West Virginia Policy and Elections

Carrie Clendening

West Virginia policymaking through the perspectives of elections and campaign finance money. wvpolicy.substack.com

  1. 1d ago

    Fleming For Louisiana: The Source of Dark Money in the Kanawha County Commission Race

    LISTEN TO THE AUDIO FOR EXPLANATION I found the original source of the Fletcher Consultants, LLC expenditure after the audio was recorded. Kanawha County Commission Candidates Campaign Finance Records * Jared Page: 3Q 2026 Campaign Financial Statement * Paul Monroe: 3Q 2026 Campaign Financial Statement * Kanawha County Election Center July Quarterly 2026 Report Lance Wheeler ↔ Jared Page Page said Wheeler was one of those who approached him about running for the commission, with his interest dating to the prior year. * WCHS Network · July 15, 2026 Quotes Page: ‘Then-Commissioner Wheeler was one of those who approached me.’ This is Page’s account of recruitment, not evidence of PAC involvement. Americans for Prosperity ↔ Lance Wheeler AFP-WV · August 13, 2026 endorsements Endorses Lance Wheeler for State Senate District 8. The list covers legislative races, not the county commission race. Its stale reference to Wheeler as a current commissioner is not used for officeholder chronology. AFP-WV’s primary-election campaign activities and endorsement. Jared Page ↔ Austin Gessel Austin Gessel has publicly supported Jared Page for the next term, and Page said he encouraged Gessel to accept the interim appointment. (WOWK, WCHS) Jared Page · Linkedin profile Self-reported history includes Morrisey’s 2016 campaign, his 2018 Senate campaign, and special-assistant work in the attorney general’s office from December 2018 to January 2021. AFP · May 5, 2025 staffing announcement Names Gessel Southern West Virginia Grassroots Engagement Director and notes prior work for Patrick Morrisey. Gazette Article: GOP delegate hopefuls try to woo voters This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

  2. 1d ago

    Quick Update: Dark Money in Kanawha County Commission Race (Version 2)

    LISTEN TO THE AUDIO FOR EXPLANATION Kanawha County Commission Candidates Campaign Finance Records * Jared Page: 3Q 2026 Campaign Financial Statement * Paul Monroe: 3Q 2026 Campaign Financial Statement * Kanawha County Election Center This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

  3. 6d ago

    Fayetteville High School Closed in 2019. Here’s What Happened to the Buildings.

