Month: September 2019

I just got back from the Kanawha City Community Association Annual Community Meeting. Present were Mayor Amy Goodwin, Police Chief Opie Smith and several members of the police force to answer questions from residents. I left this meeting with a sense of hope for the future of Charleston. I’ll detail some of my observations below but first a link to the KCCA: http://www.kanawhacity.org/ If you live in Kanawha City then please join. Fee is next to nothing, these folks are doing great work, and the more people that join and get involved the better KC will be for everyone.

Last blog post was about the recent community meeting in Dunbar where residents were incredibly angry with the job their city government was doing. The meeting tonight was a very different experience. Whereas Dunbar officials kept passing the buck and making excuses for why they couldn’t solve the problems of residents, Charleston officials never once did that. Every single complaint, no matter how small or large, was treated with respect. Officials told residents what was being done, what was being planned, then took names and numbers down for follow up. Whenever someone didn’t know an answer they said “we’ll figure it out, get back with you tomorrow, and solve the problem.” No blame assigning, no passing the buck, just a focus on the problem and how best to solve it. Charleston is being proactive in solving problems, they are thinking long term, and they aren’t waiting for things to get to a boiling point before addressing them. That’s the way government should run and it brings me hope.

Some of the things Charleston is doing really well:

Here to Serve Events — Mayor’s Office and all Department heads show up and answer questions from any resident. It’s a great public outreach program and one I plan on attending next time. Be ready Director of Refuse Collection as I complain about my trash pickup!! Check my website and I’ll make sure to add it to events. www.jonhague.com

Charleston Economic Incentive Fund — I hope to be speaking with Mayor Goodwin soon about this program. I want to see what can be learned and applied to other areas of Kanawha County. I have a feeling it will be a model for other cities and communities.

Reunification Program — This is a program designed to combat vagrancy. What it does is it attempts to reunify a criminal vagrant with their family and home community. A lot of homeless are constantly traveling from area to area and this leaves them without a support network when they get into trouble. And having an effective support network is key when attempting to exit out of addiction. Seems to be an effective tool in combating the revolving door of addiction and criminal vagrancy.

Bus Work Program — I’m sure they will come up with a better name but this is something they are considering setting up based on a program Albuquerque New Mexico is doing. Essentially a bus runs every day and picks up homeless people who are willing to work and gives them jobs in landscaping, trash collection, etc. Gives people a paycheck and gets them back on the path to rejoining the workforce.

I did hear some anger directed towards the state Legislature from residents. They feel that the state Legislature is out of touch and more of a hindrance than a help to the people on the front lines. I couldn’t agree more. It’s why I’m running for State Senate. I’ve always been drawn to where there is the greatest need. Right now that’s the Senate. It’s dysfunctional, hyper-partisan, and needs a sea change in how it operates. And a sea change is coming.

Best in Show Awards:

Mayor Goodwin. Amy is a superstar. She’s dynamic and vibrant when she speaks and her method of running city hall is leaps and bounds better than her predecessor. She’s also humble, gives credit away, and is not focused on the politically right thing to do but what is in the best interests of her people. The Democratic Party should put her front and center of all its efforts in the future as it seeks to reclaim power in WV. That’s high praise but people like her don’t come along every day.

Honorable Mention:
Sergeant Jason Webb. Jason is the Public Services Division Commander of the Charleston Police Dept. He spoke at length on the homeless and vagrancy crisis affecting the Kanawha Valley. He spoke in front of an angry crowd (because people are always angry at this) and told them everything Charleston was doing and planning to do to combat this issue. He explained that you needed a systemic approach to solving this issue, that enforcement alone wouldn’t work. He talked about a Multi-Jurisdictional Task Force on Homelessness they formed and how Charleston was actively learning from other areas around the country who are also dealing with this issue. At the end of his speech that angry crowd was on his side. And he was swamped with questions after the meeting from residents who were similarly impressed with him and the job the police force is doing.

Charleston is in good hands folks. It is great to see.

