West Virginia officials have yet to spend more than $200 million that would help renters and landlords.
This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight.
Weeks after the U.S. Supreme Courtoverturned a federal moratorium on payment-related evictions, West Virginia housing advocates like Kayla Morris know a crisis is coming. As counties resume nonpayment-related eviction hearings, potentially thousands of state residents are going to need help.
“We believe we’re going to get hit hard, we just don’t know when at what point,” said Morris, who works for Community Resources, Inc. in Wood County.
For months, state officials have had a potential solution: more than $260 million in federal rental and utility aid, being held and disbursed by the West Virginia Housing and Development Fund. Called the Mountaineer Rental Assistance Program, this fund was launched in late March with federal dollars to help renters pay their landlords.
‘How are you going to come up with all of this money’
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instituted the most recent eviction moratorium in early August, the coronavirus pandemic was taking a turn for the worse. In West Virginia,health officials noted at the beginning of September that there were more people on ventilators for COVID-19 than ever before.
“A surge in evictions could lead to the immediate and significant movement of large numbers of persons from lower density to higher density housing at a time in the United States when the highly transmissible Delta variant is driving COVID-19 cases at an unprecedented rate,” the CDCwrote on Aug. 3. The agency noted that the previous eviction moratorium had stalled more than 1.5 million eviction filings nationwide in 2020.
But now with no federal moratorium on payment-related evictions in place, the rent is due, and in some cases it’s months of back payments for tenants and their families.
At the Raleigh County Community Action Association in Beckley — which serves an 11-county region — housing director Brittany Caron said she fears for the number of people who, without a moratorium, have to figure out what to do with months of unpaid rent.
“It kept people housed, but in the long run, I mean I feel like there could’ve been more to the moratorium because those people were still responsible for that rent,” Caron said. “So how are you going to come up with all of this money when you were unemployed and unable to pay that?”
That’s where rental assistance could come into play: As of Wednesday, West Virginia officials had handed out $20.4 million to 4,300 applicants whose requests for rental and utility assistance were approved.
But that still leaves about $240 million unspent with another $90 million on the way later this year from the U.S. Treasury Department.
West Virginia isn’t alone:nearly every state has struggled to disperse the money quickly enough according to the federal government’s standards. And there are more than 3,200 applications that West Virginia’s rental assistance program has yet to process. But even while the West Virginia Housing Development Fund has taken some of the federal government’s recommended steps to make sure people are aware of the assistance, they haven’t implemented all of the recommendations. And of the nearly 26,000 people the U.S. Census estimates are behind on rent in West Virginia, more than 17,000 had not applied for assistance as of the end of August.
In Wood County, where Community Resources Inc. serves an 11-county area in the mid-Ohio Valley stretching toward the Northern Panhandle, Morris said she thinks the program’s availability is making a difference.
“Surprisingly we are not really as busy as one would think we should be during the crisis we’re dealing with,” Morris said.
The waiting game
While most community action agencies, like Community Resources, Inc. in Wood, are helping their clients complete their applications for rental and utility assistance, some are running their own more local rental assistance programs.
The Raleigh County Community Action Association has a grant-funded program to help with old and new rental payments for Raleigh County residents.
So far, the organization says that its rental program has helped 102 people with rental assistance and three with mortgage aid. They’ve spent $72,300.
For those waiting on assistance through the rental assistance fund to come through, time is an important element. Legal Aid attorney Kathryn Marcum, who works with renters in Randolph County, said she hopes once her nonpayment-related cases start going to court that judges will hold off making a decision to evict someone who could qualify for assistance.
“I have seen a number of landlords who have been patient and willing to wait. And, frankly, the alternative is to proceed with an eviction against someone who is not able to pay,” Marcum said. “Waiting will give you, eventually, money in your pocket that you wouldn’t see otherwise.”
But for now, the West Virginia Supreme Court isn’t issuing any guidance to lower courts on how to handle MRAP eligibility. Instead, they flagged the Supreme Court decision lifting the federal eviction moratorium, and are leaving the rest up to local magistrates.
Reach reporter Emily Allen at emilyallen@mountainstatespotlight.org
After an ineffective first effort, Justice directed more federal funds to a new vaccine lottery. Now another group is stepping in, backed by a CDC grant, to bring care directly to rural WV communities.
This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight.
On Aug. 11, COVID-19 cases in West Virginia soared toward 5,000, and hospitalizations reached numbers the state hadn’t seen since the winter. That same day, a Hardy County nonprofit, theCommunity Education Group, quietly announced their plan to use funds from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to increase vaccinations in rural West Virginia.
The group’s plan is ambitious. They will focus first on increasing COVID-19 testing and vaccination rates, but also hope to use their federal money to build a medical infrastructure that will prepare rural West Virginia to tackle high rates of HIV, hepatitis C and substance use disorders, while continuing to offer testing and vaccination for COVID and influenza.
“We want to be able to approach this for individuals who we know COVID is the number one issue for, but we also have other health considerations in West Virginia that we have to take care of,” said founder A. Toni Young.
Theuse of federal money stands in stark contrast to Gov. Jim Justice’s use of federal CARES Act funds, which he has near total control over. Only 10 days after ending a vaccine lottery program that multiple studies found to be ineffective, Justice announced a second round of giveaways and prizes that will cost $6 million to $8 million, or roughly double what Young’s group received.
Allowing vaccinated residents to sign up for a chance to win prizes like trucks, guns, vacations and up to $1 million cash, has been Justice’s primary method of driving up vaccination rates. But multiple studies released since the first lottery began have shown that such giveaways have done little to increase vaccinations.
Dr. Allan Walkey, who studied the effectiveness of the nation’s first vaccine lottery in Ohio, said last month, “I think [states] needed to try something to increase vaccination rates. Knowing now that they haven’t had much of an effect, I think it would be a mistake to keep doing them in the future. We need to learn and change and move on.”
But Justice doubled down. Asked at an Aug. 20 press conference by a West Virginia Public Broadcasting reporter why he was spending millions on a second lottery program with his bulldog as a mascot, Justice offered a rigorous defense, and assailed the program’s critics. “I hope to goodness that no one is sitting out there rooting for the incentive program on Babydog to fail, because if the incentive program on Babydog is not successful, then that means we’re not getting people vaccinated.”
A. Toni Young, founder of the Community Education Group
Offering a small chance at large prizes may not be enough to get someone who’s vaccine hesitant off the fence, or to get someone who doesn’t understand the need for a vaccine to a pharmacy. Unlike Justice’s plan, Young ’s program will bring vaccinations and health care services to high-risk communities by funding vaccination drives, training local health care providers to offer new services like hepatitis and HIV screenings. And she hopes to build local volunteer networks to spread quality information about vaccine safety and new treatment options to people who may not have access to it — but that’s something that doesn’t happen overnight.
