1 — It certainly appears that Marcellus shale regulation will remain a major topic of interest for the next several years. What are the key features that you see that need to be included in West Virginia law to best serve the interests of all the parties involved?



I was very disappointed when the Legislature, the leadership, was not able to finish up a bill regarding Marcellus shale regulations. It is a wonderful opportunity for West Virginia, the exploration of the Marcellus shale, for many reasons. We want to certainly take charge of that to help West Virginia’s economic situation. But we want to make sure that our landowners, that our mineral owners, their property is protected, that our communities are protected so that their water supply not only is not depleted but it’s not left in a situation that it’s not usable. We want to make sure that we preserve our water supply. We want to make sure — you know, roads get pretty beat up during the Marcellus drilling process. And we want to make sure those roads get put back together, maybe in better shape than they were. That means we all need to know the rules up front, and this is a perfect time to do this because we’re really at the beginning of this process, although I think probably 2,400 wells already have been drilled.

We’re really at the beginning of this process. And so everybody knows the rules. The corporations, the producers, the drillers, the state, the DEP, the landowners... If everybody knows what the rules are, we can really plan, and we can certainly agree that we know what we’re in it for. We want to be fair to the drillers and the producers so they can make a profit. We want to make sure the state gets a piece of that, certainly. And we want to make sure that our citizens are taken care of regarding their property and the environmental needs. One thing that I think we definitely need to look at regarding Marcellus shale is downstream product, rather than just looking at the drilling and all the ancillary businesses that come from that and the employment on those rigs, rather than just sending all that gas down to the gulf.

There are downstream products that we can use. Marcellus gas is high in methane-ethane. If we take that ethane out and convert it into say ethylene oxide and use that as a basis for plastics — I would love to see our use of that to expand the chemical industry. I work at Matric Mid-Atlantic Technical Resource Innovation Center. We have scientists who work on that every single day. I know the potential of what we can extract as downstream products from the Marcellus gas. I think it’s a wonderful way to expand industry, particularly the chemical industry in West Virginia, and also to have our employees, who work here in West Virginia, be skilled in technical research, for instance, chemical lab techs or drilling techs, some way we can put them to work, not only on the rigs, but also in these ancillary businesses that spin off as downstream products. We have talked to major producers. They’re very, very interested in this.



2 — As the debt for OPEB continues to rise, what steps need to be taken to stem the tide and begin reversing this trend?



We definitely need to take steps like the Legislature did with the retirement plans eight years ago. The Legislature knew we were in trouble with these underfunded plans. They’re still underfunded, but the Legislature did put into effect on the pension plan side, a 40-year amortization schedule, which I think is up in 2034. Hundreds of millions of dollars every single year that need to go into that, but there is a schedule, and we’re meeting it so far, and that’s a good thing. Same thing needs to happen on the OPEB side. I am schooled in employee benefits. I was a professional pension consultant, and I ran the state retirement system, and I know a lot about the PEIA and how we got to the point with the retiree health benefits. I think what the Legislature did a year or two ago in changing rules for prospective employees was a step in the right direction — stop using some of the excess, unused days to expand your health benefits. Has to be. Can’t do anything about the benefits for people who are already there. But I think the Legislature was bold in taking that step.

 I liked very much what Sen. Brooks McCabe had done with his studies on the OPEB issue. I liked the proposal that the state would, in fact, cap how many dollars they would put in each year to go toward the OPEB debt. I also, having been an employee benefit professional, I would also like to look every year at our actuarial assumption to make sure in the OPEB calculations, to make sure they are accurate, and they’re accurately reflecting the trends, not as just projections, but they’re projections based on actual experience with that group of people.

I think there are ways also that we can encourage our employees to stay until they’re 65 so that they have Medicare as their primary health care provider, rather than the PEIA. There are ways to do that to incentivize that. I think there are times when the financial market cooperates, and we have excess earnings on the pension side, and we don’t need to put as much in as the actuarial said on that pay down debt, take that and dedicate it to the OPEB side.

I think also when the old workers’ comp fund is paid off — I think that’s 2016 — definitely we need to take those monies and dedicate them to the OPEB debt. It is not smoke and mirrors. It has been there all along. It’s just federal government accounting standards are now making us recognize that as a state debt, and we need to pay attention to it. We need to address it, just like we did the pension debt.



3 — Transportation remains a significant issue, especially in our region. What specifically will you do as governor to try to resolve the funding crisis as it relates to financing new construction and providing for adequate maintenance of our existing roads and bridges?



