MORGANTOWN — “A mess.”
That was the description offered by West Virginia Division of Highways District 4 Maintenance Engineer Aaron Stevens when characterizing the district’s ongoing staffing situation.
Stevens’ boss, District 4 Engineer/Manager Mike Daley elaborated further.
“The biggest thing, and I’m not making excuses, but the fact is we’re grossly understaffed; especially in Mon County and Preston County,” Daley said during a Wednesday work session with the Monongalia County Commission.
“We just cannot recruit because there’s so much economic development and opportunities. That has a huge, huge impact.”
Daley said he’s short 75 people across the six-county district.
“We’re 14-16 people down just in Mon County. So that would be two to three crews that we just don’t have available to put out,” he said.
According to Daley, District 4 often ends up serving as a kind of taxpayer-funded training center for private companies in the area.
“It’s all positions, from engineering positions down to our transportation workers and certified operators,” he said. “And what happens over and over is we’ll get them trained and they’ll get on with a company … You get into other districts in the state and there just isn’t the competition.”
But DOH staffing problems were just one of the reoccurring issues to resurface during Wednesday’s conversation.
Communication was another.
“We need to try to get rid of these damn silos and start working together,” Commission President Tom Bloom said after hearing project information coming from District 4 personnel that didn’t align with information being shared by the state through the Morgantown Monongalia Metropolitan Planning Organization.
Intersection projects on both Collins Ferry and Green Bag roads were among the projects for which local expectations didn’t match the information provided by District 4 Construction Engineer Jason Nelson.
Nelson said the oblong, single-lane roundabout planned for the intersection of Collins Ferry Road and University Avenue is caught up in a property dispute. He said the Green Bag roundabout projects aren’t even on the district’s radar at this point.
“That’s one of the problems we’re having. There are bits of information, and we need to try to uniform it,” Bloom said.
Daley agreed that there is a communication breakdown between the state, the district and local officials. He said Wednesday’s meeting was one of the ways to address that.
“I’ve been dealing with the public now for about 45 years. There’s no better way to communicate than the collaboration of getting everybody together and making that communication happen,” he said. “From what I’m hearing here, there’s a flaw in here somewhere that the information is not getting out to us.”
