Kentucky utility regulators reached a decision this week that could mean a northern West Virginia power plant will have to close years sooner than planned.
The Kentucky Public Service Commission on Thursday rejected Kentucky Power’s request to perform environmental compliance work on the Mitchell Plant near Moundsville, West Virginia.
Under federal rules, the coal-burning plant requires a new wastewater handling system to continue operating through 2040. Without it, the plant will have to close by the end of 2028.
The project’s total cost is $133.5 million, with Kentucky Power’s portion totaling $67 million. The company owns half the Mitchell Plant along with Wheeling Power.
Both are subsidiaries of Ohio-based American Electric Power.Kentucky Power told the commissioners that performing the upgrades to keep the plant operating through 2040 was the least-cost option and it needed the plant to maintain its capacity obligations to the power grid.
The company sought to recover the cost through a surcharge its customers would pay on their monthly bills. Kentucky Power serves about 165,000 customers in eastern Kentucky.
Environmental groups, utility customers and the Kentucky attorney general’s office testified that closing the plant in 2028 would save ratepayers tens of millions of dollars.
They told regulators that natural gas, renewable energy and other capacity could feasibly replace the Mitchell Plant.
In his testimony last month, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron told commissioners that the plant “provides little to no economic value to the commonwealth.”
In its order, the commission said the company failed to demonstrate that the project was the most reasonable and least costly option.
The commission also said the company exaggerated the cost of solar power as a replacement and failed to consider the tax benefits of retiring the plant. Cindy Wiseman, a spokeswoman for Kentucky Power, said the company disagreed with the commission’s findings, but recognized that “this was a close call for the commission given the economics and the overall size of the investment.”
The West Virginia Public Service Commission still has not rendered a decision on Wheeling Power’s portion of the project. It’s not clear what would happen if the commission comes to a different conclusion from its Kentucky counterpart.
Emmett Pepper, policy director for Energy Efficient West Virginia, said the Kentucky commission’s decision showed that the Mitchell retrofits “are not good for West Virginia customers.”
Rejecting them “would help avoid yet another rate increase, and would create savings that could be invested in developing and implementing a real economic transition that would bring new jobs and economic development to the Northern Panhandle,” Pepper added.
The Mitchell Plant supports hundreds of jobs, directly and indirectly, and contributes millions of dollars in annual tax revenue to the surrounding community.Public and written testimony in West Virginia overwhelmingly favors keeping the plant open.
The Mitchell Plant is one of three in West Virginia whose fate could be decided in the coming weeks. The other two, John Amos in Winfield and Mountaineer in New Haven, require the same wastewater upgrades to keep running through 2040.
Like Mitchell, they would close in 2028 if the work is not completed.
The upgrades to all three plants would cost $317 million.The Amos and Mountaineer plants await a similar decision from the Virginia State Corporation Commission. Last week, the commission’s senior hearing examiner recommended that commissioners deny the project.
The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol left five people dead and caused an estimated $1.5 million in damage to the Capitol building.
In the six months since then, federal authorities say, about 470 people have been arrested in nearly every state, including at least 46 people in the Ohio Valley.
The Ohio Valley ReSource has mapped the home counties of those from Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia who have been charged in connection with the Capitol violence.
As of July 2, the FBI had made at least 16 arrests in Kentucky, 25 in Ohio, and five in West Virginia.
Ohio’s Franklin County stands out on the map with seven arrests, the greatest concentration in the region by far and among the most arrests by county in the country. Only two other counties nationwide have that many arrests: Orange County in California, and Brevard County in Florida. Franklin County is home to Columbus, Ohio’s capital, and has a population of about 1.3 million.
In Kentucky, the greatest concentration of arrests is in Louisville, where three people face charges. Two were arrested in the Lexington region.
All five arrests in West Virginia came from five different counties.
Mix of Charges
Many of the charges against people around the Ohio Valley include entering and remaining in a restricted building, and disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building. Some also include violent entry of the capitol, obstruction of law enforcement, and theft or destruction of government property.
However, some area defendants face more serious charges.
