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?

It’s a very good question. The Marcellus shale will not only be of interest, but it’s a great economic opportunity for us in West Virginia. To put it simply and succinctly, legislation that needs to be addressed with the Marcellus is No. 1, we need to consider surface owners’ rights. Now, in the central part of West Virginia, most of our surface rights and mineral rights are separated. I’m not familiar enough with the land down here — the titles — to know that’s the situation. But that creates a real hardship off and on the surface owners. We need to address surface owners’ rights, not in a manner that would at all deny the owner of minerals or gas underneath from getting to what they own. But so that surface owners are handled respectfully and that there is a required meet and come together on the location of roads, well sites, pipelines and things of that nature before the permits are issued.

Secondly, we need to ensure that the aquifer is protected, that groundwater. The aquifer is what farmers and what the landowners depend on for wells. We’re doing a pretty good job of that. And the technology is there, the casing, the cementing, and all that’s done. When it’s done properly, there should never be a problem with that.

The only question that I have is, do we have adequate inspectors to be there at the site when that critical part of the procedure is being done?

The third thing is that we must be able to monitor and account for the vast amounts of water that are needed for the drilling and fracking process. Just to ensure that streams are not taken, you know, not as much water is taken out of them that is affecting water supplies somewhere else or damaging the aquatic life in that stream.

The fourth thing is we have to have is a system of ensuring that the fluids that when they’re finished with the fracking process are removed, recycled, handled, disposed of properly. I think those are the four key things that have to do with water.

The fifth thing that we really have to ensure — and that’s not necessarily part of the Marcellus legislation — is that we have to ensure that the roads are maintained and repaired when and after all the work has been done. When we go up into Weztel County and Tyler County and those areas and you see the size of trucks and the equipment that’s on those roads, people are concerned in the areas where Marcellus is a big issue.



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



First of all, the present level of benefits are unaffordable and unsustainable. Once we recognize that, what is the solution? No. 1, you know the retirement benefits also affect the OPEB benefits, the age of retirement, etc. One of the things we’re going to have to look at, moving forward, is we’re going to have to have an adjustment on our state employees and teachers’ retirement, particularly the age of retirement. I remember talking when I was in pensions committee my first year in the Senate, seven years ago, and I asked the actuarials one that day that were there, when our pension system was set up, what was the actuarial age of anticipated death? It was 67 and a half. Well, medical science has taken that way beyond an affordable situation. The Social Security system has certainly adjusted their age upward to receive full benefits. And I think we’re no longer in a position where we can afford to have a pension system that allows people to retire at such a young age. The other thing is, when it comes to the OPEB benefits themselves, dealing with health insurance, under most private plans in most states, you would be able to adjust those benefits. In West Virginia, under the McGraw Supreme Court, we basically are kind of locked in to where those benefits are for our present retirees and our present employees that will be retiring. If that is ever changed, then there’s going to have to be a revisit to probably the Supreme Court to find out if we can adjust those. But the thing that’s most important from this day forward — we cannot continue to provide that level of benefits or that retirement system to people we’re hiring right now. We have to change this as we move forward.



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?



We have a tremendous problem in West Virginia in that respect. We’re already paying over 30 cents a gallon tax for road maintenance, etc., on gasoline. The one thing we can’t do and is intolerable to people is to raise the tax, particularly in areas of border counties, where up in my area, my region, a lot of my counties are Virginia counties, and I can tell you, it saves you money to go across the border to buy gas. And every time we do that, then it’s actually hurting our revenues on this side of the border as well. That tax, of course, is what is used for maintenance of our secondary roads. The fundamental problem cannot be addressed by additional taxes. Fundamentally, if we’re going to spend money where it has to be spent in this state, we have to find the efficiencies of government. The efficiencies of government are found, No. 1, by reducing the size of government, by finding the areas we have programs that are not necessarily absolute for the well-being of the people of the state.

One example, just to give you an example, you’ve watched the Legislature operate long enough that you know if the federal government comes along with a program and says, “We’ll give you three bucks; all you have to do is put one dollar into it.”

Nobody ever says, “Do we need the program?”

We just simply say, “Oh, that sounds like a pretty good deal,” and there goes that one dollar.

We have to go back and look at every federal program to see whether or not it’s truly justified. Within the Department of Transportation itself, we’ve got some problems. First of all, they tell me that if we’re going to build a new bridge, about a third of the cost is in design. I can’t buy that. I used to run an engineering company years ago. And I know that our costs are high when we’re hiring professional people. But I just can’t absolutely fathom that a third of the cost of a new road or a new bridge is going to be the engineering. One of those problems that we have there is the system that we do for bidding. Instead of bidding out an engineering job or an architectural job, we’re actually bidding out hours rather than dollars. And it seems to be in looking at the system, that an awful lot of people that would like to bid those hours — smaller firms, etc. — may not be even getting a chance to bid on those projects. We’re simply going to the same people all the time. It would also seem that as soon as they use up those hours, they can go automatically back and say, “Well, we need more hours,” and then that’s not bid out at all, even those hours. They’re just awarded another contract for the additional amount of hours. We have engineers sitting in every district office. We have engineers sitting in our Charleston office. There’s something wrong when we have to go continually out for those engineering services, and there’s something wrong when those engineering services can’t be bid on a valid basis. Those are just some of the inefficiencies in government.



