Mountain Stage with Larry Groce, the long-running live event and radio program produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and distributed by NPR Music, was recognized with the Governor’s Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement at a ceremony held at the Culture Center Theater Wednesday, March 7.
Founded in 1983 by Groce, producer Andy Ridenour and engineer Francis Fisher, Mountain Stage is currently in its 35th season of live performance radio. The show is heard on over 240 public radio stations across the country each week and is also a popular podcast.
Credit Steve Brightwell/WV Division of Culture and History
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Chief of Staff for Governor Jim Justice, Mike Hall, with Executive Producer Adam Harris at the Governor’s Arts Awards.
Chief of Staff for Governor Jim Justice, Mike Hall, presented the award which was accepted on behalf of Mountain Stage by the program’s Executive Producer Adam Harris, who came into his current role when co-founder Ridenour retired in August 2012. The awards were hosted by Commissioner of the WV Division of Culture and History Randall Reid-Smith.
“Mountain Stage has worked under eight Governors since 1983, and many Arts Commissioners since Arch Moore,” said the program’s host and artistic director Larry Groce, who was visiting family in Texas on the day of the ceremony. “We appreciate the support and are grateful to the legislature for continuing to be a part of the funding equation for Mountain Stage. I want to thank West Virginia Public Broadcasting and its members, anyone who has ever picked up a ticket, our many underwriters and supporters. Most of all we thank our radio listeners, for always having the desire to hear a show like ours. It’s a wonderful honor to receive the Lifetime Achievement recognition, and I share it with the folks who have helped us make the show and those who continue to work to keep it going.”
Credit Steve Brightwell/WV Division of Culture and History
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Mountain Stage Executive Producer Adam Harris, Cabinet Secretary of the Office of Education and the Arts Gayle Manchin, and Commissioner of the WV Division of Culture and History Randall Reid-Smith.
Mountain Stage is the longest running radio program of its kind. Each week nearly 200,000 listeners tune in for the show on public radio stations across the country. In 2017 Larry Groce was named a Southerner of the Year by Southern Living Magazine and in January 2018 Mountain Stage was named a Best WV Attraction in the 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards from USA Today.
For a list of stations that carry Mountain Stage click here. Visit our Live Show Schedule for a list of upcoming performances.
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice has appointed state Sen. Mike Hall as his new chief of staff.
Justice says in a news release that the Putnam County Republican “has a reputation for being able to work with everybody.”
Hall replaces Nick Casey, a former state Democratic Party chairman who was Justice’s campaign treasurer and was appointed chief of staff soon after Justice was elected last fall. Justice switched from Democrat to Republican on Aug. 3.
Hall was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. He has served in the Senate for a decade and was in the House of Delegates before that.
Hall says he’s honored that Justice, “has placed his trust in me, and I am eager to begin serving the people of West Virginia in this new role.”
Yet another plan to restructure taxes in West Virginia has been taken up by members of the House of Delegates.
The House Finance Committee was presented with their version of a Senate Bill 484 during a Saturday afternoon meeting.
The bill was initially presented to lawmakers by Gov. Jim Justice as a sweeping tax increase, raising some $450 million in new revenues.
As it passed out of the Senate, though, the measure only included recapturing some $12 million in annual sales tax revenue generated from some road construction purchases. Those funds are typically transferred to the state Road Fund, but the Senate’s bill would keep them in general revenue for legislative appropriation.
On Saturday, the House Finance Committee was presented with a new version of the bill that goes above and beyond that measure, and essentially refutes the economic theory behind previous tax reform measures considered in the Senate.
The new House version of Senate Bill 484 is a “broadening the base” measure, according to House Finance Chair Eric Nelson. It still contains the capture of state Road Fund dollars, but also gets rid of several exemptions in the consumer sales tax in two phases.
Credit Perry Bennett / West Virginia Legislative Photography
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West Virginia Legislative Photography
The House Finance Committee during a February meeting.
On July 1 of this year, salon services, contracting services, and cell phone bills would be subject to the sales tax. The exemptions for gym memberships, electronic data services, primary opinion research, and some direct use services would end on October 1.
On July 1, 2018, the bill would reduce the states 6 percent sales tax to 5.5 percent. It would again reduce to 5 percent on July 1, 2019, and 4.75 percent on July 1, 2020.