Federal Court Documents
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A photo of George Tanios inside the Sandwich U restaurant
George Tanios, a Morgantown, West Virginia restaurant owner, is charged with assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon, and conspiracy to injure an officer. A criminal complaint describes Tanios and a Pennsylvania man arranging to use chemical irritant spray on officers at the Capitol.
One of the injured officers, Brian Sicknick, later died. However, a coroner determined Sicknick’s death was unrelated to the injuries sustained in the Capitol violence. Tanios was arraigned in April and he pleaded not guilty to all counts. He remains in federal custody.
Four Ohio residents who are alleged members of the militia group the Oath Keepers are charged with conspiracy to delay or hinder Congress’ certification of the Electoral College vote.
Clayton Mullins of Mayfield, Kentucky, is charged with assaulting an officer and engaging in physical violence in a restricted building. The criminal complaint against Mullins includes images of him pulling a capitol officer by the leg into a crowd, where the officer was struck with poles, kicked, stomped and sprayed with chemical irritant. The complaint stated that a cut on the officer’s head required staples to close.
Derrick Evans
A former member of West Virginia’s legislature, Derrick Evans, was originally charged with entering a restricted building, a misdemeanor. Last week, federal authorities added a felony obstruction charge. Evans could face prison if convicted.
An analysis by the Ohio Valley ReSource showed that roughly 488,000 people in Ohio and West Virginia have lost supplemental unemployment payments after Republican governors there scrapped the federal unemployment benefit programs put in place during the pandemic.
Another 65,000 people in Kentucky eligible for the payments await a decision by the Democratic governor there who is facing mounting pressure as business owners claim that the expanded unemployment compensations have resulted in labor shortages.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear hasn’t announced any intentions to drop the federal unemployment assistance, but he told Kentuckians that they will receive a $1,500 bonus if they go back to work by July 30.
As part of the massive federal effort to offer economic relief during the pandemic, Congress added funding to expand states’ ability to provide unemployment benefits to workers who wouldn’t otherwise qualify for the state unemployment insurance. Additionally, under the American Rescue Plan, the unemployed workers were receiving an extra $300 weekly benefit.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice opted out of the enhanced federal payments in the past two weeks.
“West Virginians have access to thousands of jobs right now. We need everyone back to work. Our small businesses and West Virginia’s economy depend on it,” Justice said in a May 14 press conference.
A day before that, DeWine said the expanded federal benefits had been a “lifeline” for many Americans at the height of the pandemic, but “This is no longer the case as we now have an abundant supply of vaccines.”
Nearly half a million workers in Ohio and West Virginia lost their $300 weekly payments, including 450,000 in Ohio and 38,000 in West Virginia, according to a Resource analysis of the labor department’s latest benefit claim filings data.
In addition to the enhanced weekly payments, West Virginia cut off all federally funded unemployment benefits, and as a result some 23,000 workers lost all unemployment benefits. As of June 5, about 65,000 workers in Kentucky were eligible to receive supplemental benefits, the Department of Labor data shows.
As of June 12, around 33,000 workers in the Ohio Valley made new applications for state unemployment benefits or to start a second or subsequent period of unemployment within a benefit year. In addition, about 25,000 made new claims for the federal pandemic benefits, with a majority of those coming in Kentucky.
Labor Debate
On Monday, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged Beshear to cut off the additional weekly unemployment payments, citing his discussions with the business owners in the commonwealth.
“There’s no question that we’d be in better shape if the governor had made a decision to discontinue the federal bonus as 25 other states have,” McConnell said.
But supporters of the programs have called the extra $300 weekly benefits a “vital lifeline” because it helps workers who’ve been laid off or can’t find work during the pandemic.
Kentucky union leaders and nonprofits, in a letter to Beshear in May, said that it would be premature for the state to end the benefits, and challenged the notion that people have stopped looking for work because of the federal programs.
“Some are falsely claiming that the extra $300 in benefits is keeping people from working, but in fact Kentuckians are returning to work in huge numbers,” they said, adding that the benefits also add money to local economies and boost demand for goods and services.
“Most of the complaints about an alleged labor shortage come from restaurants offering low wages, few benefits and little workplace flexibility,” the Kentucky coalition, in their letter to Beshear, said.
“Even with the limited appeal of restaurant work people are returning to those jobs in huge numbers.”