    Last Tuesday, Fayette County cut two ribbons. The first was in Hico, at the new Midland Trail Elementary. The superintendent told MetroNews the opening “brings to a close” the consolidation plan the state approved in July 2017. “The last decade there’s been a lot of change,” he said. The second was in Fayetteville, on High Street, where a U.S. senator and the state tourism secretary opened Hill Hall, a 40-room boutique hotel inside the 1923 stone building that used to be Fayetteville High School and the brick building next to it that used to be Fayetteville Middle School. The TV station’s headline was “From Pirates to pillowcases.” One ribbon closed the book on the plan that ended my high school. The other opened the hotel in the building where I learned long division. Same county. Same afternoon. Nobody planned it that way. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. I should tell you where I’m standing before I tell you what I see. In the 1990s, Fayetteville Middle School was two buildings. Sixth grade had the old stone one, the 1923 building the hotel now calls Hill Hall. Seventh and eighth were next door in the brick one. There was no cafeteria, so every day we walked down to the elementary school on Wiseman Avenue to eat lunch, in a line that never once stayed a line. The press releases call it a “historic school campus.” To me it was tall windows, a hallway that echoed, and the smell of the lunchroom at the bottom of the hill. I graduated from Fayetteville High in 2003. By then the high school was the newer campus on West Maple, but graduation was still at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Building, the way it had always been. I was captain of the dance team that year. We brought a trophy home from the Battle of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and for a few weeks it felt like the whole town knew. In my yearbook there’s a baby ad my parents bought. “Our Daughter.” A picture of me as a little kid holding an alphabet book. A note telling me to set my goals high and that they’d be there through every phase of my life. Signed: Love, Mom, Dad, and Jeffery. Jeffery is my little brother. None of us knew that sixteen years later he’d walk across the same stage at Soldiers and Sailors as part of the last class Fayetteville High School would ever graduate. Class of 2019. The last Pirates. Our baby sister, Kaylee, should have been the Class of 2023. There was no Fayetteville High for her. She finished at Oak Hill instead. She’s a senior at WVU now, studying elementary education. Of the three of us, the one who never got a Fayetteville diploma is the one who chose to spend her life in a classroom. I think about that more than I expected to. Here is the part I owe you before any of my feelings count for anything. The closing of Fayetteville High School was not sudden and it was not hidden. Fayette County had been voting down school bonds for as long as anyone could remember. The state took over the district, and bad buildings were part of the reason. By September 2016 the School Building Authority had signed off on a plan to trim 18 schools to 11 and keep only two of the existing high schools, Midland Trail and Oak Hill. Fayetteville wasn’t one of them. The SBA put up $22.6 million that December. On May 16, 2017, the county school board voted 4–1 to go from 18 schools to 11. On July 12, the state board signed off. For Fayetteville, the wording was plain: after the 2018–19 school year, “Fayetteville High School will turn into a pre-K through eighth-grade school” and its students would go to Oak Hill. The reasons were the reasons you’d expect. Old buildings. Fewer kids. No money. A state that had run out of patience. There is one small line in the record I keep coming back to. On April 18, 2017, the Fayetteville Elementary principal wrote to the county commission asking to borrow folding chairs from the Memorial Building for the school’s closure hearing, set for 4:30 on the evening of May 8 in the elementary gym. The same letter asked for chairs for the sixth-grade graduation two weeks after that. So the chairs came from the building where we graduated, got carried down the hill to the gym where we ate lunch, and were set up for a meeting about closing the school. Eight days before the vote, somebody counted the seats and knew there wouldn’t be enough. The minutes record the chairs. They don’t record what anyone said while sitting in them. What became of the buildings? The plan did something besides move children. It left behind empty schools. The stone building on High Street had stopped holding students back in 1999. The school board deeded it to the Town in December 2011, and the preservation paperwork from those years imagined “a multi-tenant civic and arts center.” Not a hotel. By 2017, that same preservation listing said the Town’s school-building committee was “working with a local developer for a joint restoration project,” and by 2019 the idea had become 13 apartments. The developer isn’t named. I’d like to know who it was. By the end of 2020, the Town said the school board had handed over “the rest of the school properties on High Street and Wiseman Avenue.” The police moved into the 1953 building. Council rezoned the rest for business and said it had “met with several interested parties.” Then, on March 28, 2022, Governor Jim Justice stood in the old elementary gym, the one I walked to for lunch, and announced a $15 million plan from Mountain Shore Properties, led by Fayetteville native Charlie Wendell. A 45-to-50-room boutique hotel in the high school and middle school. Twenty-some apartments in the elementary school, with the gym kept “as a community facility for the citizens of Fayetteville.” Townhomes. Thirty construction jobs, 25 permanent ones. The governor’s office said negotiations to buy the schools had started earlier that month. Here is what the Town’s own minutes say happened before that announcement. On February 3, 2022, council opened bids on the school property. “The Town received one bid from Mountain Shore Properties, LLC for $200,000.00 for 3 buildings.” One bid. Two hundred thousand dollars. Council voted 6–0 to accept it pending a review of the criteria, signed the contract on March 14, and then pushed the closing deadline back in May and again in June. I want to be careful here. A bid is not a closing price. I haven’t seen the signed purchase agreement or the deeds that would tell me what was actually paid, for which parcels, with what strings. So I’m telling you about a bid, not a sale. That September, council voted 6–0 to let an LLC called Ninety Five Percent Holdings onto “the school property,” and 6–0 again to let a contractor “start working prior to ownership being finalized.” Five days later it approved a lease on the old grade school gym. The minutes say only that the lease “has a 30 day written notice out.” They don’t say to whom, or for how long. Three weeks after that, the assessor recorded the old elementary parcel in Ninety Five Percent Holdings’ name. The sale field says zero dollars. The sale type says “land only.” A zero in an assessor’s database isn’t proof of a giveaway. It can mean a lot of ordinary things. It is, though, a reason to go pull the deed. The elementary school became Wiseman & High Apartments. Nineteen units, a $4 million job, the first project ever certified under the state’s new BUILD WV tax credit. The governor came back in 2023 to sign the bill expanding that program, standing at the construction site, and called it the first new apartments in Fayetteville in nearly 30 years. Rents start around $1,410. The high school and middle school became Hill Hall. First guests on August 28, 2026. A Marriott Design Hotel. Rooms from $225 a night. A restaurant called Patsy’s, named for Stephen Wendell’s grandmother and built around her hand-written recipe book. I ate lunch in the apartment building. I learned fractions in the hotel. Two hometown stories: Wendell’s and Mine! Stephen Wendell, who runs Mountain Shore now, told Commercial Observer this summer that Hill Hall is “these old schools — literally where I went to elementary school, and where my father and mother went to high school.” He told Garden & Gun his grandmother “has been the North Star of every decision.” I believe him about his grandmother. I’m not going to fact-check another family’s love for this town from inside my own. But I’ll tell you what I remember, since memory is what this project is being sold on. The Wendells had the big white house on Platt Street. We were a few streets over on Grace. Stephen and I are about the same age and I never knew him. My sense growing up was that the family was mostly somewhere else, and he’s said himself that he was raised in Charleston, South Carolina. Both can be true. Families leave and come back. You can belong to more than one place. The point isn’t whose Fayetteville is more real. The point is that a hometown story, however sincere, isn’t a public record. It can’t tell you how the Town priced three buildings, why only one bid came in, what a gym lease with a 30-day notice actually guarantees the people of Fayetteville, or how much state tax money sits under a $225 room. Those are different questions. Nostalgia doesn’t answer any of them. Mine included. Now the part that complicates me. My parents bought their house inside the city limits in 1998 for about $58,000. They raised three kids in it, built onto it, kept it up. Two lots. Best we can tell, it’s worth more than $400,000 now. Some of that is thirty years of their work. Some of it is the New River Gorge becoming a national park, and the tourists, and the hotels and apartments and coffee shops that came after. The same wave that turned my sixth-grade classroom into a king suite made my parents’ house worth seven times what they paid