Unlike previous tax reform measures considered in both chambers, this version of the bill does not make changes to the personal income tax.
In all, analysts say the changes to the sales tax alone in the bill would result in a $137 million increase in revenues in the 2018 fiscal year, a $56 million reduction in 2019, a $66 million reduction in 2020, and a $125 million reduction when fully implemented in 2021.
House Finance Policy Analyst Fred Lewis told members of the committee, though, that the reductions in revenue do not account for any potential growth in spending the state could see as a result of a lower sales tax rate.
When fully implemented, the rate would be the lowest of any state to border West Virginia. Kentucky, Maryland and Pennsylvania have a 6 percent consumer sales tax. Ohio’s is 5.75 percent and Virginia’s 5.3 percent.
Credit Will Price / West Virginia Legislative Photography
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West Virginia Legislative Photography
Senate Finance Chair Mike Hall on the Senate Floor.
The plan is the exact opposite of what Senate Tax Reform Committee Chair Robert Karnes had pushed through his committee. The Senate’s tax reform plan– although it went through many iterations– was based on the idea of increasing the consumer sales tax while reducing personal income taxes. Karnes argued that would incent economic growth in the state.
“Over here there’s no argument that getting rid of the income tax will cause you to grow. It’s the lowering of the sales tax so it’s just an opposite view,” Senate Finance Chair Mike Hall said after the meeting. Hall attended to hear the presentation of the House’s version of the bill.
“The theory is that we’re 70 percent a border state so I guess the thinking is that if you lower the consumption taxes to lower than your surrounding states that may, on the margin, attract people to come or at least not leave the state to buy things,” he said.
Still, Hall said the generation of some $140 million in new revenues for the 2018 fiscal year due to the end of some exemptions and the recapturing of the Road Fund dollars may not be attractive to the Senate.
“You’re still raising taxes in terms of though you’re lowering the rate, you’re taxing new things,” he said. “There doesn’t seem to be much appetite for tax increases in the Senate right now, at all, even from broadening the base.”
“If the revenue estimate increases one penny over last year’s revenue estimate there appears to be, among the leadership, a resistance to that at this point.”
The House Finance Committee will continue discussion of the bill Monday morning.
Should the chamber approve the amended version, Senate Bill 484 would have to go back to the Senate for its approval. If Senators refuse the House version of the bill, it will go to a conference committee for a final version to be negotiated.
A Senate committee has delayed consideration of a bill that some Democratic members challenged as being unconstitutional Saturday.
Senate Bill 609 would cut funding to public education by reducing the state school aid funding formula.
As introduced, the bill would have reduced public education funding by cutting the money available to be distributed by the school aid funding formula by 5 percent, or $55 million.
In the Senate’s Education Committee, however, the bill was rewritten, making a larger cut and shifting the tax burden away from general revenues to increased local property taxes.
School Levies:
The multi-step process in the school aid funding formula that is followed to compute the state dollars each county receives includes a calculation based on the local funding brought in through a county excise school levy.
Those levies must be approved by the voters in the county because they result in increased property taxes in order to generate additional money for their schools. Levy rates themselves, or the actual percentage increase of taxes allowed to be proposed in a levy, are set by the Legislature.
Currently under state code, counties can assess levies at 19.4 cents for every $100 of value a property is appraised. The maximum the Legislature can set that rate at is just over 22 cents per $100 of value.
The Senate Education Committee’s version of Senate Bill 609, which was approved Thursday evening, would pass the authority to increase the levy rate from the Legislature to individual county boards of education.
That shift in power is paired with more flexibility for county administrators to spend their state dollars how they see fit, but also a $79 million reduction in that funding, shared among the counties at different rates.
Senate Education Committee Attorney Hank Hager explained to the Finance Committee Saturday that while the new committee version of the bill does result in a funding cut, county boards of education can vote to increase their levy rates and make the county whole.
Credit Will Price / West Virginia Legislative Photography
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West Virginia Legislative Photography
Sen. Bob Plymale gives a speech on the Senate floor.
Democratic Sen. Bob Plymale questioned Hager in committee about the county control in the bill. Should a county vote against increasing their levying rate, their state dollars will still be reduced. That would result in counties receiving different levels of funding from the state, he said.