There’s no question that infrastructure is a huge problem and a huge priority for any West Virginia governor. Our roads took a beating this past winter. I was very dismayed that for the past two years the Legislature chose to use stimulus money to backfill the budget, rather than use it for infrastructure repair. I think they missed a chance to have the political courage to make those hard decisions to cut their budget, so in fact those stimulus dollars could have been used for infrastructure. I was dismayed at that. That having been said, where we get the money to build our bridges and fix our roads is from the gasoline tax. One thing we have to do primarily — we get federal funding as well — I think we need to keep that escalator frozen. There’s an escalator in the gasoline tax. Then-Gov, Manchin froze that. There is no way in the world we can let that continue to rise because of the price of gasoline right now. So we need to take a look at that.

My approach to the government is to audit where we have agencies that have wasteful spending, cut the waste, cut the duplication of service and dedicate those savings to infrastructure and also to the extent we need to pay down that OPEB debt. So, you can’t manufacture dollars. Those dollars have to be there to fix our roads. And we have to find that without raising taxes. That means you find it by cutting back, not service, but you cut back on duplicating services. You cut the waste, you find better ways to provide the citizens those services and use those dollars to dedicate to our infrastructure. We have certain dollars that are dedicated there. Instead of building new roads and so forth, we need to go and fix what we have. We probably should take a look at how we expand our orphaned highways program. We may want to take a closer look — instead of just automatically accepting roads, we need to take a look at the ones we already have. It’s going to take tough decisions. You’re going to have make some tough decisions about how we keep our roads fixed, not only for citizens. If you don’t have good roads, you cannot have commercial transportation, in and out of the state, and it will hurt our businesses.



4 — One of former Gov. Joe Manchin’s major platform issues was education reform. While much was discussed, no wide-ranging changes to the way we educate our children have been made in the recent past. What are your plans when it comes to education reform?



We’re failing our children. And I don’t think we’re giving the taxpayers a good return on how much we spend per capita on education. We’re one of the highest per capita spending in education states around. I think primarily when you talk to teachers around the state, No. 1 on their list is not the pay issue, although who doesn’t want more money? We certainly do. It is the regulation, the restriction, that they feel so confined in such a narrow shell of what they have to do in the classroom that they cannot teach the kids what they want to teach them. I think the answer lies in understanding that there is no “one size fits all” solution to every one of our schools. No two counties are the same. No two schools within each of those counties are the same. I think we need more flexibility. I think we need more creativity. I think we need to unburden the teachers from this horrible mandate of testing, testing, testing, so that they can teach rather than test.

I think teachers will also tell you that truancy is a huge problem for them. And that’s tied into a number of difficult social situations we have in West Virginia. But we’ve got to find a way to get parents to get their kids to school. Teachers would also tell you that social promotion is a problem for them. That when they get into fourth or fifth grade, a teacher has a kid who can’t recognize his name or whatever. We need to keep the child in the classroom where he is until he can pass whatever the rudimentary requirements are for that particular grade. Moving them on for someone else to take care of doesn’t help the teachers. It doesn’t help the child. It certainly doesn’t help the class in those forward grades.

I also firmly believe that we need a universal evaluation system for all teachers, so that we look at all teachers the same. We look at them at least every other year, maybe every three years, and go down the benchmarks and see if they have hit those benchmarks. Not just on testing. That’s not the only way to grade a teacher. But all those things, and for those teachers who are not meeting the grade, we might give them another year’s grace period. If they haven’t done it, they have to move on. We can’t afford to have in our classrooms teachers who are not doing what they need to do and not using the skills that they need to have these kids learn.

Lastly, I think we need more use of technology in our classrooms. In the rural counties that only have one high school, irrespective of the fact that kids are on buses for hours, you don’t have enough resources to teach these kids all the things that they could have that maybe bigger high schools or multi-high school counties have. I think we need to stream in advanced learning to them. What a wonderful thing to let these kids see what’s going on in other states, other counties, so they could learn and get advanced placement credits, whereas now we may not be able to afford to offer those classes. In order to have technology in the classroom, you have to have broadband. You have to expand broadband throughout West Virginia. We talk about “No Child Left Behind.” We want no state left behind. But West Virginia is going to be left behind if we don’t wire this state.

(Do you favor charter schools?)

You know, I am looking favorably more and more toward charter schools, only because I like choice. But I will tell you this, I will not stand for those kids who are left out in a non-charter school, either because their parents don’t know about it, or they can’t afford to go it, or they don’t get chosen. You saw that movie, “Waiting for Superman.” I will not allow those kids who are left behind or those schools that are left behind to become just a place where you just threw up kids, the ones who did not get to go into the charter schools. This is my biggest concern about charter schools — the ones who don’t get in by no fault of their own don’t get a quality education. All the resources are taken out of the public school. If you have a charter school, and let’s say 10 percent of the kids go there, and they take their vouchers with them, what resource is left for those kids who are left behind? We have to look at all our children.