  4. Oct 8

    UPDATED: Dark Money is Flooding the Kanawha County Commission Race: Part 1

    LISTEN TO THE AUDIO FOR EXPLANATION I consider Independent Expenditure Committees (referred to as IEs in the politico world) dark money because you cannot see the donors. Raise the Bar PAC The following documents were retrieved from: https://cfrs.wvsos.gov/public/committeeProfile?registrantID=1040004038 The legal entity doesn’t show you much but here are the tax filings if you want to review them: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/365011379 $107,500 in support of Jared Page + $72,500 in opposition of Paul Monroe = $180,000 Fletcher Consultants, LLC FCC Records Showing Media Buys WCHS-TV: https://publicfiles.fcc.gov/tv-profile/WCHS-TV/political-files/2026/non-candidate-issue-ads/raise-the-bar-pac/03d1fa35-2c11-548e-45ed-bbb76be25728 More to Come Stay Tuned…… Thanks for reading West Virginia Policy and Elections! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. Thanks for reading West Virginia Policy and Elections! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

  5. Oct 6

    The Athlete Pipeline Nobody Is Talking About.

    Everything in this article is based on public records such as property tax records, 990 tax filings, SEC filings, and more. There is a policy collision happening in plain sight. Serious young athletes increasingly need school schedules that accommodate training, tournaments, recruiting visits and travel. Virtual charter schools can offer that flexibility without requiring students to show up in a building every morning. Then comes the money. When a West Virginia student enrolls in a charter school, 99 percent of the state’s per-pupil basic foundation allowance follows that student. The West Virginia Professional Charter School Board estimates that amount at roughly $8,000 per student for 2025–26, before additional state and federal funding. Put those pieces together and a theory emerges: Elite youth athletes could become an unusually valuable recruitment market for virtual charter schools—not because the schools operate athletic programs, but because they can sell schedule flexibility, NCAA-usable coursework and geographic mobility to families already searching for alternatives. And if West Virginia opens its charter schools to students from other states, that market could get much larger. The product being sold may be flexibility. But the revenue unit is the child. Thanks for reading West Virginia Policy and Elections! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. Why Athletes Fit into this Picture. A football player, basketball player, baseball player, or golfer may train for hours every day. Tournaments require travel. Camps and showcases do not care that seventh-period chemistry starts at 1:45. A conventional school can sometimes accommodate that life. Sometimes it cannot. Virtual schools offer fewer hours commuting, more control over when assignments are completed and the ability to remain enrolled while traveling. K12, Stride’s consumer-facing brand, specifically markets online education to athletes by emphasizing flexible scheduling and NCAA-approved coursework. That NCAA piece matters. The NCAA does not broadly “accredit” an online curriculum. It determines whether particular high-school core courses may be used to establish a student’s initial eligibility. Division I prospects currently need 16 approved core courses and at least a 2.3 core-course GPA; Division II prospects need 16 and at least a 2.2 GPA. For families investing years and thousands of dollars in athletic development, an online diploma is not enough. The courses must count. West Virginia Virtual Academy, the statewide virtual charter powered by K12, advertises NCAA-approved core courses alongside honors, AP, career-education and dual-credit offerings. That is a legitimate service. It is also a powerful enrollment pitch. NIL Raised the Stakes. West Virginia began allowing high-school athletes to enter name, image and likeness agreements in August 2025. Those agreements remain subject to restrictions involving school branding, employee involvement and transfer inducements. So this is no longer simply about athletes leaving West Virginia for an “NIL-friendly” state. The larger point is that NIL has turned a young athlete’s identity into a potential commercial asset. Families may now have to navigate endorsement contracts, school-association rules, taxes, recruiting restrictions and NCAA disclosure requirements alongside ordinary schoolwork. A virtual school can market itself as the portable academic layer beneath that complicated athletic life: approved courses, flexible scheduling and continuous access while the student trains or travels. No public document reviewed for this article proves that Stride or any West Virginia charter is deliberately constructing a national athlete pipeline. But the incentives are sitting right there. Follow the Money because it is Always About Money. “Funding follows the student” sounds simple. It is not. When a West Virginia student transfers to a charter school, 99 percent of the state’s basic foundation allowance moves with that student. The money is generally withheld from the resident county’s state aid and redirected to the charter. The district loses the revenue, but it does not instantly lose a classroom, bus route, heating bill or bond payment. Those stranded costs matter. Some district expenses decline when enrollment falls, but many cannot be reduced one student at a time. Now follow the money into the charter school. West