Senate Minority Leader Roman Prezioso argued that variance in funding could result in a violation of the Recht decision and be deemed unconstitutional.
The Recht Decision:
The Recht decision is named after then-Ohio County Judge Arthur Recht, who in the late 1970s and early 1980s was charged with hearing evidence in a case remanded to the circuit court by the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.
In the case, a Jackson County mother argued that because she lived in a poor county, her children were not receiving the same quality of education as children in rich counties, violating the state Constitution’s requirement that lawmakers provide all West Virginians with a “thorough and efficient” education.
The state Supreme Court agreed and Judge Recht was charged with exploring what that system should look like, releasing his decision — or set of standards for providing that education — in 1984. Those standards, among many things, required the state to fund each county school system equally.
Reconsidering the Bill:
After the committee’s open discussion, and a brief caucus of Republican Finance Committee members, Senate Finance Chair Mike Hall decided to pull the bill from the agenda Saturday and push consideration to a Monday afternoon meeting.
“The schools have to be equally funded, and the school aid formula creates a statute that distributes money equally based on student population across the state,” Hall said, but the version of the bill passed in through the Senate Education Committee, he added, could create the situation of unequal funding.
Hall said only one-sixth of the funding for public schools comes from local property taxes and the bill is essentially asking West Virginians to take on a larger local share, increasing the property tax levying rate to the highest amount possible without a Constitutional amendment.
The committee will be presented with a new version of Senate Bill 609 Monday; one that Hall said will likely call on the Legislature to increase the levying rate from 19.4 cent to the full 22.9 cents, rather than giving local county boards of education the authority to increase the rates.
That change, he said, will still result in a $79 million reduction in general revenue funds going to county school systems, but a statewide increase in property taxes to make up for the cut, not a variance of funding in the counties.
The Senate Finance Committee has put the bill on its agenda for 3 p.m. Monday.
Wednesday is the final day for Senators to approve any bills that originated in their chamber.
DMAPS, the shorthand for the Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, is an area of the budget that, according to Senate Finance Chair Mike Hall, can be difficult to cut. At $350 million, it’s a fairly sizable part of state government and houses the regional jails, prisons, homeland security office, State Police, and a few other divisions.
During the department’s budget presentation Thursday, Gov. Jim Justice’s newly appointed Secretary Jeff Sandy told senators he’s only officially been in his position for just over a month, but he’s already looking to make changes that will result in savings.
“It did not take me very long to realize some of the issues within DMAPs,” Sandy said, “and that is duplication of efforts.”
Sandy reported the agency is already combining some services- including financial and legal- to share personnel across agencies within the department.
Each of those agency heads presented their individual line items to senators Thursday and even in a tight budget year, several asked for increases in their funding.
Jan Cahill, Superintendent of the State Police, told lawmakers that with the restoration of a previous $1.3 million cut, he planned to hire more technicians to help reduce the backlog in the state Police’s forensic lab, but he chose the new lab personnel over paying for a new State Police cadet class because of the lack of funds.
Several members of the committee didn’t like the either or choice in the State Police line item, including Sen. John Unger from Berkeley County, who questioned Cahill about an issue plaguing his district, and most districts: substance abuse.
“It is absolutely no exaggeration at all for us to say that 90-plus percent, probably 95 percent, [of crime] has a drug link,” Cahill said. “If you connect the dots enough, you can go back and find a drug link on just about everything we do.”
“We are being penny wise and dollar stupid here,” Sen. Doug Facemire of Braxton County said during the meeting.
Facemire said lawmakers are going to have to make budgetary choices based on priorities and the State Police should be one of them.
“What that means is the crimes and things that aren’t drug related; you don’t have time to fool with them,” he said to Cahill. “I mean, we owe our citizens more than this.”
Credit Will Price / West Virginia Legislative Photography
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West Virginia Legislative Photography
Sen. Mike Hall on the chamber floor.
Senate Finance Chair Mike Hall recognizes that the Legislature will have to make tough budgetary decisions this session, and so far, legislative leaders in both chambers say those decisions will come in the form of cuts.
But Hall is working hard to make sure his committee understands the real-world outcomes of those cuts.
“If you’re going to talk about reducing the size of government, that you actually look at government in total to decide where you want to go,” he said, “or decide maybe that it’s pretty hard to do.”
