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.