Virginia Virtual Academy is legally operated by Mountain State Learning Solutions Inc., a West Virginia nonprofit. But its curriculum, platforms, technology and substantial operational infrastructure come through an agreement with K12 Virtual Schools LLC, part of publicly traded Stride Inc. Stride describes this national model in its own SEC filings. Nonprofit entities hold the charters and qualify for public funding, while Stride sells curriculum, technology, instruction and support under contracts tied largely to enrollment and per-student funding. That is the architecture: A nonprofit receives the public education funding. A for-profit company sells the machinery needed to operate the school. That arrangement is not automatically illegal or improper. Public schools hire private vendors all the time. The real questions are how much money the vendor receives, what services it provides, whether the price is reasonable and how much meaningful control remains with the nonprofit board. The Zero-Dollar Tax Filing Pattern. Mountain State Learning Solutions’ tax filings raise those questions. Its latest reported financial profile shows: * Total revenue: $16,538,885 * Total expenses: $16,538,885 * Program-service expenses: approximately $13,019,081 * Ending net assets: $0 Revenue and expenses matched exactly, and the nonprofit retained no net assets. The agreement also contains a “Balanced Budget Credit,” under which the provider may credit fees to prevent the school from ending the year with a negative net-asset balance. That does not prove that every dollar—or nearly every dollar—went to Stride. “Program-service expense” is an accounting category, not the name of a vendor. Proving the actual extraction rate would require the general ledger, accounts-payable records, Stride and K12 invoices, affiliate payments, contract price schedules, year-end credits and audited financial notes. Until those records are reviewed, the claim that nearly all school funding was “swept” to Stride remains a hypothesis. But it is a hypothesis worth investigating. The nonprofit holds the charter and bears the public accountability. The private provider supplies much of the infrastructure required to operate the school. The board may be legally independent. The school may be legally public. But the operating system belongs to a company whose revenue increases with enrollment. Where Transparency Goes to Die. West Virginia charter schools must undergo financial audits, and records held by the school or its public authorizer may be obtainable through the Freedom of Information Act. But transparency becomes uneven once the money reaches the private vendor. The public can request the charter contract, invoices, payment records, board minutes and audits. It can inspect the nonprofit’s Form 990 and Stride’s consolidated SEC filings. What the public generally cannot do is send a West Virginia FOIA request directly to Stride and demand the company’s internal cost allocation, profit margin on one school, proprietary pricing model or transfers among corporate affiliates. The payment may remain visible from the public side. What happens inside the corporation generally does not. And an audit does not necessarily determine whether taxpayers received good value. It may confirm that a payment was authorized and properly recorded without deciding whether the price was reasonable or the service effective. The Out-of-State Student Charter School Proposal. In September 2026, the West Virginia Professional Charter School Board discussed seeking legislation in 2027, that would allow charter schools to enroll students from other states. That is where this theory stops being abstract. An out-of-state student would not automatically generate West Virginia foundation aid. Someone else would have to pay tuition: the family, the sending district, another state program or a contractually responsible third party. Current West Virginia law allows county school boards to negotiate interstate transfers, including tuition arrangements, with out-of-state schools or districts. But the following subsection says parents and guardians are not required to pay tuition for transfers conducted under that section. The charter statute, meanwhile, currently prohibits full-time tuition. Any interstate-charter legislation would therefore need to answer some basic questions: * Who is legally responsible for tuition? * Must payment be secured in advance? * What happens if the sending district refuses or delays payment? * Can resident-student funding temporarily cover the shortfall? * Does the ESP still collect its full fee if tuition is never collected? * Who pays for special education, testing and residency disputes? * Will unpaid tuition and write-offs be publicly disclosed? Without those answers, interstate expansion is not a funding plan. It is a hope that somebody eventually pays the invoice. The Market Incentive. Now put the athlete back into the picture. A serious young athlete may need schedule flexibility. The family may care deeply about NCAA-approved coursework. Training and travel make geographic distance less relevant. NIL adds another layer of complexity. For a virtual-school operator, those characteristics create an attractive enrollment market. The student does not require a nearby school building. The family has a strong reason to accept online delivery. The school can market continuity and eligibility—not merely virtual learning. And if West Virginia authorizes interstate enrollm

  6. Sep 29

    I Did Not Quit Social Media. I Chose Better Social Media.