Unequal Recovery
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced state economies to shut down in March, workers lost jobs at a rate not seen since at least the 2007-08 financial crisis. The unemployment rates in the Ohio Valley peaked at 16% to 17% in all three Ohio Valley states in April 2020, surpassing the nationwide rate of 14.8%.
From their April 2020 peaks, however, the state labor markets have recovered by more than 10 percentage points in the Ohio Valley states, faster than the nationwide recovery of 9% –– with Kentucky seeing the fastest decline in unemployment rates in the region.
But the recovery hasn’t been uniform across all sectors of the economy as the hospitality and leisure sector that includes hotels and food services businesses reported the highest rate of job openings among all major sectors. While most sections of the economy are yet to reach their pre-pandemic workforce levels, hotels and restaurants, particularly, are the farthest away from the full recovery.
Because of the unequal impact of COVID-19 on people of color, the federal pandemic assistance helped families buy meals and pay bills. In the Ohio Valley, Black Americans file for unemployment benefit claims at a rate that is twice their population share in the region.
The leisure and hospitality industry, a major source of jobs for many people of color, is the lowest-paying employment sector in the Ohio Valley. A worker in this industry makes an average $380 a week, the lowest among all major industries and roughly equal to the amount of average weekly unemployment benefits.
Suhail Bhat | Ohio Valley ReSource
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Researchers at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, who studied the impact of the pandemic benefits, found that a longer duration of unemployment insurance benefits results in an increase in wages on re-employment.
“When people have resources to meet their basic needs while out of work, they can take the time they need to find the right job for them, rather than taking the first work opportunity that comes along,” the researchers said.
Other concerns include the lack of child care services keeping parents from rejoining the workforce, and the slowdown in vaccination rates creating economic uncertainty.
The Ohio Valley states would receive $2.3 billion in child care funding from the federal government that would be used to revive the child care industry that was upended by the pandemic forcing parents, mainly mothers, to quit jobs.
The Ohio Valley ReSource gets support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and our partner stations.
The Ohio Valley ReSource marks its fifth anniversary this month. With your help, thiscollaboration among seven public media stations in three states is still doing the job it set out to do in June, 2016: to tell the untold stories in the under-served parts of our region.
On June 17, 2016, the ReSourcepublished its first story, a piece about problems with the disposal of radioactive waste generated by the gas drilling technique known as fracking.
The package of stories tracked a load of “hot” waste as it crossed state lines from drilling pads to a West Virginia processing facility and finally to a landfill in Estill County, Kentucky. The landfill was not supposed to take that sort of waste. It was also close to two schools and several homes, where a resident concerned for her family’s safety told us it felt like “the henhouse was not guarded and the fox got in.”
We might not have known it at the time, but that first story from our collaborative journalism enterprise contained many of the elements that would become hallmarks of our journalism for years to come:
It reflected a commitment to investigation and explanation of big issues.
It brought a regional perspective to common challenges for communities around the Ohio Valley.
And it showed a propensity for puns and wordplay. (The headline of that first story? “Hot Mess.”)
Five years later we’re still tackling the big issues in the Ohio Valley: public health, the region’s energy transition, infrastructure failures, our food system, the opioid crisis, and more.
We tell these stories from the community perspective — because we live and work in the communities we report on — and we stick to the stories that matter over time. (In an ironic twist, arecent episode of our podcast focuses on much the same topic as did that very first story, the continuing environmental and public health challenges associated with fracking.)
Partnerships continue to play a big role in our work. For example, we partnered again with Center for Public Integrity and our colleagues at the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting for aseries on worker safety issues in Kentucky, highlighting serious flaws in the state’s program for preventing workplace fatalities.
In 2016 we partnered with NPR investigative reporter Howard Berkes to investigate thenonpayment of roughly $15 million in taxes and fines by the companies belonging to coal executive — and now West Virginia Governor — Jim Justice.
We’ve also partnered with theSolutions Journalism Network to focus on the many ways that people here are working for solutions, such as thecollective of rural schools in eastern Kentucky who are not only improving education but increasing the chances that towns can develop more diverse and sustainable economies.
