Some more bills that passed during the legislative session:
Good: SB 273, “to allocate and station child protective services workers by county based on population, referrals and average caseload” and to allow for locality pay. Our foster care system is in crisis — that’s been known for years now. There are multiple factors contributing to the problem, including a CPS worker shortage and an increase in the number of kids coming into foster care. SB 273 may only address one facet of the crisis, but it lays out concrete steps that can be followed instead of throwing down a vague mandate to “do better.” We look forward to seeing if this law produces the results we hope it will.
Good, honorable mentions: SB 534, to allow people to carry alcoholic beverages from place to place within a designated outdoor refreshment zone. Think of something akin to Morgantown’s Arts Walk, but with alcohol. HB 3113, to create a mandatory high school personal finance course. Not everyone will need calculus or trigonometry, but everyone should know how to balance a check book and understand how taxes work. And SB 187, the bill to criminalize school staff sexual contact with students in primary or secondary schools, regardless of the student’s age or if the contact occurred away from school. While a student may be 18, any adult school staff member or volunteer is already in a position of authority over that student, which raises questions of dubious consent. This law creates a clear boundary between what is acceptable and what is not acceptable between school staff or volunteers and students.
Bad: SB 162, to allow the Department of Natural Resources to lease state-owned pore spaces in certain areas for carbon sequestration. “Carbon sequestration” might sound like a good thing, but the form of carbon sequestration approved in SB 162, known as geo-sequestration, is basically reverse fracking: Instead of pumping water in to get natural gas, it pumps carbon dioxide gas in after the natural gas has been used. Unfortunately, this method of carbon sequestration carries many of the same risks as fracking, including leakage, environmental contamination and the possibility of seismicity (small, man-made earthquakes). Geo-sequestration is generally used in the production of “blue hydrogen,” which — unlike green hydrogen, which uses renewables — actually has a larger greenhouse gas footprint than just burning natural gas or coal for heat.
Bonus bad: SB 47, to create the Charter Schools Stimulus Fund to provide financial support to charter school applicants and public charter schools that may not otherwise have the resources for start-up costs. Applicants can receive an initial grant up to $300,000 from the West Virginia Professional Charter School Board and can receive an additional grant up to $100,000. Mind you, this is all taxpayer money and will be on top of the taxpayer money the charters get once students are enrolled.
Lawmakers insist that public schools are failing, but then they divert more and more money away from public education to so-called “public” charter schools, in essence creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can’t fix “failing” schools without funds for improvements. But it’s clear that legislators are trying to make sure public education fails.
Stupid: HB 3042, “forbidding excessive government limitations on exercise of religion.” It was a tough choice between “bad” and “stupid” for this one. We settled on “stupid” because religious freedom is already protected by the U.S. Constitution — but it has also been widely understood that someone’s freedom ends where someone else’s begins. HB 3042 will most likely be used to undermine non-discrimination ordinances and to excuse discrimination against otherwise protected groups, such as the LGBTQ+ community. We also predict that, in practice, this law will protect Christian “exercise of religion” far more often than it will any other religion.
