Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stephen Smith made a campaign swing through Morgantown recently and stopped at The Dominion Post office to talk about his run for office.
The 40-year-old Charleston native said he learned his view of public service from his parents. “I think I learned from both my parents that West Virginia is different in that here we judge ourselves more by the people we serve than by the things that we own.”
His dad helped start West Virginia Coalition for the Homeless and the state public defender services. His mom raised her own children plus foster kids.
“It was always a mystery when we would open the door coming home after school because the local elementary school would send its most troubled kids to our house as an after-school program because they knew my mom would take anybody in.”
His family left Charleston for Texas, and Smith then attended Harvard, where he helped lead a student movement for four years to get campus staff a living wage.
“We realized that being smart and polite and going through the proper channels doesn’t work.”
That led to a three-week sit in, arrests, and year of negotiations. “It was the moment in my life I realized that I was going to have a choice between whether I spent the rest of my life working on the side of poor and working people or getting rich off of them. It was an easy choice.”
Smith and his wife worked in Chicago just before returning to West Virginia seven years ago. He now runs the Healthy Kids and Families Coalition. His wife is an attorney.
Asked why he’s running, he said his work at the Coalition has helped rural teams of people start community gardens, small businesses, after-school programs and community development projects. They’ve sent people to the Capitol to fight and lobby for school breakfasts and more.
“The people of West Virginia are 10 times smarter and more compassionate and more courageous than the lobbyists who run our government,” he said. The people need to replace the lobbyists and achieve a people’s government.
He’s held 151 town halls to date and is urging people who share his values statewide to run for offices at every level, he said. So far, 60 have decided to run.
Asked how his agenda fits into a more conservative-leaning West Virginia, he said that state isn’t really red or blue. There’s a good-old-boys club at the top that sometimes calls itself Democrat, sometimes Republican.” It’s them vs. everyone else.
“The problem in our government isn’t a red problem or a blue problem,” he said. “It’s that the people who are getting rich off of us are making the laws, not us.”
Smith outlines his campaign platform in detail on his website, wvcantwait.com. They include a Workers Bill of Rights, his Small Business Revolution and half-penny wealth tax. We covered a few points.
Regarding his Bill of Rights, Smith said many wrongly characterize West Virginia’s problem as small business vs. workers. “They’re not on opposite sides. They’re getting undercut by the same giant bullies — Big Agriculture, Big Pharma, Wall Street.”
Instead of exporting our wealth, we need to keep it here for our own workers and our own small businesses, he said.
The Bill of Rights proposes to end Right to Work, restore the prevailing wage for public projects, institute collective bargaining for public employees and phase in a $15 per hour minimum wage with small-business tax breaks to help offset the increased labor costs.
While some assert that the higher minimum wage will lead to layoffs and business closures or exodus, he said that’s not been demonstrated. Big businesses may threaten to leave, but so what. “Stop buying threats that they’ll leave if they give more to people” that make them succeed.
Small businesses want to pay their workers $15 or more, and his $75 million in tax breaks will help them. The big boxes can afford it easily, and if they would leave, that opens more opportunities to fill the vacuum with small, local businesses.
Smith’s Small Business Revolution shifts more than $200 million in tax breaks for out-of-state-based businesses to tax breaks and capital for local small businesses.
Smith cited the example of Denmark-based Rockwool, which is building an insulation plant in the Eastern Panhandle. It promises to create 150 jobs but has stirred a storm of protests over expected air pollution.
“We believe in economic development,” he said. “We just think that paying an out-of-state company to drive away small businesses and poison our kids is a pretty terrible way of doing economic development.”
Its $25 million tax break, he said, could go to 1,000 local businesses, instead.
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