Here is a glimpse of a few projects created for my capstone class at WVU back in 2016. We were tasked with creating two projects that included articles, videos, and infographics.
By: David Schlake, Kara Loyd and Anthony Santoline
Beginning July 1, West Virginia will become the 26th right-to-work state in the nation, which means employees who work for companies with unions will no longer be required to pay union dues. Republican leaders who pushed the right to work law through the legislature earlier this year based much of their argument on a study done by an economics researcher at West Virginia University, which found that right-to-work laws lead to both economic and job growth.
But now the unions are crying foul. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters says the fact that the author of the study, John Deskins, an associate professor of economics in the WVU College of Business and Economics, shared preliminary results with Senate President Bill Cole (R-Mercer) and his staff well before the study was released raises troubling ethical issues. The state legislature also funded the study, leaving its findings open to questions of bias.
A former Congressional investigator who has studied conflicts of interest agrees. The fact that Deskins shared preliminary findings of his study with the legislators who funded it raises a red flag, according to Paul Thacker, a former Congressional investigator and Fellow at the Edmond J. Safran Center for Ethics at Harvard University
“[It] tells you that the mind of that academic is being guided in a way that they get an outcome that makes the people that funded them happy,” Thacker says. “
Scientific literature has found that there is funding bias. What funding bias tells us is that we need to be careful and scrutinize the study a little bit more when there is an entity that has either a financial or ideological interest in the outcome.”
The problems with this study don’t stop there. Thacker and others say there are multiple issues with the way the study was done and how it was used. When the Teamsters filed a Freedom of Information Act request with WVU and the legislature to obtain emails and other information about Deskins’ exchange with Senate majority leaders, WVU tried to withhold documents claiming a number of arcane exemptions to the FOIA law. When information is redacted from a FOIA request, it must come with a cited exemption for the redaction. WVU repeatedly claimed an exemption that Thacker says is too broadly used.
“This [internal memo] exemption eight is nonsense, it’s meaningless, because anything can be used as an internal memorandum,” Thacker says. “It’s problematic to cite this [exemption] because as soon as [the Teamsters] asked the Senate for the emails, they turned them over.”
The Teamsters had filed a FOIA request for the emails in January of 2016. They didn’t receive all of the material they requested and many of the emails were heavily redacted. So in February, the Teamsters filed a lawsuit against Deskins, WVU and the state legislature for violating FOIA requirements. Judge Philip Gaujot ruled March 15 that WVU had violated FOIA in heavily redacting the emails between Deskins and the state Legislature.
As a result of that ruling, WVU has been ordered to deliver the emails in non-redacted form in addition to other materials they failed to provide under the initial FOIA request. The Teamsters are still waiting.
“What the judge ordered was that WVU provide the judge with the documents,” says Luke Farley, an attorney representing the Teamsters Local 175. “The judge will look at them and then we will argue whether we’re entitled to those documents or not under a FIOA request and the judge will make a determination.”
Farley says Deskins sent the Senate Republican leadership a draft on July 31 asking for comments and questions, according to emails obtained under the FOIA. He then sent them a final draft approximately a month before anyone else. The unions were not given a copy of Deskins’ study until November.
“If this is an impartial study, then why is Deskins giving the majority party a chance to comment on the report in July but it’s not available to the public until November? We want a copy of the draft to see how it compares to the copy of the final draft,” Farley says.
The State Legislature and WVU also have yet to turn over emails showing the Republican leadership’s response to Deskins’ draft study. As a result, the union is unable to determine what kind of influence the legislature, which funded the study, had on the final results.
“That’s because they aren’t living up to FOIA. They are trying to hide the ball,” Thacker says.
Deskins, however, says that WVU has already provided Teamsters with the non-redacted emails they were trying to obtain. He claims the Teamsters sued to gain publicity.
“Why would the Teamsters push this lawsuit to obtain something they already have?” Deskins says. “Does that sound like they’re interested in gaining information? Or does that sound like they were interested in swaying the opinion of people through headlines?”
John Bolt, WVU’s Director for News and Information Services, declined to comment, saying neither he nor FOIA Officer Harry Montoro could comment on pending litigation.