We also get ambitious, stretching into new ways to better tell the full story of our region, such as with our book, “Appalachian Fall,” published last year.
Oh, and the wordplay? Yeah, we still do some of that, too. (A story about tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, for example, included section headlines “Steely Ban” and “Aluminum, Foiled.” You’re welcome.)
In a June 9, 2016,web post announcing the ReSource’s arrival, I wrote that “our goal is to promote understanding, engagement, and a cross-pollination of ideas among those tackling the region’s toughest problems.”
And I said that while much of our work will focus on the real but hidden costs of the region’s extractive industries, we would do our work with an understanding that “the region’s historic contributions to the country are also real and deserve recognition.
“These connections among economic activity, cultural identity, and social change will be at the core of our journalism.”
Five years on, that’s just what we’re doing, thanks to a great team of dedicated, talented journalists; a solid partnership of visionary public media leaders; support from important institutions, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; and you.
Yes, you!
You know what we like to say: You are the public in public media. Through your support for our partner stations, you have made the ReSource possible. Thank you! And, as I wrote five years ago, I hope you find this ReSource a valuable one.
West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito is the senior Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and is a lead negotiator on infrastructure legislation. No matter who controls the Senate, West Virginia has perhaps more influence in Washington since the days of Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller, decades ago.
To Manchin, who grew up in Beckley, West Virginia, it’s about time.
“I think sometimes West Virginia has always felt that it was behind the eight ball or never quite getting its fair share,” she said in an interview about a week into her new job. “And I would say right now, the stars have just lined up in our favor.”
Curtis Tate
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Gayle Manchin, center, shares a laugh with first lady Jill Biden, left, and actress Jennifer Garner, right, at an event to promote COVID-19 vaccinations in Charleston, West Virginia.
West Virginia lost 60,000 residents in the most recent Census count. It has struggled to keep young people from leaving and to attract industries. Its historic dependence on coal mining has left the state pockmarked with abandoned mine sites and hollowed-out towns. As the struggle continues in Manchin’s home state, the commission she now leads could help turn things around.
Human Infrastructure
The Appalachian Regional Commission was established in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. It encompasses 420 counties in 13 states, including all 55 of West Virginia’s counties. The agency consists of a federal co-chair and the region’s 13 governors.
It is the only lasting federal component of the War on Poverty.
Biden nominated Manchin as the top federal official at the commission in March, and the Senate confirmed her unanimously in April.
For decades, the ARC was best known for building a 3,090-mile network of improved highways throughout the region. The system is complete except for a few hundred miles.
Some of the toughest, and most expensive segments yet to be built are in West Virginia, such as Corridor H in Grant, Tucker and Hardy counties.
Manchin said the highways are a priority. However, she brings a background in human infrastructure to her job. She served as president of the state board of education and secretary for education and the arts.
ARC
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Gayle Manchin is the new federal co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission.
“One of my priorities, of course, going back to my past is education and education being the foundation if we want to strengthen communities, and build economic vitality and build the workforce,” she said.
In one example of how the commission’s work extends beyond the region’s highways, an ARC grant provided computers for every middle school student in McDowell County in Southern West Virginia. McDowell, where a third of residents live in poverty, according to Census data, is the state’s poorest county.
The work doesn’t stop there. Manchin said the ARC should help expand broadband internet throughout the region so those students are connected at school and at home. When they graduate, they need the appropriate job training and workforce development opportunities.
That’s where the commission comes in, too: Helping young residents get the right job skills so they’ll stay in West Virginia. And if they stay, that will help reverse the state’s population decline.
“So whether it be at a career tech center, a community college,” Manchin said, “(it) does not have to be a four year college degree but they need training and job skills. And we need to fit those job skills to what is available in that area.”
Eller said in the beginning, the governors wanted to build physical infrastructure so they could cut ribbons and show that the region looked like other parts of the country. They didn’t pay as much attention to human capital: education, health care, housing and economic empowerment.
University of Kentucky
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Historian and author Ron Eller.
“In the last 20 years, however, we’ve begun to see that infrastructure and human capital go hand in hand in economic development,” Eller said. “It takes much longer to develop human resources and human capital.”
That kind of infrastructure has become even more important throughout Appalachia with the long-term, structural decline of the region’s coal industry.