“I mean, [Justice] has way more money than me,” Young said. “But I don’t know that the people that we’re talking about are necessarily the same ones that are going to go in for the lottery. I think there are some people out there that we have to do, literally, a hand touch on.”
In spite of increasingly dire trends, with active COVID cases hitting 21,500 — just three weeks after they reached 5,000 — and the rate of new infections and hospitalizations nearing all-time pandemic highs, Justice has refused to reinstate mask mandates or require state employees to be vaccinated. The governor’s office did not respond to questions about other programs to encourage West Virginians to get vaccinated.
Justice’s hesitance comes as many West Virginia Republicans have come out against mask and vaccination mandates. Attorney General Patrick Morrisey tweeted on July 27, “Informed citizens in a Republic don’t need government mandates to dictate how they should act.” Senate President Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, and House of Delegates Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, are asking Morrisey to weigh in on the legality of vaccination mandates, or a “vaccine passport” system.
In the absence of new efforts from lawmakers, Young hopes to use strategies the Community Education Group have applied in the past to prevent HIV and hepatitis C and increase access to care in marginalized, mostly urban communities. Their plan involves training community members and local health care providers in the next few months to offer health services that many people in rural West Virginia can’t easily get.
Young’s focus moved from urban areas like Washington D.C., where the group had primarily worked for decades, to rural West Virginia after reading a CDC report that found more than than 20 of West Virginia’s 55 counties were among the highest risk counties in the nation for HIV outbreaks. At that point, there had yet to be an HIV outbreak, but looking at the numbers of overdoses and hepatitis cases, Young knew what was coming. When terms like “outbreak” and “cluster” started showing up in connection with HIV in West Virginia years later, Young was ready to move.
With the new funding, she’ll be able to prove whether or not her tested strategies can be adapted to a new environment. But building a network of treatment, and gaining the trust of underserved community members, will take time.
In the next 90 days, the group will also start accepting applications for funding from rural groups with ideas for vaccine pushes of their own, with an eye towards expanding services for clinics that are offering medically-assisted substance abuse treatment in hard-hit regions. She hopes to provide funding and training for COVID and influenza testing and vaccination, as well as hepatitis and HIV prevention.
In the next couple of weeks, Young will fund West Virginia Health Right clinics in Morgantown and Charleston to increase the access of their mobile clinics in nearby rural counties.
Community care
While Justice’s lottery may not prove an effective incentive, medical and behavioral health experts have long contended that community-based messengers are effective at nudging people towards treatment.
“This is the hard work,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco, said last month. “Where you get people who are trusted messengers in the community, like a doctor, or the head of the Rotary club, or someone in that community who is important to you.”
In West Virginia, Young hopes to adapt the CHAMPS model (Community HIV/AIDS Model Prevention Services), which the Community Education Group previously used to combat HIV in Washington, D.C. The model stresses the importance of recruiting and training locals in underserved communities to perform outreach, provide tests, and point people towards treatment. The key, according to Young, is building trust in hard-hit communities through local messengers. She hopes to begin virtual training in the next three months, after the group considers how to adapt its training to serve rural West Virginia communities.and identify potential partners with local health care providers.
For his part, Justice recently announced an effort to open vaccination clinics in at least one school in every West Virginia county this fall, giving young people a chance to get vaccinated in their own communities. The move was praised by U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.
Young hopes to train community messengers in rural areas to administer tests and point people towards treatment. As well as building trust, relying on community help can also help fill information gaps, she said.
“Can we get that person who is marginally housed to be vaccinated?” Young said. “Because maybe that person hasn’t been approached about it, the availability of it, the importance of it, the new knowledge about the Delta variant.”
The work ahead
Young, a Hardy County resident, has already begun to build a network of local health care providers and interested organizations after opening a regional office in the Eastern Panhandle. Since September 2020, the Community Education Group has been holding “West Virginia Stakeholders” meetings to discuss their work and prominent issues in the state.
But according to Dr. Judith Feinberg, an infectious disease specialist at West Virginia University, who specializes in HIV and substance use disorders, outreach in rural West Virginia represents a unique challenge.
“Rural communities are really insular.” said Feinberg, who has been in touch with Young. “In general, West Virginians, and especially West Virginians in the areas of coal and other sort of rapacious stealing of all of West Virginia’s natural resources, have been pretty abused by the outside world, so they aren’t terribly trusting.”
Young hopes to begin her work by partnering with established health care providers, and sharing the federal money. Dr. Angie Settle, CEO and executive director of West Virginia Health Right, said she’s grateful for the opportunity for extra funding, which is expected in the next couple of weeks. Last weekend, the group had to shut down their drive-through testing center in Charleston because two of their nurses were dehydrated.
Along with their work in larger communities like Charleston and Morgantown, Health Right also has a mobile treatment clinic. The Community Education Group funds will allow them to expand that work in five underserved rural West Virginia counties.
“There’s a lot of COVID funding coming through,” said Settle. “I’m just glad to see that some of that is going to rural health.”
For Young, it’s an opportunity to do on-the-ground work in a state where she’s lived, organized and advocated for health policy reform.
“West Virginia is unique, and it’s a county by county approach,” Young said. “It may take a few more touches, but you can get folks to access care and treatment.”
This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight.
Every morning, peer recovery coach Misty Dillon heads into work and has no idea how her day will unfold.
In April, Dillon joined the Mingo County Quick Response Team, a four-person group that works with residents who are dealing with addiction. They help people who have overdosed recently and connect them to resources for treatment and long-term recovery.
But there are people struggling with addiction all over Mingo County. You can see them sometimes in magistrate court, on the third floor of the Mingo Memorial Building, where the response team is based. Or down the road at one of the local treatment clinics. Or in just about any of the small towns from Matewan to Delbarton, from Gilbert to Kermit.
For the Mingo County response team, this work can seem like an uphill battle. But behind their efforts to address one of the largest public health epidemics in the state, there looms an even larger battle in the courts to hold manufacturers, distributors and state regulators responsible for their roles in the state’s addiction crisis.
In 2018, Mingo County joined several West Virginia communities by filing a lawsuit against various people and companies who the county says made the opioid crisis possible. Later that year, Mingo’s lawsuit was moved from the local state court to a federal court in Cleveland, Ohio. The federal system was moving opioid lawsuits from communities all over the country there to be litigated, because of the many common defendants and issues. Today, more than 60 West Virginia cities and counties have complaints there. They’re waiting alongside 3,500 other cases from all over the country.
