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‘Yeas and nays,’ preparing for the session

On Wednesday, I will begin my 15th year involved with the start of the West Virginia Legislature’s regular 60-day session. I moved to Charleston on a snowy January in 2010 a week before the start of that session. I had just started one year prior a news website on behalf of a libertarian think tank focused on government transparency and accountability called West Virginia Watchdog. This was a good 13 years before non-profit-funded journalism would become cool. As a print and radio news reporter in the Mid-Ohio Valley in the mid-2000s, I followed West Virginia politics and wrote ...

Show support for our local restaurants

This weekend should have been seeing the final days of the inaugural Weirton Restaurant Week. As an amateur foodie, this idea was something I had been looking forward to since first learning about it by speaking with those involved in its planning. I was mapping out a possible schedule, looking at ways to squeeze in a couple visits in between work meetings and other appointments, and even considering the possibility of inviting a few people to come along. Weirton Restaurant Week is being organized by the Top of West Virginia Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Weirton Area Chamber ...

Some ideal temperatures

We’re now into the winter season, and I would like to offer you a few suggestions to encourage you to think of ways to lower your utility bills. The major one involves replacing the furnace filters in your home. The U.S. Department of Energy says the average homeowner can save up to 15 percent on heating and cooling bills with this one simple step. A filter full of dust or pet hair makes your furnace work harder. It’s like you trying to breathe when your nose is congested. You should inspect your furnace and air conditioning filters regularly and consider setting up a 90-day ...

The Ohio Valley has a radiation problem

During the 1950s and 1960s, I remember the government-conducted Civil Defense drills in my school. We were told to climb under our school desks, duck down and cover our heads. We might have survived a bomb blast but the radioactive fallout could not be stopped. The nuclear disasters at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima have taught us that the radiation emitted during an accident or bombing will travel across the planet via the jet stream and distribute some radiation to all of us. Unfortunately, a similar scenario has been occurring in Southeastern Ohio. Since 2012, (when ...

Technology … where would we be without it?

Technology. Where would we be without it? Technology. Where would we be without it? No, I didn’t accidentally write that sentence twice. It’s written to mean two different points of view. Go back and read it again. I’ll wait. Can you see the difference? On one hand, technology has drastically changed the way we do practically everything. The world is pretty much at our fingertips. Life has become so much easier — perhaps too easy. We no longer have to try to read a map or stop and ask directions at a gas station, even though some of us may insist we never get lost. ...

Putting a freeze frame on federal funding

I typically don’t write about national politics in this space. When I do cover national politics, it is usually through the lenses of West Virginia’s congressional delegation. My focus tends to be on state-level politics. However, last week’s temporary freeze on federal grant funding by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – now stayed and rescinded - really brought together national and state politics, because probably no other state would have been affected by that freeze more than West Virginia. According to the memo, federal agencies were to review ...