The ongoing loss of jobs at coal mines and power plants will mean that communities will need something to fill the void.
Eller said Manchin’s background makes her well-suited to take the commission in that direction.
“Frankly, I think that’s a direction that the commission needs to take,” Eller said. “There’s a lot of promise for that within the region.”
Working Together
In addition to her education credentials, Manchin was West Virginia’s first lady from 2004 to 2010. She knows most of the senators and governors.
Her current state co-chair is Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. Northam’s term as governor ends this year, and the 13 governors rotate the state co-chair role every year.
One of those governors is West Virginia’s Jim Justice, a Republican.
Justice appointed Manchin as secretary of education and the arts, a cabinet-level position, in his first term in 2017.
Then things went sour. Justice, who ran as a Democrat with Joe Manchin’s endorsement, switched parties. Their relationship deteriorated. There were rumblings that Joe Manchin would challenge Justice for the governor’s mansion. Justice fired Gayle Manchin in 2018.
Now, Manchin said they’ve moved on.
“Governor Justice certainly wants what’s best for West Virginia,” she said. “I certainly want what’s best for West Virginia, and that we know that working together, we can make some great things happen.”
Manchin’s mission extends beyond West Virginia, as far north as southern New York and as far south as northeast Mississippi. Manchin said she’d like to think of the region as one big state.
She said she plans to first visit the states within driving distance, and eventually work her way to every part of the region, something that was not possible during the height of the coronavirus.
“I have not traveled to all these areas,” she said. “One of the first things I want to do is to travel and visit and listen.”
Manchin said she wants to bring the states together on a single project that could benefit the entire region. The tour will be the first part of that effort.
“I want to hear what their issues are specifically, and what are their ideas?” she said. “I mean, you can talk on the telephone and you can do a Zoom call, but it’s not like going and shaking hands and walking down the street of these little towns.”
The Ohio Valley ReSource gets support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and our partner stations.
St. Vincent’s Mission has been doing the work of feeding, clothing and sheltering the people of Floyd County, Kentucky, since 1968.
“We believe that all persons have a God-ordained right to the basic needs of life in order to meet their full potential,” the mission states on its website.
Recently, the mission looked for a little help from above to reduce overhead costs and focus on community service in a county with a poverty rate of 27%, well above the state and national average. The mission installed an array of solar panels.
Katie Myers
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St. Vincent’s Mission Executive Director Erin Bottomlee (left) and Emergency Assistance Director Jennifer Farkas-Sparkman.
Erin Bottomlee directs St. Vincent’s Mission. On a recent visit, she pointed out the 27 panels on the rooftop.
“And that runs the volunteer house, the home repair garage, woodworking shop and our RV pad,” she said.
St. Vincent’s paid for the $25,000 installation cost with grants and donations. The system should pay for itself in 10 to 12 years. With solar, St. Vincent’s Mission saw its bills drop from $250 per month to $15. Bottomlee looks forward to using freed-up funds to bolster their community programs.
Katie Myers
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St. Vincent’s Mission Executive Director Erin Bottomlee (left) and Emergency Assistance Director Jennifer Farkas-Sparkman.
“We want to do services that help people come out of poverty,” she said, “not just support people while they’re in poverty.”
The mission’s cost savings are possible thanks to a system called net metering credits, which also help make solar affordable for an organization like St. Vincent’s. Selling clean energy back into the grid pays for the installation costs.
However, that may change with a proposal before the state’s Public Service Commission that would reduce net metering payments, cutting the value of new solar installations by up to 80%.
Under the proposal, existing net metering customers would keep their cost savings for the next 25 years. Others would lose out, said Cara Cooper of the Kentucky Solar Advocacy Network.
“We find tons of small businesses, we find tons of nonprofits, we find a lot of people who are on fixed incomes, who are choosing rooftop solar,” Cooper said.
Solar energy may have a future in the Ohio Valley, but what that future looks like is in flux.
Some utilities in the Ohio Valley are pushing against rooftop solar while others support larger, or more business-oriented, solar ventures. Meanwhile, solar advocates argue that a decentralized grid could make electricity more democratic.