Those complaints are waiting in line as a complex court system plays out, with thousands of lives and billions of dollars at stake. In May, the City of Huntington and Cabell County took the nation’s three largest drug distributors to trial at the federal courthouse in Charleston. After delivering their closing arguments in July, the city and county are waiting on U.S. District Judge David Faber to determine what, if anything, these companies owe them.
Attorneys who worked on the Huntington-Cabell case believe their work could have a huge impact on whether other West Virginia communities go to trial, and what successes they may have. But for places like Mingo County, with a much smaller population and far fewer resources to tackle the opioid epidemic, the legal process is not happening fast enough.
“It’s taken over this town. The drug use has,” Dillon said.
A ‘natural reaction’ to unprecedented traumas
Attorneys for Cabell County said last month that distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson helped ship more than 81 million prescription opioids to a community of less than 100,000 people over eight years. Those pills, the county argued, fueled an epidemic that resulted in 726 overdose deaths from opioids in Cabell from 2015 to 2020, according to the state Office of Drug Control Policy.
Mingo County got about half as many pills, with only about a quarter of Cabell County’s population. From 2006 to 2014, distributors shipped more than 43.2 million pain pills to Mingo County pharmacies.
“These drugs were diverted, misused, and abused, to the point where citizens of West Virginia, including the residents of Mingo County, lost their jobs, their health and even their lives,” attorneys for Mingo County wrote in the 2018 lawsuit.
Furthermore, these drugs “triggered resurgence in heroin use,” which is harder to regulate simply by restricting distributor actions and doctors’ abilities to prescribe.
“It is hard to imagine the powerful pull that would cause a law-abiding, middle-aged person who started on prescription opioids for a back injury to turn to buying, snorting, or injecting heroin,” attorneys wrote, “but that is the dark side of opioid abuse and addiction which this complaint seeks to shine a light upon.”
Mingo County officials, lawyers for the county argue, bear the financial and emotional burden of responding to a public health crisis like the opioid epidemic: dispatching of emergency services, running drug treatment programs, investigations of overdoses, taking care of people who are dealing with addiction and transporting dead bodies.
“These costs reflect the natural reaction of leaders within Mingo County to traumas so unprecedented that no coping guidelines existed when they occurred,” the lawyers wrote.
‘Situations you just can’t explain’
Dillon and other members of the Mingo County Quick Response Team see these costs in their work every day. On a Thursday afternoon in mid-July, QRT members pull out of the Mingo Memorial Building parking lot in Williamson and head for the Gilbert area, about 30 miles away.
They leave with a manila folder of printed emails and a cardboard box of naloxone, a medication to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. Each email is a brief description of someone who has overdosed in the community. The naloxone is for community members and volunteer fire departments, who are sometimes called to administer the overdose-reversal medication when EMS can’t.
On the way to Gilbert the team stops in Wharncliffe, where fewer than 800 people live. A small group is already gathered outside the volunteer fire station, sitting in lawn chairs while a radio rumbles in the background. “What you see here is what you’re going to get on a call,” says fire department member Natasha Grimmett. She’s filling out paperwork for 10 more naloxone kits from the response team. Her young daughter sits at her feet, playing with bandages from a first aid kit.
“There’s situations you just can’t explain,” Grimmett said. “You cannot explain these things to people to make them understand it. Until you’ve seen it, you’ve dealt with it, you work with someone who’s out and completely unresponsive, turned purple … you don’t know about this.”
Janet Gibson, another fire department member, was the last to administer naloxone the weekend before the response team’s visit, to a woman who appeared to be experiencing an overdose.
“She was my age,” Gibson said. “In my class of 1989, I have lost 19 people.”Gibson is also filling out forms for two new kits — she has a family member dealing with addiction and she wants to be prepared to save his life.
“God forbid it ever be your own kid. But what if it was? Wouldn’t you want somebody to do everything?” Gibson said.
Potential outcomes of the complaints
When someone sues a company and a judge doesn’t dismiss it, most often they have two choices: they can go to trial or they can agree to settle.
But lawsuits like Mingo’s against opioid distributors, manufacturers, regulators and prescribers are more complicated. There are dozens of defendants, and thousands of communities across the country have filed similar suits.
When Huntington and Cabell County went to trial, they were up against the nation’s three largest opioid distributors, AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson. Even though the city and county also named manufacturers and pharmacies in their complaint, trying everyone at once would’ve made an already nearly three-month trial much longer. So, U.S. District Judge Dan Polster, who is overseeing these federal cases in Ohio, agreed each type of defendant being sued would get a different trial. In October, the first bellwether case against chain pharmacies will happen in Ohio.
Some of the defendants named in Mingo County’s complaint no longer exist. That includes distributor Miami-Luken, the fourth largest distributor in West Virginia, which closed in 2019. They sent more than 22.5 million pills to Mingo County from 2007 to 2012, according to the 2018 complaint.
A $26 billion settlement on the table from manufacturer Johnson & Johnson and the Big Three distributors also complicates matters for Mingo County. West Virginia opted out of this settlement amount, with state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey arguing the formula for who gets how much money is focused too much on population, and not enough on how hard the opioid epidemic has hit certain places.
But the federal court, where 24 West Virginia counties and more than 30 towns and cities are waiting, still has to wait to see how many communities from other states agree to the $26 billion settlement. Then, Polster could decide whether to send West Virginia cases back to federal courts in the state, or even state-run circuit courts.
Many of the opioid lawsuits, including those for another 60 West Virginia counties and cities, were never sent to federal court like the Mingo County case was. Instead, they’re in a state court mass litigation panel, which is scheduled to begin holding trials next spring. Before that, a panel of circuit judges will hold a status conference on the effort on Sept. 10, during which they’ll determine whether these communities can all go to trial at the same time.
Then, there are cases like the ones brought by Gilbert, Williamson and Kermit — towns in Mingo County that filed their complaints before the county did. They were in the middle of requesting that they stay in their respective West Virginia circuit courts when they were moved to Ohio. If Polster was to return the cases to West Virginia for trial, Faber would have to decide whether these belong in federal or state-run circuit courts.
How Mingo County and West Virginia fit in nationally
In Mingo County, Health Department Administrator Keith Blankenship said this represents only a sliver of the true problem, due to troubles with data reporting.
Because Mingo County runs along the Kentucky border, many people who experience medical emergencies like overdoses end up in hospitals across the river. There’s a lag in how that data reaches West Virginia reporting systems.
Data from the neighboring counties of Logan and McDowell might paint a more representative picture. Both were behind Cabell County as the top three for overdose deaths per 100,000 people, according to the state Office of Drug Control Policy. For just a population of about 32,000 people, Logan County had nearly 50 opioid-related overdose deaths. In McDowell, which has roughly 19,000 people, there were just under 25 opioid-related overdose deaths.