Research on the impact of right to work legislation is mixed. Seven of the 13 states with the lowest unemployment rates are right to work states. On the other hand, studies on right to work legislation have found a connection between right to work and higher unemployment rates. Right to work states also have lower wages than those states without such legislation.
“Every reliable study that I’ve seen have shown [right to work] lowers wages,” says Ken Hall, General Secretary-Treasurer of IBT and President of Teamsters Local 175 (Charleston, West Virginia). “If you compare right-to-work states to non-right-to-work states, after factoring in the cost of living, it ranges at least $1,500 a year less wages in a right to work state.”
Deskins’ study found that right to work legislation made no significant difference on wage or salary increases. It did, however, find that such laws lead to job growth.
In the 13 states with the lowest unemployment rates, seven of them are right to work states. Some studies on right to work legislation have found a connection between right to work and higher unemployment rates. Right to work states also have lower wages than those states without such legislation.
William Hal Gorby , an assistant professor of history at WVU, believes that right-to-work is a big mistake for the state. He says for states with big cities and big business, right to work has led to economic growth, but it won’t help rural states like West Virginia attract new business. In Oklahoma, which like West Virginia is a resource-extracting, rural state, the economy has plummeted since adopting right-to-work. The policy allowed businesses that were already here to pay lower wages, but didn’t do much to new businesses.
If Deskins’ study is proven to not be impartial, the Teamsters says they will challenge the state legislature to address the fact taxpayer money was spent for a study that doesn’t fit their own criteria for credible research.
“Do I think that means they’re going to go back and vote to void right-to-work?” Hall says. “Probably not, but it will go a long way towards proving our point. It would be nice to show the citizens of West Virginia what really happened.”
By: Corey McDonald, Kara Loyd, and Lauren McMillen
Even before the 2016 gubernatorial race begins in earnest, Senate President Bill Cole [R – Mercer] has already received substantial contributions from oil and gas interests in West Virginia. He has been endorsed by a super PAC that has so far raised $70,600 – $10,000 from oil and gas interests – and he has been backed by the West Virginia Coal Association. He has also spoken to high-end donors at an exclusive retreat organized by affiliates of the Koch brothers, two conservative billionaires who own a vast empire of oil and natural gas interests.
Cole is one of the many state politicians from both political parties who have filled their campaign war chests with money from the fossil fuel industry over the years. But this year there are some candidates running for state office without backing from the fossil fuel industry. Instead they are running on a platform of diversifying the state’s economy.
“Coal production is falling and this is a new reality that we’re faced with,” said Evan Hansen, president of an environmental consulting company in Morgantown and a candidate for the 51st district of the House of Delegates. “There’s more and more of a recognition that this is not just a cycle and what we need to do is to think of ways to expand the economy so that we have many different industries that provide jobs.”
Even so, candidates like Hansen are fighting an uphill battle against the status quo: the outsized influence of the fossil fuel industry on West Virginia politics via generous campaign contributions and lobbying. The vast majority of West Virginia’s lawmakers have received substantial campaign contributions from fossil fuel interests. And in this year’s race for Governor, it seems as though it will be business as usual.
“I think most people feel there is some connection between big money and politics,” says Matthew Jacobsmeier, assistant professor of political science at West Virginia University. “And in some sense we would expect that because why would people be spending all this money if they’re not getting anything out of it.”
Also running for Governor on the Democratic side is Jim Justice, a coal baron who is widely considered the richest man in West Virginia with a net worth of roughly $1.63 billion. Justice is the principal owner of Justice Energy Company Inc., which generates $8.2 million in annual revenue with mines in Wyoming and McDowell counties as well as Kentucky. Justice’s mines have a history of safety violations, and according to several news reports, he has failed to pay millions of dollars in overdue fines for those safety violations.
Booth Goodwin and Jeffrey Kessler are also running in the Democratic primary for Governor. Kessler, the Senate minority leader, has received considerable campaign contributions from the coal and natural gas industries during his 18-year tenure as a state lawmaker. Goodwin, who stepped down as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia after prosecuting Donald L. Blankenship, Massey Energy Company’s former chief executive at the time of the Upper Big Branch explosions that killed 29 miners, announced his candidacy for Governor early in January. Since the first campaign finance filing deadline for 2016 is April 1, information on donations to Goodwin’s campaign is not yet available.