Changing Economics
Solar accounts for only a fraction of electric power in the Ohio Valley. The region remains a heavy user of coal to generate electricity. However, the rapidly changing economics of energy, combined with federal policies that favor carbon-free power could change the balance in the coming years.
In Ohio, solar is booming — at least in some forms. Policy makers there are encouraging some large-scale solar, but not rooftop solar, which Ohio utilities have attempted to fight in the past.
“They’re a little more OK with renewables if they own and operate those systems, right?” said Gilbert Michaud, an energy policy analyst at Ohio University.
Solar array on the roof of the St. Vincent’s Mission volunteer house.
That business imperative is even helping solar grow in coal-heavy West Virginia, where some lawmakers see all scales of solar as linked to economic growth.
“I think providing a diversified energy portfolio is certainly an attractive item for companies that are looking to invest in a state,” said Del. Moore Capito, a Republican who co-sponsored a bill that enables solar power-purchasing agreements. Capito is the son of West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito and the grandson of the late West Virginia Gov. Arch Moore.
West Virginia, which ranks near the bottom among states in solar energy development, has recently taken new steps to encourage it.
“There’s nothing inherently different about our environment here or the resources we have available to deploy a lot more solar energy in West Virginia,” said Autumn Long, regional field director for Solar United Neighbors. “We just haven’t had the support of policy drivers to incentivize that industry and move it forward in the same way that’s happened in our surrounding states.”
The state legislature passed the bill enabling solar power-purchasing agreements in April.
Such agreements allow homeowners, business owners, schools and churches to install rooftop panels and share the cost. That helps make solar more accessible for those lacking the capital to pay for it.
“Unless you’re a highly capitalized company,” Capito said, “you weren’t really able to participate in any sort of solar generation, because you would have had to purchase it on your own.”
Dramatic Shift
West Virginia ranks nearly last among states in installed solar capacity, with 11 megawatts at the end of 2020. That’s enough to power slightly more than 1,000 homes. Kentucky ranks slightly higher, with about 60 megawatts. Ohio, with about 500 megawatts, ranks in the middle.
By comparison, the region’s larger coal-fired power plants generate 1,000 megawatts or more.
Nationwide, solar accounts for 3% of electricity generation, but that is expected to grow dramatically in the years to come. In 2020, 43% of all new capacity added to the grid was solar, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. The industry employs a workforce of 250,000, more than four times the number of coal workers nationwide.
In the next five years, the group projects that solar will account for an even larger share. A decline in the economics of coal and recent federal regulations on power plants could cause more coal-burning facilities to close by the end of the decade, opening up even more opportunities for solar.
Renewable energy advocates say that the conversation has shifted in coal-heavy West Virginia. Coal still generates about 91% of the state’s electric power, but lawmakers have become more open to solar development.
“I have seen a huge shift in the narrative in the conversations that are coming out of Charleston and the Capitol,” Long said.
West Virginia’s legislature has now voted to expand funding and protection for solar two years in a row, supported by key Republicans, including Capito, who say clean energy is good business.
“It’s really just an economic argument at this point, that makes sense,” Long said.
Energy Democracy
In Kentucky, solar advocate Cooper has been organizing opposition to the move to reduce net metering payments, which was proposed by investor-backed utility Kentucky Power. In January, Kentucky Power asked the commission to approve this change, along with a rate increase of roughly 11%.
A 2019 bill had made this possible, allowing Kentucky utilities and the Commission to set net metering rates. Mountain Association, Kentucky Solar Energy Society, Metropolitan Housing Coalition, and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth intervened in the case, leading the Commission to hold hearings on the issue throughout April.
The Commission is set to make a decision on the case by mid-May.
Katie Myers
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Solar panels and meter await installation on the St. Vincent’s Mission warehouse.
Kentucky Power did not respond to a request for comment.
For Cooper, decentralized solar power means political power for utility customers. Cooper sees solar as part of a bigger strategy, what she calls “energy democracy,” the idea that ratepayers should have more say in the affairs of public utilities.
“How can we engage with the Public Service Commission? How can we educate people about the role that we can play in that process? And how can we give everyday folks more of a voice,” she said.
The Ohio Valley ReSource gets support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and our partner stations.
