CHARLESTON – Making good on his word from three weeks ago, Gov. Jim Justice announced Friday a special session of the Legislature beginning Monday and a request for proposals for an audit of the Department of Health and Human Resources.

Speaking during a virtual briefing Friday afternoon, Justice said the special session will begin at noon on Monday and include a mix of bills that were vetoed for technical reasons, bills that didn’t make it out of the 60-day regular legislative session, and new bills.

The special session is expected to last one day and coincide with April legislative interim meetings already scheduled to begin Sunday through Tuesday.

“This evening I will be issuing a special session call,” Justice said Friday afternoon. “The session will begin this coming Monday. There’s no point in going into any more detail on that.”

The proclamation calling the Legislature into special session was released Friday evening and includes 16 bills, including a new version of Senate Bill 729, relating to funding for infrastructure and economic development projects in West Virginia. The original bill that passed the Legislature would have created two revolving loan funds — one managed by the state Economic Development Authority and one managed by the Department of Transportation.

Justice vetoed SB 729 on March 29, citing numerous technical errors, making the two revolving funds impossible to use, such as the inadvertent removal of language providing investment authority to the Economic Development Authority.

Some of the other bills on the special session call include:

* A bill reclassifying Bluefield State College as a statutorily exempt school from Higher Education Policy Commission oversight. If passed, BSU would join West Virginia University, Marshall University, and the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine as statutorily exempt schools. Shepherd University and Fairmont State University have administrative exemptions.

* Four bills deal with various state employee retirement systems.

* One bill would create an unemployment fraud unit within WorkForce West Virginia. Senate Bill 543 would have created the unit, but the bill died after the Senate amended the bill to include provisions of another Senate bill to lower the number of weeks of unemployment benefits from 26 weeks to 12 weeks and require specific work search criteria. The House never took the bill up on the final day of the session on March 12.

* Another bill makes changes to multiple state boards and commissions, including changing qualifications for appointed members, and reducing the number of members of some boards.

One bill vetoed by Justice in March that will not be on the special session call is House Bill 4020, which would have separated the Department of Health and Human Resources into two departments: the Department of Health and the Department of Human Resources. In his veto message, Justice said that HB 4020 did not take into account the complexity of splitting the state’s largest department that manages more than $7 billion worth of state and federal funds.

Instead, Justice said he would call for a top-down review of DHHR to audit the department and make recommendations as to how to reform it. Speaking Friday, Justice said the state issued a request for proposals earlier that same day seeking consulting contracts to provide an organizational assessment of DHHR and create a strategic plan. Bids are due by Friday, May 6, at 1:30 p.m.

“We look forward to hooking up with a really, really great partner that can do an assessment from top to bottom of all the needs in DHHR,” Justice said. “If we have deficiencies, we’ll address those deficiencies as I promised. We want to continue to make every single one of our organizations better.”

DHHR has come under fire over the last several years for its handling of the opioid crisis, the explosion of foster children, its handling of abuse and neglect cases, delays in the medical cannabis program, issues at state-managed hospitals, and severe staffing shortages. Jeremiah Samples, the department’s deputy secretary, recently departed DHHR citing a difference of opinion with Secretary Bill Crouch’s management of the department.

“We are moving this process as quickly as it can be moved,” Crouch said on Friday’s briefing. “We hope to get a good applicant in place to do that … We are looking to have recommendations by Dec. 31 of this year. It’s a tight timeframe and a big job.”

An audit report commissioned in 2014 by former governor Earl Ray Tomblin also called for splitting DHHR into two departments. Justice deflected blame for DHHR’s failures.

“Every breathing, living person knows that DHHR did not just get this way on my watch or in the last few years,” Justice said. “There is no possible way. DHHR has had problems for a long, long time. The great thing is we’re addressing them now and we’re going to get to the bottom of it and see what we can do to really help.”

(Adams can be contacted at sadams@newsandsentinel.com)