A Report from West Virginia
Haught, James A.
A Report from West Virginia by James A. Haught Three decades ago, West Virginia had 125,000 coal miners and about 10,000 state government workers-a 12-to-1 ratio. Since then, the coal industry...
...He promised to try to stem the tide...
...Today there are 60,000 miners and 50,000 state employees...
...The State Department of Natural Resources joins many professional societies (like the Southeastern Raccoon Task Force) and sends its officials to conventions everywhere from Florida to Canada...
...When the federal money runs out, student fees will pay only one third of the trolley’s operating cost, and the state will have to scrape up the rest...
...They can do whatever’s politically saleable in Congress...
...In the year since then, Rockefeller has succeeded in at least keeping the size of the state government steady...
...We see the result of it each year in our budget...
...For example: .The Governor’s Office of Economic .and Community Development is budgeted for $90 million next year, $82 million of which will come from the federal government...
...The state’s Title 20 welfare programs, funded on this 75-25 basis, now cost West Virginia $5.7 million a year more than its original share...
...It’s hard to ask state officials to exercise discretion when deciding which federal programs to participate in, because every federally funded program gives state officials, free of charge, ample amounts of the currency of politics-jobs...
...28 tage of this federal largesse, hiring grantsmen who specialized in writing successful applications for funds from Washington...
...sin,ce she started her job in 1977, she says she has found about 75 employees of her agency “who have done no work, can’t define what their job is, or are physically or mentally unqualified to hold their jobs...
...The department’s travel requests point out, in large type, “cost is 75 per cent reimbursable from federal funds...
...But the feds have no lid...
...The West Virginia government apparently can stand a lot...
...The manpower program also provides for summer jobs for’poor youths, which, investigations have , shown, have often gone to the children of politicians and their friends...
...The state mental health system expanded from 2,745 workers to 3,964, and the state health department from 354 to 588...
...West Virginia’s commission on aging had a three-person staff in 1971 and now employs 23 people who oversee a $5.9-million annual budget, $4.8 million of which comes from Washington...
...They’re good, but how much good can you stand...
...Twenty years ago,” says Dean, “we didn’t have strip mine enforcement laws or air pollution control or meat and produce inspections or mine safety control or chemical plant safety inspections or consumer protection 30 offices...
...In the 1950 census, West Virginia had a population of two million and there was one state government worker for every 200 residents...
...The Promise of Perquisites Federal programs are alluring to West Virginia because they hold out the promise of perquisites and nondemanding work for the state employees who implement them...
...But these are minor changes...
...Reporters who cover the West Virginia statehouse agree that, with a few exceptions, government employees rarely seem to work hard...
...States learned to take advanJames A. Haught is a reporter for the Charleston, W. Va., Gazette...
...In the 1960s especially, Congress passed a welter of social-welfare programs and gave control of them to local agencies...
...The West Virginia manpower program costs the state $10,000 a year (and the federal government $25 million) and adds 8,400 workers to the state payroll...
...You can’t view any of these negatively, because they’re all motherhood programs-but they’re expensive...
...Now the population is 1.7 million and the ratio is 1-to-35-six times higher...
...Health, Education, and Welfare The growth areas in the West Virginia government have been, unsurprisjngly, health, education, and welfare...
...The federal government made West Virginia pay back some of the summer money it had spent illegally...
...She said she has found others “taking senseless trips around West Virginia to earn profits on state mileage...
...It took her nine months to learn that the agency really had only 764 employees...
...Another way the government can cost West Virginia money is by building a state facility, like a juvenile detention home or a cultural center...
...Smoot recently told the Charleston Daily Mail that she has found one staff in a suburban office so fancy it was nicknamed the country club and ten employees in an office in Charleston that was equipped with a bar...
...So they were “hidden” in the federally funded Employment Security Department, which gets less scrutiny from the legislature than state funded agencies...