    I did not leave Facebook because I stopped caring what people think. I left because I wanted to think again. Facebook and the rest of the social media machine trained us to consume public life in fragments: a headline, a meme, a screenshot stripped of context, an angry comment from someone who did not read the article, an advertisement, a conspiracy theory, somebody’s casserole, and then another political fight. That is not a public square. It is a cognitive pinball machine with targeted ads. I got tired of donating my attention to a platform designed to keep me scrolling—not necessarily to make me wiser, better informed, or more capable of understanding what the people in power are doing. I wanted room to follow the money. I wanted room to read the legislation. I wanted room to explain what happened, who benefited, and what the records actually show. That work does not fit inside a rage bait post. Substack is a Place for a Full Thought. Substack is not perfect. It is still a platform. It has Notes, recommendations, feeds, and plenty of people trying to sell you the secret to going viral. But it is built differently. Here, readers choose to subscribe. A writer can send work directly to people who asked to receive it. The relationship is not filtered entirely through an algorithm that decides whether your followers are allowed to see you that day. And most importantly, the work has room to breathe. A Note can start a conversation. A full article can supply the documents, the context, the timeline, and the receipts. That is why I think of Substack as social media for people who want to think. Not because everyone here is brilliant. Not because every post is profound. But because the point is not supposed to be a five second reaction. The point is to read, question, learn, and maybe change your mind. A Village of Research Ninjas. My favorite part of Substack is not just publishing. It is the people I have met here. I have connected with writers and researchers in other states who are tracing the same political networks I see in West Virginia: the same organizations, donors, consultants, policy language, and sometimes the same money moving under different names. That is important because these political networks do not stop at the state line. They test a message in one state, move legislation in another, and recycle the same operation somewhere else. What looks local is often part of something much bigger. In Substack Chats, we compare notes. We share documents, filings, names, patterns, and questions. Someone recognizes an organization I am tracking. I recognize a consultant who just surfaced in their state. One person finds a thread; another pulls it. That is how the bigger picture comes into focus. The political networks are already sharing strategies across state lines. Now, so are we. Why My Substack Content is Free. My content is free because it is for my fellow West Virginians—and for anyone else who needs to know what I am sharing. Public information about public officials, public policy, campaign money, and the people trying to influence our government should not be hidden behind another barrier. Free does not mean the work has no value. It means I believe its value comes from people being able to use it. Read it. Share it. Question it. Send me the document I missed. Compare it with what is happening where you live. I am not chasing virality. I am building a record. Why Substack Makes Sense to Me. Maybe Substack makes sense to me because I am a Millennial. We are the bridge generation: old enough to remember the analog world, young enough to build and organize in the digital one. We remember when news required sitting down with something long enough to finish it. But we also understand what digital tools can do: find the filing, preserve the record, connect isolated people, expose a lie, and publish without waiting for permission from a political party, a donor, or a gatekeeper. Facebook taught us to keep moving. Substack gives us a reason to stop. And in a political culture built to keep us distracted, angry, and exhausted, stopping long enough to think may be an act of rebellion. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

