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Guest Column: A tax cut that puts West Virginians first

Local Columns

West Virginia is proving something powerful right now: when you focus on the basics, tighten the budget, and let the free market work, good things happen. That progress puts us in a position to do what the government too often forgets to do: return money to the people who earned it. That’s why I am calling on the State Legislature to pass a 10 percent across-the-board income tax cut. Over the past year, my administration has made difficult but necessary choices. We tightened spending, restructured government, reduced costs, and focused relentlessly on fixing our state budget. Those ...

Animal cruelty on display

Letters to the Editor

To the Editor, Weirton has several colonies of community cats — cats that live outdoors, have been neutered or spayed and are cared for by volunteers or store employees. Some of these colonies have been in the same places for a decade or more. Recently, during the cold snaps, someone who apparently likes to cause suffering to animals collected all of the bins and boxes that the cats live in by Gabe’s and the downtown car wash and threw them away, even though those bins and boxes were not their property. Worse yet, this person left the cats to die in freezing weather. One cat was ...

Fixing Hancock County Schools is a marathon, not a sprint

Local Columns

By now nearly everyone has most likely seen the dire financial situation that the Hancock County school system currently finds itself in. Years of inadequate personnel management, overspending, and a lack of thorough financial oversight finally caught up with them when it was recently announced that the school system is facing a budget shortfall of approximately $8 million. All of this occurred over the stretch of multiple superintendents and numerous county board members, and was finally brought to light this past fall when then-superintendent Dan Enich notified the West Virginia ...

If you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them

Local Columns

There are some days when the world feels unbearably heavy, days when the headlines seem to blur together and the noise of everyday life makes it hard to hear anything at all. And then, in those rare, quiet moments, the ones where we finally sit still long enough to feel something … a single sentence can change everything — change our perspective on how we see the world. For me, it was the Dalai Lama’s gentle reminder, “Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” Such simple words, and such a simple ...

Continue our focus on dental health

Editorials

Mountain State residents grew up knowing there were certain jokes that would be made at their expense once a person from another state found out they were West Virginians. Some variation on the “but you’re wearing shoes!” or “but you look like you have all your teeth!” was not uncommon. And we laughed it off. But the reality is West Virginia HAS struggled for generations — and still does struggle — with making dental health a priority. That’s backed up by a recent WalletHub study, “2026’s States with the Best and Worst Dental Health,” in which West Virginia ranks ...

Some answers given, others still needed

Editorials

Hancock County residents were able to get some of the answers sought over the last several months during Monday’s meeting of the county board of education. It was the first meeting of the board since the local school system was taken over by the state last month. Featured at the meeting was the long-awaited report from Jeff Davis of Education Consulting Team LLC and Uriah Cummings, school financial operations officer for the West Virginia Department of Education, who discussed some of their findings after reviewing Hancock County Schools’ financial books in an effort to find out ...