5 — We are constantly being told, and are witnessing every day, the far-reaching impacts of drug abuse. What will you do as governor to address the epidemic of drug abuse? Do you have any specific plans for interdiction efforts?



One of the top three issues that employers have in West Virginia, in either continuing to do business or starting businesses, is the availability of a dependable and educated and drug-free work force. There are areas of the state that are worse than others in drug addictions. You know that the state of West Virginia has the highest death rate of prescription drug overdoses. Indeed, we will attack this problem. Regarding prescription doctors, for instance. How do people get them? Are they getting illegal prescriptions? Is it a matter of stealing pills out of grandma’s medicine chest? I don’t think so. I think they’re going to doctors who are fraudulently using the system so that when these people get 90 days worth of pills... Why 90 days worth of oxycodone? Why are we doing this? Go out on the street, and sell these pills. I know for a fact there are doctors who are getting a piece of the cash action as a result of having given those 90-day prescriptions, and people go out and sell them and give the money back to the doctors. I know there are doctors who are defrauding Medicare and Medicaid with these types of arrangements with their patients. I want investigators to go after them, and I want those doctors in jail. I want the drug pushers in jail. I want the dealers in jail. I do not want someone who is addicted to drugs or alcohol to go jail.

We need more in-state resident treatment centers for those people so they can become producing members of society again. It is a terrible problem. We have to address it. It’s making choices — tough choices — about how much resource you’re going to spend in this, and are you really going to get tough about the people who are defrauding the system?



 Please highlight the key points of your gubernatorial campaign.



 We have on our face card three of our main planks in our platform. You will notice they are economy, energy and education. We have talked about each of these, actually. The first thing I’m going to do on inauguration day, if elected governor, is sign an executive order that’s going to set up a governor’s council of economic advisers. And that will be a blue-ribbon committee of outside professionals and several folks within the administration. And we’re going to look at every single executive agency and have line-by-line audits, looking for waste, looking for duplicate services. You know, state government is full of turfism. You make widgets. I’m in another agency. I make widgets. We want to continue making widgets. Not going to happen. We need to put that together. We’re going to look for excessive staffing, where we don’t need that many people. So that we can cut the size of the budget, so we can put those savings toward infrastructure and toward OPEB. I also want to introduce the idea of performance-based budgeting, not zero-based budgeting. I would love to do zero-based budgeting, but I’m not sure the agencies are ready for that. That’s something I might want to do down the road.

You know, every year, an agency, one time a year, goes in front of the Legislature, presents the budget — this is what we need. First of all, I want to come back more than one time a year, and I want the agencies to have to report on a series of benchmarks that we have set — efficiency, energy efficiency, money savings, your employees come to work, where are those things that you have done — and we’ll evaluate you. If you haven’t met your mark, we’ll send you back, and you’re not going to get an increase. And, oh, by the way, the money you’ve got squirreled away, that you’ve been pulling from year to year because you got to keep that. You didn’t have to use that first, and you say, “Oh, there’s a hole in my budget, I’ll just pull over that 2003 money.”

We’ll stop that. We’re going to take those monies away, hopefully, and put them toward infrastructure and the OPEB debt. You’re not going to have the luxury of looking back, and if you can’t meet your mark this year, of pulling back something from the past. You’re going to have to live within your budget. The council of economic advisers would be similar to the federal General Accounting Office, and we’re going to have performance-based budgeting. That is the cornerstone of my economic plan.

We’re getting ready to roll out our 11-point policy points. We have seriously, seriously thought about how we’re going to approach problems and initiatives in West Virginia for progress and prosperity.

I think, at the end of the day, people need to understand how critical this election is. First of all, we have a Saturday primary. We’re going to encourage people to vote early, because it might be a sunny day in May, and people may decide, “I don’t want to do that.” We have a shorter early voting period this time. Starts April 29. We encourage to go out to vote early.

The general election is Oct. 4. We are the first election of four gubernatorial elections this year — Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky. We are being looked at across the country. We believe we are going to be targeted by those forces that have gone to other states and had trouble, for instance, with collective bargaining issues. We think it’s going to be a very lively and serious campaign. We want people in West Virginia to understand that there’s a lot at stake in this special gubernatorial election. I have won a statewide race. I have beat the tax-and-spend machine at the statehouse, and I can do it again.