  7. Sep 28

    Buy Local—Unless You’re Running for Office

    West Virginia politicians have a favorite phrase: economic development. They say it at debates. They say it at ribbon cuttings. They say it in campaign ads while standing in front of a mountain, a factory or some unsuspecting small business owner who probably just wanted to finish lunch. They want to create jobs. Grow small businesses. Keep young people here. Invest in West Virginia. Then the campaign starts, and suddenly nobody in West Virginia can design a mailer, produce an ad, buy television time, conduct a poll, build a website or tell a candidate which shirt looks least weird on camera. That work gets shipped to Virginia. Pennsylvania. Colorado. Georgia. Texas. Washington, D.C. Apparently, “West Virginia first” has an asterisk: Unless a political consultant from Arlington answers the phone.* That is b******t. The Receipts, because in Receipts we Trust. I downloaded the West Virginia Secretary of State’s annual expenditure files for 2024, 2025 and 2026 and looked specifically at candidate spending in campaign-facing categories: advertising, television, radio, direct mail, consulting, polling, campaign staff, fundraising, signs, web services and related work. State candidates, legislative candidates and judicial candidates must file electronically, and each expenditure is supposed to identify the recipient, address, date, purpose and amount. Among the transactions with a usable vendor-state address, candidate committees reported about $22.6 million in those campaign-facing categories. About $12.9 million—57%—went to recipients listed outside West Virginia. Read that again. In the part of campaign spending most likely to involve strategists, media firms, printers, consultants, pollsters, digital shops and advertising professionals, more than half of the identifiable dollars left the state. And no, this is not one party’s hypocrisy. Republicans did it. Democrats did it. Nonpartisan judicial candidates did it. The red team and the blue team may disagree about almost everything, but they have apparently reached a bipartisan consensus that West Virginia money looks better in somebody else’s economy. Here are just some of the larger payments reported in the state files: Those are payments, not accusations. Using an out-of-state vendor is legal. It may even be strategically defensible in a particular race. But legality is not the question. The question is whether candidates who campaign on building West Virginia’s economy are willing to practice that principle when they control the checkbook. The Political Consultant Pipeline. These are not random office-supply purchases. FP1 describes itself as a general consulting and political advertising firm serving Republican candidates. It is based in Arlington, Virginia. Canal Partners Media calls itself a one-stop political media-buying shop and operates from Georgia. Smart Media Group is an Alexandria, Virginia-based political media firm. In other words, campaigns are not merely buying a subscription that happens to be headquartered elsewhere. They are deliberately hiring political professionals outside West Virginia to shape the messages delivered to West Virginia voters. That is the part that should bother people. Candidates tell us nobody understands West Virginia like they do. Then they pay somebody in another state to explain West Virginia to us. They tell us our people are talented. Then they build campaign budgets that suggest the talent lives in Arlington. They tell young people to stay. Then they export the exact kind of communications, design, research, data and media work that could help young professionals build careers here. A campaign is a temporary business. It hires people. It buys services. It rents space. It purchases signs, video, photography, printing, food, software, polling, research and advertising. It is also one of the few businesses in which the owner spends months publicly explaining what his or her spending priorities supposedly are. So yes, the campaign budget counts. Some Necessary Honesty. Not every out-of-state payment is avoidable. West Virginia does not own Facebook, Google, ActBlue, WinRed or every specialized political-data platform. A campaign should not be expected to invent a payment processor in Boone County because somebody yelled “buy local.” Media-buying payments also require caution. When a campaign pays an out-of-state placement firm, part of that money may ultimately purchase airtime from West Virginia television or radio stations. The gross payment in a campaign-finance report is not necessarily the consulting firm’s net revenue. That is why this should not become a cheap list of villains. The filings show who received the campaign’s check and the address the campaign reported; they do not always show where every dollar ultimately landed. But that limitation creates another question: Why are campaigns not telling us? If a Virginia media firm receives $1 million but $850,000 passes through to West Virginia broadcasters, separate the placement costs from the consulting fee. If a national firm subcontracts with West Virginia photographers, printers or designers, disclose it. If no qualified local firm submitted a bid, say so. Campaigns already know how to explain their spending when they want credit for it. This is their chance. This is Bipartisan. The vendor pattern reaches far beyond one race. It runs through statewide campaigns, legislative campaigns and judicial campaigns in both the 2024 and 2026 cycles. The two 2026 Supreme Court races alone featured large payments to media and consulting firms in Georgia, Colorado, Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, Texas and Oklahoma. The point is not that every candidate spent the same amount or made equally questionable choices. They did not. The point is that sending campaign work out of state has become normal enough that almost nobody feels compelled to explain it. That normalcy is the problem. Start with your Campaign. Candidates love promising to reform state purchasing after they get elected. Fine. Start with the purchasing operation you already control. Every candidate asking West Virginians for money and votes should adopt a simple local-procurement policy: * Seek West Virginia bids first. If the service exists here, give in-state businesses a fair chance to compete. * Set a local-spending goal. Pick a percentage and publish progress in each finance report. * Disclose pass-through spending. Separate advertising placement from the fee retained by the consultant or media buyer. * Name subcontractors. Let voters see whether the big national firm hired anyone in West Virginia. * Explain exceptions. If the campaign chose an out-of-state company, tell voters why. This is not complicated. Nobody is asking candidates to hire an unqualified cousin with a Cricut machine to produce a statewide television campaign. The ask is much simpler: Before mailing a six-figure check across state lines, look here first. West Virginia has videographers. Graphic designers. Writers. Researchers. Printers. Photographers. Digital strategists. Data analysts. Event planners. Web developers. Advertising professionals. Young people trying to build exactly the kinds of careers our politicians claim they want to attract. Those workers do not need another speech about opportunity. They need somebody to hire them. Put the Slogan on the Ledger. Campaign-finance reports are moral documents disguised as spreadsheets. They show what a candidate values when the applause stops and the invoice arrives. If a politician believes West Virginia businesses deserve investment, the campaign is the first place to prove it. If the candidate believes local talent can compete, let local talent compete. If the candidate believes money should circulate in West Virginia communities, stop treating campaign donations like an outbound wire transfer. Economic development cannot just be something candidates promise to do later, with taxpayer money, after Election Day. It should begin now—with their own money, their donors’ money and their own purchasing decisions. Until then, spare us the ribbon-cutting speech. “West Virginia first” should be a budget line, not a bumper sticker. AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article analyzes the West Virginia Secretary of State’s annual Expenditures CSV exports for calendar years 2024, 2025 and 2026, downloaded September 25, 2026. The analysis retained records identifying a candidate and grouped campaign-facing purposes including advertising, television, radio, direct mail, consulting, polling, campaign staff, fundraising, signs, web services and related categories; transactions without a usable recipient-state address were excluded from the state-share denominator. The analysis measures payments to the recipient address reported by the campaign. It does not claim that the entire gross payment became revenue in that state: media-placement payments can include pass-through airtime, national platforms may be unavoidable, recipient addresses may be entered inconsistently, and the files do not reliably identify subcontractors. The Secretary of State requires itemized expenditure details, but the quality and specificity of the purpose descriptions depend on what committees enter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

