to build a public skatepark for the local community. The project follows years of advocacy from people like Peacemaker, who have spoken to local officials about the benefits of increasing access to recreational opportunities like skateboarding.
Knowles said they have identified a potential location for the skatepark “close to the downtown corridor on the outskirts of our trail system,” but that a place has not been finalized. The project will be publicly funded by both the city and county governments, he said.
“It’s going to be a perfect addition, the one that does come to fruition,” Knowles said. “It’s going to happen, we just have to make sure we have the right land, and we have to make sure about the finances.”
The Martinsburg and Berkeley County governments have also not finalized a timeline for the park’s construction, but said they are in conversation with Peacemaker and other local skaters for the project.
McCormick said skaters are willing to travel far distances for a skatepark, which means the project could increase local tourism, too.
“We had people from Baltimore, Frederick — all over the quad-state area come to our little DIY,” he said. “Another public park in the area would be a great thing.”
It could be a while before a permanent park is actually up and running, but Peacemaker and McCormick say knowing one is coming is a relief. The DIY spot had charm, but did not supplant the community’s practical need for a public, government-funded park, they said.
For now, the skaters are glad they will not have to pour time, money and more concrete into the DIY skatepark.
“We’re finally going to have something new in a really beautiful setting that’s going to be personalized and public and open for everyone,” Peacemaker said. “It’s a safe space that’s legal, and it’s never gonna go away.”
On this West Virginia Morning, there’s no public skatepark in Martinsburg, so locals spent a decade building one from scratch. And they’re not alone: Skaters nationwide are adding ramps and rails to abandoned lots, calling them DIY skateparks.
Reporter Jack Walker visited the “do-it-yourself” park in Martinsburg. He talked to skaters about the spot, plus a push for something permanent.
Plus, how do government and emergency response agencies make sure people with disabilities are safe during chemical or oil spills? We hear from The Allegheny Front, a Pittsburgh-based public radio program focused on environmental issues in the region.
Also in this episode, we dive into the latest from the West Virginia Legislature’s interim session following several committee meetings Sunday.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University and Marshall University School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
Eric Douglas produced this episode.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
Amtrak is combining the Capitol Limited and Silver Star trains temporarily to accommodate a tunnel reconstruction project in New York.
Starting Sunday, Nov. 10, Amtrak passengers in Cumberland, Maryland, Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry will board the Floridian instead of the Capitol Limited.
And instead of ending in Washington, D.C., the train will continue on to Miami.
Amtrak is combining the Capitol Limited and Silver Star trains temporarily to accommodate a tunnel reconstruction project in New York.
The trains will continue to originate and terminate in Chicago.
They will be numbered 40 eastbound and 41 westbound. Functionally, not much will change. The trains will operate on a similar schedule at the same stops.
Passengers will, however, be able to get a one-seat ride to Florida.
