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...
...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...
...The federal government made West Virginia pay back some of the summer money it had spent illegally...
...but most of it stays in Charleston...
...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...
...When there’s federal money available, state employees know their requests for out-of-state business trips are much more likely to be honored...
...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...
...Part of the money from Washington is passed on to pay for programs that county or local governments administer...
...This growth has reflected Washington’s priorities over the past decade and a half, and has therefore been in appropriately idealistic areas...
...Since then, the coal industry has mechanized and government has bureaucratized...
...But once such programs start up, the state has to cover the regular annual five per cent raises for the people who administer them...
...She said she has found others “taking senseless trips around West Virginia to earn profits on state mileage...
...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...
...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...
...In the year since then, Rockefeller has succeeded in at least keeping the size of the state government steady...
...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...
...Today there are 60,000 miners and 50,000 state employees...
...For the same reason that the coal companies keep adding managers and losing miners, the state government isn’t going to get much smaller...
...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...
...Now the population is 1.7 million and the ratio is 1-to-35-six times higher...
...Carolyn Smoot, the state director of employment security, agrees...
...But these are minor changes...
...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...
...here in West Virginia, big government looks like it’s here to stay...
...Miles Dean reported in January that the 45,837 employee total had been whittled down to 43,450...
...28 tage of this federal largesse, hiring grantsmen who specialized in writing successful applications for funds from Washington...
...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...
...The department’s travel requests point out, in large type, “cost is 75 per cent reimbursable from federal funds...
...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...
...State law forbids us to budget a deficit...
...States learned to take advanJames A. Haught is a reporter for the Charleston, W. Va., Gazette...
...But the feds have no lid...
...If we were utilizing only our own resources, we wouldn’t grow much,” says Dean...
...We see the result of it each year in our budget...
...That budget has more than tripled in the last decade...
...Most of the reason for the increase is the availability of free money from Washington over the last 20 years...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...In the 1960s especially, Congress passed a welter of social-welfare programs and gave control of them to local agencies...
...One of every six people in the West Virginia work force, Rockefeller said, is on a government payroll...
...So they were “hidden” in the federally funded Employment Security Department, which gets less scrutiny from the legislature than state funded agencies...
...Sometimes, however, this is more expensive for the state than it seems to be...
...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...
...It’s now at $1.6 billion a year-and $700 million of that is federal funds...
...The pie is there, so get your share,” became the motto of the West Virginia government, says Miles Dean, the state’s finance cornmissioner...
...Health, Education, and Welfare The growth areas in the West Virginia government have been, unsurprisjngly, health, education, and welfare...
...As Ralph Halstead, chief of statistics for the West Virginia Department of Employment Security, puts it, “it’s something basic and profound in society...
...She’d fire them, she said, but can’t because they’re under civil service...
...The state welfare department has grown from 1,937 employees seven years ago to 3,385 today...
...You can’t view any of these negatively, because they’re all motherhood programs-but they’re expensive...
...The West Virginia government apparently can stand a lot...
...Some of these workers, she said, had originally been hired by the state as a political reward and had proved incompetent in other agencies...
...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...
...The Welfare Department will spend $209 million, $133 million of it from Washington...
...Reporters who cover the West Virginia statehouse agree that, with a few exceptions, government employees rarely seem to work hard...
...The state mental health system expanded from 2,745 workers to 3,964, and the state health department from 354 to 588...
...Another way the government can cost West Virginia money is by building a state facility, like a juvenile detention home or a cultural center...
...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...
...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...
...They can do whatever’s politically saleable in Congress...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The Vocational Rehabilitation Division is budgeted for $23 millionand $1 5 million of that is federal...
...They’re good, but how much good can you stand...
...The Department of Employment Security is 100 per cent funded-at $10 million a year-by 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...
...It took her nine months to learn that the agency really had only 764 employees...
...He promised to try to stem the tide...
...The colleges and universities employed 7,904 people seven years ago, and 9,827 today...
...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...
Vol. 10 • April 1978 • No. 2