Meanwhile, in Mingo County, a county with similar geographic composition and a 26,000-person population, the state drug policy office reported onlynine fatal, opioid-related overdoses in 2020.
For the response team, not having reliable data on the area’s overdoses affects their work because it limits the number of people they can visit and invite to treatment.
But for Mingo County as a whole, it limits the grants and funding they get to respond to the epidemic, because state officials are not getting a complete look at the crisis in Mingo County.
If he were to compile a list of what Mingo County could use, trial or no trial, Blankenship said the needs are endless. The county needs more treatment facilities, or reliable transportation, to facilities in Huntington and Charleston, he said. They need more mental health workers to assist people coming out of treatment and returning to Mingo County. They need more naloxone, peer recovery coaches, Narcotics Anonymous meetings and sober-living places.
“Grants are hard to come by, they really are,” Blankenship said. “A health department is only as successful as the person who writes their grants.”
It was a federal grant that came through the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources that got Mingo County its response team.
“I see us getting a bigger team,” said Dillon, the peer recovery coach from the team. “It gets rough at times, we’ll definitely need someone.”
Before Dillon was a peer recovery coach, she dealt with addiction herself. It started with prescription opioid abuse. When it became harder to access pills due to more stringent regulation, she turned to heroin.
The local adult drug court program connected Dillon to a treatment facility in Greenbrier County, and to resources to sustain her recovery. Such programs, the county says,, the county says, are a locally-run response to a problem created by the companies that manufacture and distribute prescription opioids.
Now, Dillon finds herself a part of another, similar county-run effort to undo the damage of the opioid epidemic. In the last four months, Dillon and the QRT have gotten more than 50 Mingo County residents into a treatment facility. They’ve intercepted criminal justice proceedings and gotten people who otherwise would be in jail into a detox center; they’ve made house calls to towns throughout the county and gotten people into rehab, days after an overdose.
For those who aren’t ready for treatment, the response team members keep in touch on a weekly basis to make sure they’re doing OK.
“I think we’re making a big difference,” Dillon said. “I have not seen this many people in rehab in years.”
Nearly a third of West Virginia kids don’t live in a county with access to a drug court program. This means for about 110,000 kids, their home address could lead them down a drastically different — and troubling — path in the juvenile justice system.
This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight.
The first time Gaby Bradshaw tried alcohol, she was 10 years old. She started smoking weed shortly after, a habit she continued through middle school.
When she got to high school, things got out of control. She skipped class almost every day, holing up at the houses of her older friends and smoking pot, cigarettes and crack cocaine.
“I was very hard-headed. I didn’t want to listen to anybody,” she said.
When she was 15, she was charged with shoplifting and truancy, and was eventually diagnosed with a substance abuse disorder. Authorities gave her an option: stay in a residential facility or participate in a newly-established juvenile drug court in her hometown of Parkersburg.
Bradshaw chose the latter, and says the treatment court changed her life.
“I don’t think that I ever would have graduated high school without the program,” she said. “I needed that extra structure in my life.”
Courtesy Gaby Bradshaw
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Gaby Bradshaw
Kids in West Virginia are charged with juvenile offenses and sent to out-of-home placement facilities — which include residential homes, correctional facilities and treatment centers — at a higher rate than almost any other state in the nation. In 2019, the last year nationwide data was available, the state was second only to Alaska.
And in a state where many struggle with drug addiction and overdose death rates are rising, teens struggle with substance abuse too. Lucky ones like Bradshaw live in places like Wood County, where juvenile drug courts give them the opportunity to receive support and treatment. This approach helps keep kids in their communities, and reduces the likelihood they will commit additional offenses. It also saves the state money.
But nearly a third of West Virginia kids don’t live in a county with access to such a program. This means for about 110,000 kids, their home address could lead them down a drastically different — and troubling — path in the juvenile justice system.
Keeping kids at home
One of the key benefits of juvenile drug courts is that they provide an alternative to removing kids from their homes and placing them in a residential facility. Teen treatment courts have become increasingly popular in the state, as lawmakers and judges alike have sought to reform the juvenile justice system and keep more kids in their communities.
The reforms helped address an element of the juvenile justice system that is often overlooked according to Teresa McCune, senior counsel and former chief public defender in Mingo County’s Circuit Court.
“I just wish that we saw children as children. They are still developing, and they can’t think the way we do yet,” McCune said. “They grow and they change.”
In the last fifteen years, the U.S. Supreme Court hasrepeatedly acknowledged that children should be held to different legal standards than adults because their brains function differently: The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that evaluates risks and long-term consequences, controls impulses, and regulates decision-making, is not fully developed in most people until they are 25.
And court sentences for kids have lasting implications, partially because kids are still developing.Studies show that juvenile incarceration can make children less likely to graduate high school, make them more likely to be incarcerated as an adult, permanently disrupt their social and community ties, and hold them back from future financial success, compared to their peers.
That’s where diversion programs like juvenile drug courts come into play. In West Virginia and nationwide, these programs have proven effective at both reducing the number of children confined in juvenile correctional facilities and reducing the likelihood of them committing subsequent offenses.
About 15% of juvenile drug court graduates went on to commit another offense. That’s compared with 55% of youths in more traditional probation programs, according to the state Supreme Court.
And juvenile drug courts save the state a lot of money, too. On average, confining a kid at a residential placement facility costs around $100,000 a year. The average cost of teen treatment court in 2020 was $3,522 per participant, a sum that includes intensive supervision and individualized treatment services for both the teenager and their family, according to Nick Leftwich, who oversees all juvenile and adult drug courts for the state Supreme Court.
The treatment courts combine intensive court supervision — kids meet with their probation officer up to three times a week — with individual and group therapy sessions and substance abuse treatment.
Compared to normal courtroom proceedings, juvenile drug courts are more “participant-centric,” Leftwich said. “The focus is on participants’ progress, with the ultimate goal of getting folks clean and sober, maintaining their recovery, and ultimately graduating them from the program.”
David Hill, the juvenile drug court probation officer in Putnam County, believes that treatment courts should become the “new normal” in the juvenile justice system. Typical court proceedings that strictly follow the code of law don’t allow for much flexibility or support, Hill said. But those characteristics are what makes teen treatment courts successful.
“You have to be able to bend a bit, otherwise you are just incarcerating people who are sick,” he said.
Unequal access
Around 6 p.m. on a recent weekday, a group of teenagers and their families filed into a courtroom in Putnam County’s judicial building. The kids, dressed in the typical teenage uniform of hoodies, jeans and basketball shorts, arranged themselves in the jury box, chatting among themselves. Their families sat silently in the gallery, waiting for the week’s juvenile drug court proceedings to begin.