  8. Sep 20

    The Clean-Seas West Virginia Plastics Plant Department of Environmental Protection Air Quality Permit

    I’ll be honest about how this article came to be. The Clean-Seas West Virginia plant in Belle had fallen off my radar. I knew the broad outline from 2023, when then Governor Justice announced a $50 million “advanced recycling” investment with the usual fanfare, and I knew the project had slipped and shrunk since. But somewhere between the delays and the incomplete applications, I stopped following it. Eric Caruthers brought it back to my attention. Caruthers is a Belle resident who has been organizing opposition to the plant for the better part of a year, and when he reached out about the community forum he is hosting this week, the thing that stuck with me was not the outrage. It was the fact that the state had already issued the permit, and that most people in the Kanawha Valley, myself included, had not read it. That forum is Tuesday evening, September 22, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., at the Belle Town Hall gym, 1100 E. DuPont Ave. Organizers have sent personal invitations to 168 elected officials and community leaders, along with company representatives. Most of the conversation will, understandably, be about health, schools, and whether anyone at the county or state level can still do anything. Before I walked into that room, I wanted to answer a narrower question: what did the state actually approve? So I pulled Permit R13-3728, the 58-page construction permit signed by Division of Air Quality Director Laura Crowder on August 12, 2026. What follows is a plain-language walkthrough, with condition numbers cited so you can check my work. A copy of the signed permit is posted by WCHS, and the DEP’s own file is searchable through its NSR permit application database. Why nobody in Belle, West Virginia is taking the state’s word for it. If you want to understand why a permit fight over a 50-ton-a-day plastics plant has produced nearly 1,000 petition signatures, personal invitations to 168 elected officials, and a second packed town hall, you have to understand that the people of the Kanawha Valley have been told before that the state was watching, and have learned what that promise is worth. This valley has hosted the densest concentration of chemical manufacturing in the country for the better part of a century. Locals call it Chemical Valley, and nobody means it as a compliment (National Geographic). In August 2008, a pressure vessel at the Bayer CropScience plant in Institute exploded, killing two workers. Federal investigators found that Bayer management withheld information from county emergency responders while the fire burned, and that a shelter-in-place recommendation never reached 911 operators. The Chemical Safety Board’s central recommendation was that West Virginia create its own chemical plant oversight program (U.S. Chemical Safety Board). A proposal modeled on California’s program, requiring annual audits by health officials and safety experts, was put in front of the Legislature in 2009. It failed to advance (National Geographic). In January 2010, in Belle itself, a frayed cable on a phosgene line at the DuPont plant sprayed a 58-year-old worker named Carl Fish, who died the next day. It was one of three preventable accidents at the plant inside 33 hours. Investigators cited old equipment, an ineffective mechanical integrity program, and incomplete investigations of earlier near-misses (U.S. Chemical Safety Board; BBC News). The Clean-Seas site sits on DuPont Avenue. Then came January 9, 2014. A tank at Freedom Industries, a mile and a half upstream from the region’s water intake, had corroded through, and roughly 11,000 gallons of MCHM went into the Elk River. Some 300,000 people in nine counties were told not to drink, cook with, or bathe in their water. Freedom did not disclose that a second chemical was in the tank until 12 days later (U.S. Chemical Safety Board). The state, it turned out, had been relying on companies to self-report their risks and did not have enough certified inspectors to check (West Virginia Watch). What happened next is the part that matters most for Tuesday. The Legislature responded with the Aboveground Storage Tank Act, passed unanimously in 2014, requiring registration and certified inspection of roughly 42,000 tanks (Mountain State Spotlight). The very next year, lawmakers passed SB 423 and began carving tanks back out (West Virginia Watch). They kept carving. By this spring, Scott Mandirola, the former DEP official who helped draft the original act, testified that the state now regulates about 4,500 of those tanks, roughly 11 percent, and that 89 percent had been deregulated (WV MetroNews). Then both chambers advanced yet another rollback, SB 641, exempting more oil and gas tanks from inspection and letting some owners in critical zones inspect themselves rather than hire an independent third party. When a senator offered an amendment to at least define what fluids the exempted tanks could hold, the Senate rejected it (Mountain State Spotlight). Widen the lens beyond the valley and the pattern