Cole, who will more than likely be the Republican contender, is endorsed by Accelerate West Virginia, a super PAC that has raised $70,600 from a number of businesses, including the oil and gas industry, according to a year end report of its financial receipts for 2015. And he continues to do the oil and gas industry’s bidding. For example, he supported Senate Bill 596, which would have allowed gas company surveyors onto private property without the property owners permission in order to plan potential pipeline paths. That bill was narrowly defeated in the Senate February 29, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail.
Cole also supported another pro-industry bill, SB 705, which would cut the current severance tax rate of 5 percent to 4 percent beginning in July 2018 and then cut it again, to 3 percent, at a time when the state already faces a $380 million budget shortfall due to severance tax shortages.
Although the Senate approved this bill, it was recently tabled by the House Finance Committee for further study. If it had passed, the state of West Virginia would have lost close to $159 million in revenues a year while local governments would lose approximately $11.6 million a year, according to a report by the WV Center on Budget and Policy.
“With our problems with the budget right now, a cut in the severance tax would blow an even bigger hole in the budget,” says Michael Plante, president of Plante Associates, a political consulting and public relations firm.
One of the bill’s sponsors, Mike Hall [R-Putnam] has received $22,150 in contributions from the mining and oil and gas industries over his 18 years in state office, while the other sponsor, Dave Sypolt [R-Preston] has received $20,600 from the industries over his 12 years in state office.
The Legislature also recently passed a bill to cut “excess” severance tax revenues that were put into place in 2005 to pay off debts related to the state’s workers’ compensation, according to a report by the Charleston Gazette-Mail. That bill was signed into law by Gov. Early Tomblin March 1, and one of its lead sponsors in the House was Rupert Phillips Jr., a lawmaker from coal-producing Logan County. Phillips, an employee of the mining industry himself, has received campaign contributions totaling $24,900 from the mining industry, close to 20 percent of his total contributions since the 2008.
Phillips and Cole are two of the many state legislators who continue to blame the coal industry’s current woes on Obama and the EPA.
“Get rid of Obama, we’ll help the coalfields.” Phillips said in a recent interview.
In reality, there has been a consistent decline in coal jobs since the 1980s, with a brief recovery in 2006 when significant tax cuts were made to the corporate income and business franchise tax. Market analysts say that coal’s decline is largely due to market competition from cheaper natural gas and cheaper coal produced in western states like Wyoming.
While coal has been in decline for some time, state officials expected severance taxes on the growing natural gas industry in West Virginia to make up for the shortfall in taxes from coal. But the declining price of natural gas, caused by a current glut, has reduced severance tax revenues from that industry as well. West Virginia’s estimated $380 million budget shortfall can be directly attributed to the state’s overall drop in severance tax revenues.
Some analysts say the real cause of the state’s financial woes can be traced back to the significant corporate tax cuts made by then Governor Joe Manchin’s administration in 2006.
“We’ve had budget shortfalls for several years now and those can be tied directly to a series of tax cuts that we passed back in 2006 and 2007,” O’Leary said. “When you add all those tax cuts up, that’s $400-425 million a year in lost revenue and that is directly tied to our recent budget problems.”
Manchin’s financial reports during his candidacy for Governor in 2004 reveal a range of special interest contributions, including coal-related businesses and other mining interests that provided at least $100,000 of his campaign funds, according to the Associated Press.
While the state legislature was controlled by conservative “blue-dog” Democrats like Manchin for most of West Virginia’s history, Republicans have had the upper hand since 2014.
With a Republican backed legislature, Cole arguably has the advantage in the 2016 Gubernatorial race. The WV Coal Association has already endorsed Cole as their candidate for governor of West Virginia.
“Coal and natural gas interests have spent a lot of money in West Virginia and they continue to spend a lot of money,” Plante said. “I think the industry is still going to spend heavily in [future] political campaigns in order to try to get whatever edge they can.”