MORGANTOWN — If death and taxes are the only certainties in life, local dissatisfaction with the West Virginia Division of Highways might have climbed to a strong third.
So, road maintenance was already scheduled to be a topic of conversation Tuesday evening when Morgantown City Council held its annual sit-down with state lawmakers.
Then the area woke to find an early morning snow squall had apparently caught the DOH completely flat footed.
The first significant winter weather of the year all but paralyzed local traffic, essentially shut down routes into the county and city and resulted in dozens of accidents.
State Sen. Mike Caputo, D-Marion, said he reached out to DOH District 4 Engineer Mike Daley after Monongalia County residents started ringing his phone.
“He said nowhere on their radar did they see this snow coming. This was a squall that came through here that nobody was expecting, and it got ahead of them,” Caputo said of his conversation with Daley.
It was ice and snow Tuesday morning, Morgantown Director of Engineering and Public Works Damien Davis said, but in the summer, it’s weeds, mowing and ditching.
“Our biggest problem is that our area in District 4 currently, consistently doesn’t have the ability to maintain its core maintenance program,” Davis said, later adding, “Every road into the city looks terrible.”
As these discussions tend to do, the conversation veered into how non-competitive pay has led to severe staffing shortages at DOH’s District 4. The six-county region is currently more than 80 people short according to information shared at Tuesday’s meeting.
To that end, Davis explained the city has approached the state with no success about entering into a contract to take over some of the state’s maintenance responsibilities within the municipality.
Davis asked lawmakers to push legislation that would force the DOH to hold up its end on road maintenance, either as intended or through the kind of agreement described above.
Morgantown Mayor Jenny Selin said the city has made a good faith effort to work with the state, but the bottom line is the maintenance isn’t getting done and hasn’t for some time.
“We’ve tried quiet diplomacy,” Selin said. “I’ve been doing this for 15 years. For 15 years it hasn’t been right. At some point somebody has to decide that it’s important to serve this area just like it’s important to serve all the other areas.”
Councilor Louise Michael was more pointed with her comments.
“I’m sick of it. Why is it every year it’s the same things over and over and over,” Michael said.
Sen. Mike Oliverio, R-Monongalia, suggested that instead of continuing to respond with the same fruitless frustration, suggestions and requests, it’s probably time to change tack.
“We may need to turn the pressure off [DOH] and we may need to direct this pressure onto the governor. We may need to make it very clear to the governor that we expect a higher standard of maintenance on our roads. Not just in the winter, but year-round,” Oliverio said.
“I think the governor needs to understand our frustration and the problems that exist here, and if he needs to make managerial changes to fix this problem, then that’s something he needs to do.”