I just attended the Dunbar Town Hall to address the homeless and vagrancy issues Dunbar is having. There are a lot of pissed off citizens in Dunbar. Dunbar is one of the hot spots of the opioid and homeless problem in WV and its citizens are absolutely fed up with inaction on this issue. Most of the Town Hall was spent by Dunbar city officials making excuses for why they couldn’t arrest criminal vagrants. Yes we need some tweaks to state code but when somebody kicks in your door and the city prosecutor says “what was their intent?” then it’s not a matter of state code, it’s a matter of your city officials not doing their job. Now the meeting ended on a nice kumbaya moment where the state Legislators in attendance gave out their personal cell phones and promised to work with city officials to solve the problem. (I’m sure a lot of Legislators who really didn’t want to give out their personal cell phone # will have words with Delegate Byrd who started that trend). That’s how the news is going to report this meeting – a kumbaya moment and Legislators will work on the issue. But this problem has been going on for 9 years. Every elected official has known about it for years and not addressed it.

The one thing that was never said by any elected official was “yes this is a problem, and it’s our job as your elected officials to deal with it and we’re going to take care of it.” I keep going over and over that in my mind. To me a leader takes responsibility for the problem. It really bothers me what I saw. Lots of excuses, lots of passing the buck around. But nobody took ownership. I feel like I need a shower from all the slimy politician excuses that were floating around.

Best in Show Awards:
Best show by elected officials: Delegate Byrd in first and Delegate Moore-Capito in second. Both gave good speeches (Moore-Capito arrived late and rambled on some political tangent so negative points for that).

Worst show by elected official: The gentleman who claimed they couldn’t arrest people because it costs $52 dollars a day to house them. I didn’t catch his name but it was a good thing he shut up after that. Dude was about to get lynched.

Worst fact of the night: City of Dunbar has ZERO drug recovery programs.

And the absolute best line of the night came from a citizen who very succinctly laid out the fact that our Legislators, being of the wealthy variety, may not care about homelessness in Dunbar quite as much as the average citizen. He looked straight at Eric Nelson Jr. and said, “I have a question for the Legislators…is there a homeless problem in South Hills?” He deservedly got a thunderous round of applause.

I will be laying out a plan on my website for this issue. It’s an issue that affects Dunbar and Charleston and Huntington and every area in between. It’s based on what other cities in the country have done so it’s not reinventing the wheel. And it will work. But it will take leadership. Because all levels of government and the business community and the citizens and the faith community will need to pull together on one solution. Right now everybody is pulling in their own direction and it is not working. But that’s what good leaders do. They get disparate people to work together. And right now West Virginia needs true leadership.

I was talking to a supporter yesterday about all the things I would like to do for state employees. As a former state employee I know how much they struggle. I want to raise salaries so they are competitive, I want to reestablish a matching 401K. And he said, “that sounds great but people are going to say we can’t afford to do this.” My response was that we can’t afford NOT to do this. Our population decline is the root cause of every economic problem we have. People leave because they can make much better money out of state. As people leave our tax base shrinks and we have to cut because of less money. More people leave, more cutting. It’s what I call our economic death spiral. And it must be stopped.

The trap is how our leaders in power have thought about this issue. You have heard the analogy used that the state should be like a household and live within its means. If you as a person had budget issues you’d cut spending. Well that makes sense if you are a household. But name me one BUSINESS that would use that strategy.

Our leaders are thinking about the problem wrong. A business would simply get a loan and GROW their way out of it. Heck many of our elected leaders have businesses of their own. And they would never do that for their own businesses. They would invest in themselves because how you think about running a business is radically different than running a household.

WV is experiencing some good economic news this year. But I have read all the economic reports from both conservative and liberal economists. And they all say the same thing. Yes we’ve had economic growth but its all being driven by natural gas pipeline construction. And the pipeline is almost complete. Only 7 out of 55 counties had economic growth last year. All in the panhandles, all in shale country. 7 out of 55. Know how many jobs were added in the other counties? Only 300. That’s 6 jobs a county.

That’s why I support a massive investment program, spread throughout ALL areas of WV. We have seen in this state with pipeline construction, with our current batch of road construction, that investing in ourselves drives economic growth. In fact it’s the only thing that does. West Virginians deserve an economy that is as good as everywhere else. And this is how we get it.