...The Department of Employment Security is 100 per cent funded-at $10 million a year-by Washington...
...Most of the reason for the increase is the availability of free money from Washington over the last 20 years...
...This growth has reflected Washington’s priorities over the past decade and a half, and has therefore been in appropriately idealistic areas...
...At West Virginia University at Morgantown, 1 OO-percent federal funding built a $60million elevated automatic trolley to whisk students from campus to campus (by the way, the trolley was supposed to cost $1 3 million...
...The Employment Security Department once told the legislature, Smoot said, that it had 1,500 employees, apparently so that friends and relatives could easily be added to the slack payroll...
...For the same reason that the coal companies keep adding managers and losing miners, the state government isn’t going to get much smaller...
...He said that when he had entered the state legislature in 1967 there were 32,200 state employees, and ten years later there were 45,837...
...In February, Glen Gainer, the state’s auditor, who was counting paychecks instead of full-time employees, said the state’s work force went down from a high of 52,644 on one payday in 1976 to 50,250 in January of 1978...
...Miles Dean reported in January that the 45,837 employee total had been whittled down to 43,450...
...West Virginia Governor John D. Rockefeller IV, in his first state of the state address a year ago, said the government had “grown to the point where it’s unmanageable...
...Four high-rise office buildings have been added to the state capitol in Charleston to house all those new employees, and the state still has to spend $6 million a year renting additional space...
...That budget has more than tripled in the last decade...
...As Ralph Halstead, chief of statistics for the West Virginia Department of Employment Security, puts it, “it’s something basic and profound in society...
...The pie is there, so get your share,” became the motto of the West Virginia government, says Miles Dean, the state’s finance cornmissioner...
...The state seems to be getting a free building, but because it has to pay for staff and upkeep, it’s actually taking on a major expense...
...The state welfare department has grown from 1,937 employees seven years ago to 3,385 today...
...It’s now at $1.6 billion a year-and $700 million of that is federal funds...
...The Vocational Rehabilitation Division is budgeted for $23 millionand $1 5 million of that is federal...
...West Virginia’s government also will have to shoulder next year a larger share of the cost of a new statewide ambulance service, a state coroner system, and a network of community mental health centersall launched with federal money...
...The colleges and universities employed 7,904 people seven years ago, and 9,827 today...
...Washington can provide full funding for a state program, but when the grant expires the state is stuck with a new group of employees whom it has to support thenceforth...
...One of every six people in the West Virginia work force, Rockefeller said, is on a government payroll...
...Some of these workers, she said, had originally been hired by the state as a political reward and had proved incompetent in other agencies...
...Since then, the coal industry has mechanized and government has bureaucratized...
...Part of the money from Washington is passed on to pay for programs that county or local governments administer...
...She’d fire them, she said, but can’t because they’re under civil service...
...but most of it stays in Charleston...
...West Virginia’s money for the program expires in October, and the state has to decide whether to abandon or support a bus network that covers one third of its area...
...But once such programs start up, the state has to cover the regular annual five per cent raises for the people who administer them...
...The old warhorse bureaus of state government-the highway department, the parks department, the motor vehicles registry, the state liquor stores-have not grown much recently...
...Carolyn Smoot, the state director of employment security, agrees...
...An example is the Transportation Remuneration Incentive Program (TRIP), which the federal government started and funded in order to provide bus service for the poor and elderly...
...If we were utilizing only our own resources, we wouldn’t grow much,” says Dean...
...here in West Virginia, big government looks like it’s here to stay...
...The federal government also can provide 75 per cent funding for certain services as an incentive to . states to provide the other 25 per cent...
...State law forbids us to budget a deficit...
...The Welfare Department will spend $209 million, $133 million of it from Washington...
...Sometimes, however, this is more expensive for the state than it seems to be...
...When there’s federal money available, state employees know their requests for out-of-state business trips are much more likely to be honored...
Vol. 10 • April 1978 • No. 2