One by one, the kids, flanked by a guardian, approached the bench. In front of the participants and their families, Circuit Judge Phillip Stowers celebrated triumphs and admonished setbacks with equal parts positive reinforcement, humor and tough love.
“The past can hurt,” Stowers said, holding up a figurine of Rafiki, the eccentric mandrill shaman from “The Lion King.”
“But the way I see it you can either run from it or learn from it.”
This mindset underscores the purpose of treatment courts for juveniles and adults alike. Every week, a treatment team made up of court officials, therapists, state caseworkers, educators, and community volunteers reviews the kids’ cases. The teens have a group therapy session, and then attend a court session where the judge addresses their individual progress. The program has multiple phases with different levels of supervision and takes at least seven months to complete.
And while he holds the teens accountable for their progress and past actions, Stowers doesn’t expect change overnight. “I ask you to do better, not to be perfect,” he told the kids.
Anya Slepyan
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The judicial building in Putnam County.
There are currently seven kids enrolled in Putnam County’s juvenile drug court and another 102 in other drug courts around the state. If it weren’t for the treatment courts, the majority of those kids would have been sent to residential placement facilities, according to Larry Johnson, the chief juvenile probation officer in Wood County.
But for children in 31 of West Virginia’s 55 counties, juvenile drug courts aren’t an option. In 2019, about 110,000 kids (30% of the state’s under-18 population) lived in a county without one of these programs.
The result is that kids facing similar charges can be set on wildly different paths within the juvenile justice system, depending on the services provided in their communities. Although the state has tried to make programs like drug courts more available, it hasn’t succeeded in closing the service gap between counties.
That isn’t for lack of trying, says Leftwich. Juvenile drug courts are a partnership between circuit courts and the state Supreme Court. The Supreme Court fully finances the programs, while the circuit courts implement them — hiring and managing the probation officers who supervise the kids, putting together the treatment team, and coordinating services.
To start a new juvenile drug court, circuit judges have to submit an application to the Supreme Court, which Leftwich says emphatically supports the programs.
“We’re ready when they are,” he said.
But despite financial support at the state level, regional circuit courts still face significant barriers to implementing juvenile drug courts. One issue is that judges are expected to preside over treatment courts in addition to their normal docket of cases, which are especially full right now due to court closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Also, juvenile drug courts rely on community resources beyond the court system. Local drug treatment providers and therapists must be available and willing to be part of a treatment team that meets each week to discuss the cases.
“Getting all these folks to come to the table weekly to discuss treatment is a huge component of the juvenile drug courts,” Leftwich said. “So if you don’t have a good treatment provider, or one that is available to meet the rigorous demands of drug court, it is difficult to be successful.”
Youth reporting centers — which provide supervision and services like therapy and drug screenings — are another alternative to juvenile confinement and can support the mission of treatment courts.
But again, these aren’t available in every county. And despite a mandate in the state’s 2015 juvenile justice reform law that the Bureau of Juvenile Services operate a minimum of 19 youth reporting centers by July 2018, there are still only 17 in West Virginia.
Youth reporting centers and juvenile drug courts are closely linked, and there’s a lot of overlap in the counties that have both options. But kids in 26 West Virginia counties don’t have access to either program.
Compounding disparities
This demonstrates a snowball effect relating to youth services. The more resources a county has — whether therapists, addiction treatment services, or youth reporting centers — the easier it is for that county to create additional services, such as juvenile drug courts, that redirect children from residential placement to community-based programs.
But the problem is compounded for counties already lacking in resources.
Take Mingo County. Despite being one of the epicenters of the opioid epidemic (as well as media coverage of the crisis), the county doesn’t have a teen treatment court.
Mingo has only one circuit judge, who would have to apply for, set up, and then preside over the brand new juvenile drug court in addition to her already-crowded docket.
And even if they established a teen drug court, the county lacks the other supporting services they need. There’s no youth reporting center, and the treatment services for children are limited, according to McCune, who has served as a public defender and worked with children in the county for more than three decades.
In recent years, several of McCune’s juvenile clients have been ordered by the court to complete drug counseling, but they have had to wait months to get appointments. Other times, a child’s psychiatric evaluation will show that they are in need of intensive counseling, but the local services are only able to provide one appointment a month.
“I don’t know if a mental health professional would consider that ‘intensive counseling,’ but it sure doesn’t sound intensive to me,” McCune said.
The 14th judicial circuit, made up of Braxton, Clay, Gilmer and Webster counties, is in a similar position. There is no youth reporting center within the circuit, and no juvenile drug court either. Lucy Cruickshanks, the chief probation officer for Clay County, wishes they had a teen treatment court.
“If we were able to, it would be the best possible thing,” she said. But the reality of the situation is different.
“Clay County is a very rural county, and we don’t have a lot of resources,” she said. “We’re short on staff, short on money, it’s a combination of a lot of things.”
This lack of resources for juveniles leaves everyone feeling frustrated and doesn’t give judges many alternatives to keep struggling kids in their communities instead of placing them in residential facilities.
“I know how much kids’ welfare means to these judges,” said Stephanie Bond, the director of Probation Services at the state Supreme Court. “They only want to do what is best for those kids, but sometimes they feel like they don’t have another option [than removing kids from their homes], because there aren’t any other services available.”
Stowers, the Putnam County judge, agrees.
“If you’re a judge in a county without a youth reporting center or an effective Safe at Home [program], then you don’t have any choices for a child,” he said, referring to in-home services provided by the state Department of Health and Human Resources. “And I would like to see the state equalize the playing field in every circuit so that all judges have the choices that some judges have, because not all of them have that opportunity.”
But for those that do, access to drug courts can help teens turn over a new page.
Eight years after she graduated from Wood County’s juvenile drug court program, Gaby Bradshaw is now helping others deal with substance abuse. She’s part of the rapid response team at Westbrook Health Services in Parkersburg, which follows up with people who have suffered drug overdoses and tries to get them into treatment. She is also a part of the treatment team for the circuit court’s juvenile drug court, helping teens go through the same process that helped her.
Although she relapsed and had to restart her recovery as an adult, without juvenile drug court, Bradshaw says she “would have been either in jail or dead.”
But being able to help other people through their recovery makes it all worth it, she said. “It’s an amazing feeling when you see [the program] just click for people. You see a light shining in their eyes that wasn’t there before.”
Reach reporter Anya Slepyan at anyaslepyan@mountainstatespotlight.org
This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight.
Geard Mitchell remembers the day he turned 17. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, sitting inside a Boone County juvenile correctional facility. The staff of the Donald R. Kuhn Juvenile Center didn’t put on much of a celebration, he recalled. No family or friends called or visited. The only sign of the milestone was a white-frosted cake from the center’s cooks.
