Breaking News

Local Columns

Grateful for another year in journalism

We are now in June, which means I’m beginning my seventh year as your state government reporter in Charleston. And it continues to be a fun, wild ride. I remain thankful to Ogden Newspapers and its many daily and weekly newspapers here in West Virginia and bordering states that run my news stories and this weekly column. I’m also thankful for other newspapers in the state that run my articles, including the Clarksburg Exponent-Telegram/The State Journal and the Beckley Register-Herald. The newspaper industry has encountered many challenges over the last 25 years. The internet has ...

Government budgets are getting smaller, too

As the state and various other governmental entities approach the end of their 2023-24 fiscal year on June 30, there has been much attention paid toward their budgets. As our statewide reporter, Steven Allen Adams, noted in a recent article, West Virginia is on track to have a “surplus” of approximately $800 million (a sizable decrease from previous years) to start the next fiscal year on July 1. I put surplus in quotation marks because, as anyone who has paid attention to our reporting in the last few years would know, the Legislature has made a habit of setting aside a series of ...

History in the Hills: Remembering D-Day

This past week marks the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasions in Europe during World War II. On that day in June 1944, the world changed. The allies began the operation to take back Nazi-held Europe and liberate the many under their rule. My grandfathers were in the Army then, too, although they did not take part in the invasion. My grandfather, Joseph Carpini, was in England in June 1944 training and serving as a military policeman. He landed at Omaha Beach about a month or so after D-Day and saw firsthand the destruction and evidence of the great battles that took place in the ...

Father’s Day should have been more important

Next Sunday is Father’s Day. To be painfully honest, it has never been a day I thought too much about until, say, a week prior to its arrival. (Kind of like this column.) It is nothing like Mother’s Day. We know it is coming and always order our gifts and flowers well in advance. We actually buy her a card as soon as they become available in the aisles. Why is that? What makes Mother’s Day more meaningful than Father’s Day? I truly have no idea. But I will speculate that mothers usually don’t leave. Some do. But most stay for the duration. Now, in no way am I ...

Manchin’s declaration of independence

I’m a news reporter, which means that rumors make me uncomfortable. I don’t usually report rumors. I like to have hard information in the form of documents and multiple sources, including sources willing to go on the record. This is why I have largely avoided the recent rumors being spread over the last couple of weeks about an alleged plan by some moderate Republicans and Democrats in West Virginia to pressure Huntington Mayor Steve Williams, the Democratic candidate for governor, to drop out of the race and be replaced by none other than outgoing U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin. In fact, ...

My effort to protect your electric supply

A sworn statement I issued recently on behalf of the Public Service Commission is at the heart of a multistate effort, led by West Virginia, to limit efforts of the federal government to wreck our state’s economy. While that is an important element of my work, it is even more crucial to protect and defend the nation’s electric energy supply. I’m angry. And I am determined to protect the reliability of that energy source to the maximum extent I can. I confess this latest assault by the federal government on coal-fired electric energy generation has deeply upset me. But we are ...