That’s why Hall has divided his committee into workgroups who are looking at each section of the budget before the agency’s present their funding plans.
That knowledge allows his fellow Senators to ask more pointed questions of the departments, but also get them through the budget process more quickly.
Hall said this session, he wants to have a spending plan prepared as close to the halfway mark as possible.
“We’ve only got 60 days, so we’ve got to build some baseline understanding of the expenditures,” he said. “Then, in the second part of this session, decide if revenue is going to be there or not be there, what to do next.”
That new revenue isn’t necessarily off the table, according to Hall, despite leaderships’ push to cut instead of increase taxes. To Hall, it’s about protecting necessary public services and he believes his fellow Senators are starting to come to the same understanding.
“I’m hearing members say things like, if I can be convinced that there’s not much waste or that we really need to do these things, then they would look at revenue measures,” he said.
Gov. Jim Justice has asked lawmakers to do a politically unpopular thing this state Legislative session — raise taxes. But legislative leaders say they are still on the hunt for cuts to state government. Both the House and Senate Finance committees held meetings Thursday and heard from the Governor’s budget team, who attempted to convince lawmakers to see things the governor’s way.
On Wednesday night, Gov. Jim Justice presented lawmakers with his plan to balance the 2018 budget. The latest estimates from state revenue officials show there’s a nearly $500 million budget gap in the upcoming fiscal year, and in short, Justice wants to close it by increasing taxes and making some minor cuts. His proposal would create $450 million in new taxes and cut government spending almost $27 million.
But during his State of the State Address, the Governor’s Office also released what they are calling an alternative budget — a list of government agencies that would have to be cut if lawmakers choose not to raise any taxes this session. Justice’s alternative budget would close colleges and universities, the Department of Veterans’ Assistance, and end most senior services, among many other things. That alternative plan concerned the Minority Chairman of House Finance Delegate Brent Boggs, D-Braxton.
“When we’re faced with this kind of a deficit, we can’t possibly cut state government to the point that we lose so many vital services for so many segments of our population,” Boggs explained, “so I think that he said that he’s open to other cuts, but I think to think that we can possibly cut $450 million out and not really make West Virginia a very difficult place to live and to work, I think he’s right on point.”
On only the second day of the legislative session, there’s quite a way to go before lawmakers put a final spending plan in place, but Boggs said he’s optimistic about Justice’s proposal.
“He’s giving us how it is,” Boggs noted, “I don’t think; it’s something that’s sometimes, the medicine’s kind of bitter to take, but I think the takeaway, we need to make sure we do right by the citizens of this state.”
Thursday morning, representatives of the state budget and the governor’s offices presented the governor’s plan in more detail — details House Finance Chairman Eric Nelson, R-Kanawha, said were not included in Justice’s State of the State Address.
So he said he and his colleagues are just scratching the surface of the proposal.
“I look at some of the positives that were out there, you know tourism in areas of the state; infrastructure, but you know, the devil’s in the details, and gosh our back’s are against the wall,” Nelson said, “and so we’ve got to work all the way around; find areas of compromise, and many of his secretaries have only been in their position two weeks, so let’s work through this.”
Thursday afternoon, across the rotunda — members of the Senate Finance Committee were given that same detailed presentation by the director of the State Budget Office, Mark McKown. He was asked about that alternative budget made up solely of cuts to government, first by Sen. Corey Palumbo, D-Kanawha.
“Was the point of this exercise to come up with the cuts that [would be the least harmful] or the most shocking?” Palumbo asked.
McKown said the Governor’s Office wanted to avoid cuts to public education and most Medicaid coverage while also keeping the state’s prisons and jails open, but otherwise, McKown said there isn’t much left in the budget to cut.
Senate Finance Chairman Mike Hall added his own thoughts.
“Obviously, to a lot of minds it would be unacceptable to do several of the things on here,” Hall said, “The question is, are there other things not on here that total up to a substantial amount of money and my belief is, having looked at the budget, there are not other things unless you go to the school aid formula or the Medicaid line.”
Hall said his Finance Committee will split into subgroups to dig through smaller sections of the budget to find additional places to cut. That work will begin after the committee hears from all of the state agencies during their budget presentations this month.