“[That cake] was the only good thing about that day,” he said.
Now 19, Mitchell lives in Brooklyn with his aunt and cousin. He spent half of his childhood in West Virginia, and for seven of those years he was in state custody. Sometimes that meant foster homes, after he was removed from his aunt’s home in Boone County. But sometimes that meant places like the Kuhn Juvenile Center.
Courtesy Geard Mitchell
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Geard Mitchell
Every year, several hundred West Virginia kids like Mitchell are sent to places like this, ranging from group homes to boarding schools to maximum-security jails. In Mitchell’s case, it was a last resort: he had some previous low-level offenses and had, according to a judge, been improperly labeled as a sex offender despite never being charged as such. Because of this, the state was unable to find Mitchell a foster home placement, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of him and other West Virginia foster kids.
In 2015, the year Mitchell began bouncing between foster care placements and juvenile correction facilities, West Virginia kids were confined at the highest rate in the nation: 330 of every 100,000 children. This was an emergency, lawmakers were told, and then-Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin convened a task force to reform the state’s juvenile justice system.
“We must do more to keep our kids out of the courtroom and in the classroom,” Tomblin said in his 2015 State of the State address.
Shortly after, lawmakers unanimously approved a bill implementing many of the task force’s recommendations.
But six years after these reforms, their legacy is mixed. Some of them, including procedural changes in the courtroom and new alternatives to incarceration, have reduced juvenile confinement rates by about 12% from 2015 to 2019, according to the national Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. According to that same office, West Virginia still confines more kids per capita than almost any other state.
But system-wide oversight and an effort to collect and analyze key metrics — ingredients that experts say are essential to transforming the system — have fallen apart. And there’s been little action on the part of Gov. Jim Justice to fix them.
“At the end of the day, the Governor’s Office has priorities,” said Joey Garcia, who once chaired the juvenile justice oversight committee and now represents Marion County in the state House of Delegates. “Governor’s offices are some of the most powerful offices in the United States, and they have the ability to push ideas to the forefront and use the legislative process to create reforms. And so the fact that [Justice’s office] hasn’t done that, and hasn’t seen this as an important enough issue, that’s something [Justice’s office] has to answer to.”
Thousands of West Virginia children are affected by the juvenile justice system every year, but without data or oversight, the possibilities of drastic improvements to the system are limited.
Moving in the wrong direction
In 2014, it was clear West Virginia and its kids were bucking national trends and moving in the wrong direction. Nationally, there was a 35% decrease in the number of children incarcerated between 2006 and 2011, the most recent data available. But the number of West Virginia kids in juvenile detention facilities increased by 5% over the same time period; soon it would become the highest in the country, adjusted for population.
So, Gov. Tomblin assembled a task force made up of people from all three branches of government to conduct a comprehensive review of West Virginia’s juvenile justice system.
The task force found one of the most serious problems facing the system was the sheer number of children confined in residential youth detention facilities, popularly referred to as “juvie.”
Children were increasingly entering the court system and being removed from their homes for charges like truancy and running away — so-called “status offenses” that wouldn’t be considered a crime if they were committed by an adult. Nearly two-thirds of the kids in the state’s juvenile correctional facilities in 2013 were there for non-violent offenses, according to theWest Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.
This posed — and continues to pose — serious problems for those kids who are locked up.Study after study has shownthe harms of juvenile incarceration: kids that have spent time in the system are less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to be in jail as an adult. They often have trouble finding steady work or high-paying jobs and experience disruptions in their medical and physical development. They are also sometimes exposed to physical, emotional and sexual victimization in juvenile facilities, and have been isolated from their families and communities.
These are lasting impacts that can affect kids and their communities for decades. Geard Mitchell says now — two years after being released from the correctional center— he struggles with life skills his peers have already mastered, like driving and opening a bank account.
“I’m already behind all the kids my age who were taught that stuff,” he said. “And the fact that I was never given the opportunity to learn those things affects my life in the long run and on a daily basis.”
In addition to the lasting effects on kids, it’s expensive to incarcerate children. The average cost of keeping one kid in a residential facility run by either the state Department of Health and Human Resources or Bureau of Juvenile Services is over $100,000 per child per year.
All of these reasons — societal and financial — played into lawmakers’ urgency to reform the juvenile justice system back in 2014. In December of that year, Tomblin’s task force submitted a report detailing the issues and making policy recommendations. Besides the disturbingly high rates of children in the system, they found a lack of community services across the state, inconsistent and subjective decision-making related to juvenile cases, and significant gaps in data collection and analysis at every level of the system.
Experts say these data gaps are a big deal.
“If you don’t know how many kids are out-of-home, or where they’ve been placed, or certainly for what reasons, how can you actually manage a system?” asked Jake Horowitz, who directs the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Public Safety Performance Project, and assisted the task force. He said compared to other states, West Virginia’s juvenile data collection was “notably weaker” at the time.
Because of the complexity of the system — which includes DHHR, the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the Department of Education and the judicial system — a lack of proper data sharing means kids like Geard Mitchell, who bounce back and forth between DHHR and BJS facilities, can easily get lost in the system. And without oversight, the system can’t continually improve.
“You have to constantly be looking at the data because things will continue to change,” said Tessa Upin, a deputy director at the nonprofit Crime and Justice Institute who assisted with the implementation of the 2015 reform bill. “So you have to be able to examine the data and examine the outcomes, and then make the right adjustments to get the best results for the kids and their families that come in contact with the system.”
This emphasis on data collection and system oversight was one of the many reforms codified by the 2015 juvenile justice bill. But West Virginia’s work in implementing this provision of the law was relatively short-lived.
Shifting priorities
Lawmakers decided to streamline West Virginia’s complex system through a new committee: the Juvenile Justice Reform Oversight Committee, which included lawmakers, government officials, a law enforcement officer and a victim’s rights advocate.
“It was supposed to be a way to measure progress, or lack of progress, in the system,” Upin said.
But the oversight committee no longer exists. The most recent meeting minutes and agenda are for a meeting that took place in June 2017, shortly before Gov. Justice switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party.
That was when Garcia, who had chaired the oversight committee under both Tomblin and Justice, stepped away from the post. At the time, Garcia was the legislative director and a senior counselor in the Governor’s Office.
Justice eventually appointed James Bailey, then a senior counselor of policy and legislation in his office, to fill the position. But despite a mandate that the oversight committee meet quarterly, members say it only had one meeting after Garcia’s departure (though no records of the meeting exist).
Stephanie Bond, the director of Probation Services and former director of the Division of Juvenile Services, was adamant that the committee continue its work. But she said it was clear the priorities of the Governor’s Office had shifted.