holds. In 1972, a Pittston Coal slurry dam failed on Buffalo Creek, killed 125 people, and left roughly 4,000 homeless across 16 coal communities; the company called it “an act of God” (WV Mine Wars Museum). In 2010, 29 miners died at Upper Big Branch, and an independent review concluded the federal mine safety agency could have prevented it (NPR). In Parkersburg, DuPont told workers and neighbors for decades that C8 had “no observed health effects” while it contaminated their water, and eventually paid $671 million to settle more than 3,500 lawsuits (PFAS Project Lab; The Conversation). The sequence is always the same. A company gives assurances. Regulators accept them. Something breaks. The Legislature passes a law. The Legislature weakens the law. And every step of it is official, on the record, done by people West Virginians elected. So when residents of Belle say they do not trust that the DEP, the county, or the Legislature will protect them from this plant, they are not being paranoid. They are being accurate about their own history. The burden here is not on them to prove the plant is dangerous. It is on the state to prove, this time, that it is actually watching. Read the permit with that history in mind. That is the lens I brought to Permit R13-3728, the 58-page construction permit signed by Division of Air Quality Director Laura M. Crowder on Aug. 12, 2026. Before I walked into Tuesday’s room, I wanted to answer a narrower question: what did the state actually approve, and how much of it depends on the company telling the truth about itself? The short version, which I will spell out below: the permit lets the company decide for itself whether the gas it burns is a fuel or a waste, lets it check its own stacks with a hand-held meter, tests for dioxins once and then not again for five years, and requires no monitoring at all at the fence line shared with two schools. Each of those is a defensible legal position. Together they are a familiar shape. What follows is a plain-language walkthrough, with condition numbers so you can check my work. A copy of the signed permit is posted by WCHS, and the DEP’s own file is searchable through its NSR permit application database (permit writer: Ed Andrews). The forum is Tuesday evening, September 22, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., at the Belle Town Hall gym, 1100 E. DuPont Ave. Organizers have sent personal invitations to 168 elected officials and community leaders, along with company representatives. First, the basics. Who and where. The permittee is Clean-Seas West Virginia, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Clean Vision Corporation, a Los Angeles-based penny stock (OTC: CLNV) (Clean Vision press release). The permitted address is 2700 E. DuPont Ave., Suite 3B, Belle, the former 84 Lumber building, which sits a few hundred feet from Riverside High School and Midland Trail Elementary (West Virginia Watch). What kind of permit. It is a “construction permit” under state rule 45CSR13, but don’t let the name fool you. The permit’s own description of change says it is “for the construction and operation of a chemical manufacturing process (pyrolysis units).” Once built, the company can run. The article that circulated ahead of Tuesday’s meeting got this right. How the DEP classified it. The permit declares the plant a “nonmajor source” of air pollution. That single classification does most of the work in this document, and I’ll come back to it. What gets built. Section 1.0 of the permit lists every emission unit. Stripped of the ID codes: * Two commercial pyrolysis reactor trains, each rated at 25 tons of plastic per day, each heated by a 3.5 MMBtu/hr process heater. That is 50 tons per day combined, a far cry from the 100 tons per day the company promised in 2023, or the 500 tons per day its CEO said he hoped to reach (West Virginia Watch). * A “Training, Research, Evaluation” (TRE) reactor at 1 ton per day with its own small elevated flare. This is the unit the company has been running under a research-and-development exemption without a permit since before the application was filed (WV MetroNews). * An enclosed combustion device (10 MMBtu/hr) that burns off gases during startup, shutdown, and malfunction. * Eight storage tanks of 21,000 gallons each for pyrolysis oil, a truck loading rack capped at 3.96 million gallons per year, a glycol heater, a 30-ton char storage bin, and a natural-gas emergency generator. “Burning plastic” is not quite what the permit describes. The shorthand in most coverage, including the article promoting Tuesday’s meeting, is that the plant “would burn plastic feedstock.” That is not what the permit authorizes, and the distinction matters because the company will use it. Condition 5.1.1.b.3 requires each reactor to run in an “oxygen-free/oxygen-limited atmosphere” with no more than 2% oxygen. Plastic is cooked, not burned. What comes out is pyrolysis oil

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West Virginia policymaking through the perspectives of elections and campaign finance money. wvpolicy.substack.com

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