“With the past administration, we had inter-governmental discussions about juvenile justice reform,” Bond said. “It was a top priority so it was accepted and worked on across agencies.”
But this has not been the case for the current administration, which has focused its attention elsewhere. “Juvenile justice reform hasn’t made it to the top of the list,” she said.
Office of Gov. Jim Justice
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The law charges the governor or their designee with presiding as committee chair; it’s also up to the governor to appoint four of the other committee members. Although representatives from all three branches and several different agencies served on the committee, the Governor’s Office had primary responsibility for setting up and running the meetings, said Putnam County Circuit Judge Phillip Stowers, a former committee member.
A spokesperson for Justice didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.
Besides the inaction on the part of the Governor’s Office, budget cuts to the department that provided staff support dealt another death blow. And lawmakers didn’t act to renew or revive the committee before its end date on Dec. 31, 2020.
This lack of action is troubling to Garcia.
“I think it’s a very big issue,” he said. “These were mandatory guidelines that were set out by the Legislature, and for whatever reason did not continue to be a priority.”
Upin of the Criminal Justice Institute says in West Virginia’s case, the leadership changes had a “fundamental impact” on the budding juvenile justice work. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
She pointed to Utah as one example. Shortly after the reforms in Utah were passed, a new person was appointed to head the Juvenile Justice Division and the program went on to successfully reduce the number of kids in locked detention by 46% (thoughevidence suggests the reforms have predominantly benefited white offenders).
Now, very little record exists of West Virginia’s brief Juvenile Justice Reform Oversight Committee. Despite a requirement in the law that the committee make regular reports to the legislature, only one annual report was ever written, for fiscal year 2016.
The importance of continuing to collect and analyze data is a central theme in the report. In the conclusion, the committee writes that “the goals moving forward for the different branches of government and agencies involved in this effort are as follows: Continue striving for consistency in practices statewide, improve data collection and reporting to understand the impact of the reforms, and use data to make data-driven decisions to improve outcomes for youth and families involved in the West Virginia juvenile justice system.”
But without an active oversight committee to review and enforce cross-agency data collection, program implementation, and performance outcomes, data-based decision making simply isn’t possible.
Consequences of lack of data
Upin, who has assisted 14 different states with repairing their juvenile justice systems, describes juvenile justice reform as a “forever process.”
“The passage of reform legislation is really just the beginning,” she said.
Six years after West Virginia’s juvenile justice reforms were enacted, most of the ingredients necessary to make the system work the way the task force intended are still missing.
One barrier is that there is no government-wide definition of juvenile recidivism, or the rate at which people — in this case children — who have been convicted of an offense commit other offenses after completing their sentence. This makes comparisons across agencies and juvenile justice programs nearly impossible.
And though there is some data collection at the branch and agency level, much of the data defies analysis due to the poor organization of the databases, according to Stephanie Bond.
“The courts didn’t even start an electronic database until 2013, so we’re really behind,” Bond said. “DHHR had one, but it was pretty outdated from the beginning. So they’ve had as much trouble getting data from their database as we have with ours.”
And the system is still sprawling, involving multiple courts and agencies, and without the single oversight committee the law intended.
Duncan Slade
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
The Donald Kuhn Juvenile Center in Julian, WV.
This has a significant impact on kids like Geard Mitchell, who was shuffled back and forth between DHHR and BJS facilities for more than six years. He says several of the facilities he was in held a mixture of foster kids and kids involved in the juvenile justice system.
“I figured out after the years I was there that they mixed people. When I was there, there were kids who were only supposed to be there a week and were waiting to be put in a locked-up facility, who were involved in gun cases and stuff like that,” he said. “And they were putting them in with kids like me.” At the time, Mitchell had been charged with running away, which is a status offense.
Though she couldn’t comment specifically on Mitchell’s case, DHHR spokeswoman Jessica Holstein said the agency “is required to place children in the least restrictive placement when they are placed in the state’s custody regardless of the reason they were placed in custody. DHHR cannot place a child in a juvenile correctional facility, only circuit courts have that authority.”
The DHHR and Bureau of Juvenile Services continue to struggle with collecting, analyzing, and using data.
While the DHHR can identify the number of children placed in its more than 60 residential facilities through the Youth Services program, the department does not keep track of how many of those kids are involved in the juvenile justice system, according to Holstein.
And though the Bureau of Juvenile Services (formerly the Division of Juvenile Services) made significant efforts to improve their data systems after 2015, their reporting efforts have since faded. In 2016 and 2017, the division published annual reports that were over 100 pages long, detailing everything from staff trainings to demographic data from each youth reporting center (which are similar to day report centers) and residential facilities.
But in 2018, as part of the Legislature’s effort to consolidate the West Virginia correctional system, the free-standing agency was renamed and moved under the state Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Since then, that agency’s annual reports, covering the state’s whole correctional system, have only been about 50 pages long. Of those 50 pages, only three are dedicated to the juvenile justice system.
The lack of reporting doesn’t mean that the Bureau of Juvenile Services isn’t collecting data. The Bureau was able to provide spreadsheets tracking over 20,000 cases of children sent to residential and non-residential facilities between 2013 and 2021.
But having data points isn’t the same as having legible, usable data. Although the Bureau keeps track of individual cases of recidivism, they were unable to provide a recidivism rate extrapolated from that data.
And even where concrete data does exist within the juvenile justice system — juvenile drug courts, for example, collect, analyze, and report data regularly — without an active Juvenile Justice Oversight Committee, there is no government entity to compile each agency’s data in order to review the juvenile justice system as a whole.
Room for improvement
Six years after West Virginia’s major juvenile justice reform bill was passed into law, some significant changes in the system are evident. Some of the most effective reforms have been procedural changes, like the rule that in most cases restricts children from being locked up for status offenses like truancy or running away.
Similarly, an emphasis on diversion programs that keep kids in their communities or prevent them from entering the court system in the first place has changed the system for the better. Juvenile case filings have decreased by 28% between 2014 and 2019, a decrease which is more likely due to effective diversion policies than a significant drop in juvenile offenses. (2020 case filings are dramatically reduced even from 2019 levels, almost certainly the result of COVID-19 quarantines.)
The progress made by these reforms demonstrates a fundamental characteristic of criminal justice systems around the country: policy decisions, not demographics or crime rates, drive the numbers.
“States make a decision about how many kids to place out of their homes, and for what offenses,” Jake Horowitz said.
And stories like Geard Mitchell’s show that there’s much more work to be done. Now 19 years old, Mitchell works as a caretaker for the elderly, helping them with their groceries and other tasks they might not be able to do on their own. Things are looking good, he says. But even though he’s trying to move forward, it’s not easy. And the years he spent in West Virginia’s juvenile justice and foster care systems have set him apart from his peers.
“I definitely stand out from other kids. Because they can tell, just from how I carry myself, that I didn’t grow up the right way,” he said. “I tell myself, ‘you’ve been through a lot, why give up now? You’ve made it through the toughest part of your life, and now it’s time to move on.’”
But that doesn’t mean he’s done thinking about the juvenile justice system in West Virginia. He compared himself to a dog that had been locked in a cage his whole life.
“I don’t think they should lock kids up as much as they do because they’re going to end up like that dog that doesn’t know what to do with life and is scared of everybody,” he said.
Despite the disintegration of oversight and data collection that was meant to support West Virginia’s reforms, Tessa Upin believes that improvements are still possible.
“The framework is there, and I believe there is potential for meaningful change to happen because the laws are still on the books,” she said. “It just needs someone driving, driving that change and getting people on-board across all of the agencies and branches to make it possible again.”
Reach reporter Anya Slepyan at anyaslepyan@mountainstatespotlight.org
Monongalia County had the highest turnout yet for the state’s redistricting committee, which has held similar hearings in counties across the state. Around 50 citizens gathered Thursday, sitting in rows of blue and gold chairs.
This story was originally published by Mountain State Spotlight.
Monongalia County had the highest turnout yet for the state’s redistricting committee, which has held similar hearings in counties across the state. Around 50 citizens gathered Thursday, sitting in rows of blue and gold chairs. They were joined by over a dozen members of the Legislature, mostly members of the joint redistricting committee, who were there to listen.
One by one, constituents stood to speak, and most were clear and consistent on one point: they’re tired of living in a multi-member district. In Monongalia County, five delegates represent House District 51, a populous and spread-out area that covers Morgantown and a lot of surrounding areas. But come 2022, that will change.
“We have all these people running for office in one big area,” said Cindy Chambers, who’s lived in Morgantown for 35 years. “We’re so different from Blacksville, to South Park, to Suncrest, to Cheat Lake. People have different interests. They have different things that they want to have done.”
A 2018 state law banning multi-member districts makes the coming redistricting process the most significant in decades. West Virginia has 20 multi-member districts; as part of the redistricting process, lawmakers will carve them up into smaller areas, each represented by one delegate.
While single-member districts have generally been supported by voting rights advocates who say they more accurately represent smaller communities, West Virginia’s switch has raised alarms among Democrats who have strong representation in multi-member districts, and nonpartisan watchdogs who fear the move will lead to partisan gerrymandering.
Here, lawmakers draw the maps that determine their own political futures, and for the first time in 80 years, Republicans will control that process. And the largest multi-member districts they’ll be carving up are in the Democratic strongholds of Monongalia and Kanawha counties.
“For better or worse, whoever controls the line drawing, and this is usually true, will draw the lines in their favor,” said Adam Podowitz-Thomas, the senior legal strategist at the nonpartisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project. “And if there’s more lines, there’s more chances to draw favorable lines.”
The argument against multi-member districts
Podowitz-Thomas says historically, multi-member districts have been used to disenfranchise voters along racial and partisan lines. Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down multiple maps where multi-member districts were used to “submerge” Black votes.
For example, in 1973, the Supreme Court struck down parts of a Texas redistricting map where they found multi-member districts were being used to dilute the state’s Black vote. They found that Hispanic and Black neighborhoods in Bexar and Dallas counties, respectively, were being lumped in with white communities that could outvote them.
Where, in Bexar, if there were single member districts, you would likely have one Hispanic representative and two white representatives, a larger three-member district was electing three white representatives.
Because of the Voting Rights Act, which ensures equal representation for non-white communities, and legal challenges like in Texas, Podowitz-Thomas said states that still use multi-member districts “tend to be places that don’t have a big minority population,” like West Virginia.
Still, partisan issues can arise. If anything, the numbers suggest that in West Virginia, multi-member districts have given a partisan advantage to the Democratic Party. In the last presidential election, just under half of Monongalia County residents voted for Republican Donald Trump. But four out of five of their county’s delegates are Democrats from Morgantown, the largest city in the district.
The down-side of moving to single-member districts
In West Virginia, the redistricting process is controlled by legislators whose political futures are determined by the maps they’re drawing.
Typically, multi-member districts are found in populous areas, like Morgantown or Charleston, which have historically been Democratic strongholds. Fifteen of the state’s 22 Democratic delegates come from multi-member districts. And now, Republicans will have control over these Democrats’ fate.
When the 2018 law that outlawed multi-member districts in West Virginia was being debated, Delegate Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, sought to include an amendment that would have also moved the state away from a partisan redistricting process by creating an independent commission to oversee the mapmaking process. The amendment was shot down on partisan lines.
That’s a change from the early part of the last decade, when Democrats still controlled the Statehouse and had little interest in Republican proposals for an independent commission to handle redistricting.
Voting rights advocates have long pushed for the creation of independent commissions to oversee redistricting, wresting the power from the lawmakers impacted by it.
Ken Martis, a professor emeritus at West Virginia University, spoke at the Monongalia County hearing to point out that in nearby Maryland, Republican Gov. Larry Hogan created such a committee by executive order earlier this year with Democrats set to control the redistricting process.
“Without an independent redistricting commission, the Legislature will have to be extremely careful drawing district lines,” Martis said.
The sentiment was echoed by another attendee, Sarah Barnes, co-president of the nonpartisan Monongalia County League of Women Voters.
“I’m personally not opposed to [single-member districts] as long as the maps are drawn fairly,” Barnes said. This would mean, in Monongalia County, not dividing up Morgantown and lumping its voters in with rural communities that don’t face the same daily issues.
Sen. Charles Trump, R-Morgan, the chairman of the Senate redistricting committee, is doing his best to assure voters there will be no gerrymandering. The Morgantown public hearing on redistricting is the sixth public hearing so far, in which the committee has sought public input on the map-making process. Six more are scheduled, and three will be held virtually for anyone in the state to attend.
“The advantage of going to all these different places in West Virginia is you get to hear from the people about what is important,” Trump said.
While the drawing of new maps has yet to begin, the U.S. Census Bureau released the data that will allow the process to start on Thursday. Trump said that it will take roughly a week for the data to be converted into a usable format that will allow lawmakers and staffers to begin looking at where populations have grown and shrunk, and redrawing district lines accordingly. Trump says that the committee will use citizen input as its guide.
“We don’t know if all of this [public input] is just show or if all of this is meaningful,” said Martis, the WVU professor, after the meeting. “The maps will show.”
Reach reporter Ian Karbal at iankarbal@mountainstatespotlight.org