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?



Education reform has to be done in a manner that we have true educators onboard working on the process. We are not going to achieve education reform as long as the agenda is driven by the unions. The unions have one purpose, and that is simply to protect their employees, their membership. The purpose of a union is not to drive the agenda of education. And that’s unfortunately what we have in West Virginia.

The second problem that all educators tend to agree on — administrative educators, educators in the classrooms  — is that we have a huge failure in America, and in West Virginia, as a result of No Child Left Behind. That was absolutely the socialism of the education system. It’s been an abject failure. We have gone down hill since then. And what we have done is, we have just put administrative process, after administrative process, after administrative process in the way of true education.

One of the things that I would hope to accomplish — now bear in mind that only 8 percent of the money that we get for education comes from the federal government. A big part of that is used right down there at the Department of Education to tell our school boards how to teach according to No Child Left Behind — how to meet federal guidelines. We talk about 10th Amendment rights. When is the time for states to assert their constitutional rights when the federal government has basically pre-empted and has been treading on the rights of our citizens? And I think that’s one of the areas that they have pre-empted their rights. But we’ll have to make the choice. What I’d like to do — I’d like to tell the federal government, “You keep your 8 percent.”

 We’ll find another way to fund our education if we need that money. But right now, we’re taking our schools back, and we’re going to bring those teachers’ abilities back to the classroom so that they’re not teaching on a schedule defined by someone else, that they’re teaching in a manner that’s creative again.



(Do you favor the concept of charter schools?)



Yes, I do. No. 1, I think it gets us out of the box. I have been visiting schools around the state, and I have visited several that are not innovation-zone schools. That’s as close to a charter school as we were allowed to come with our last round of education reform. I have not found a school yet — teachers, administrators, etc. — that weren’t absolutely delighted by the results that they were getting. I can quote one principal at Davis Elementary in Barboursville, and a teacher who was sitting there — “We will never work in another school that is not an innovation zone school.”

There is that much difference. And no longer constrained by the clock — this is how many minutes we can spend here, how many minutes we can spend here. They feel like they’re not leaving any child behind, but they’re not holding back their best and brightest, either.



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, and do you have any specific plans for interdiction efforts?



With me sitting on the oversight commission of regional jails and prisons, I’m very aware of what our problem is. They tell us about 70 percent of our people incarcerated right now are in because of drug-related incidents, not necessarily charges, but drug-related incidents. It’s a huge problem. I’m not sure I can answer this question in five minutes because there are so many approaches we have got to take. We certainly have already been investing money in prevention. We have to do as much prevention and invest as much in prevention as we can, as long as it is working. We can’t just keep throwing money at prevention if it’s not preventing anything. At some point, we have to look and see what are the effects of our prevention program. Secondly, where are our real drug problems? First of all, we don’t even try to enforce marijuana laws any more. We’ve gone beyond that. Our law enforcement, if they happen on it, that’s one thing, but they certainly aren’t looking for it.

The No. 1 problem is prescription medications. And why is that such a problem? Because they don’t affect just kids or people looking for a high, but it affects all of us that are out here that end up on pain medication for whatever reason. So it’s a prescriptive problem. I feel that we need to improve our database. We are not requiring physicians to go to that database before they write prescriptions. It’s available to them. We made it available. But it’s not required for them to do it. Now, I’ve been told that one of the reasons that they don’t use it is that it’s not user-friendly. It’s not up to date. And we need to fix that. That database absolutely needs to be fixed. It’s capable of being real-time. In this day and age, we need to make it real-time. If it’s not user-friendly, we need to make it user-friendly, because we have that capability as well. When physicians are having to take a great deal of their time — and they’re all about seeing patients, and I understand that, it’s the business of medicine — they certainly are not going to want to spend an extra 15 or 20 minutes trying to access a database if that database should be accessible in just a few seconds. And I really, truly believe it should be. So we need to fix the database. We need to get physicians required to use it. We need to get drug stores required to use it.

Then the next problem is the Sudafed problem. And that problem is a huge problem with our residents. It’s amazing how many eighth-grade dropouts have become chemists. It’s just astounding. I think they probably could have finished school. The meth problem still needs to be addressed. We’ve taken great strides in our law enforcement. I’ve talked to, in several counties, that when we put it behind the counter, and now there’s a signature sheet that they’re signing that, and they’re actually cracking down, and it made a world of difference in the drug crisis and the meth.

To take the Sudafed and put it in the same category as prescription painkillers, I opposed that this year and simply because, first of all, that’s not working. The prescription drug problem is still there. It’s not going to address that. One of the things we can do, “smurfing,” with Sudafed as the problem, one of the things we can do to address that is we can require someone only to purchase Sudafed if they have a local driver’s license or have to swipe the driver’s license to be able to tell. There are simpler things we can do to stem that “smurfing” problem.

 And then the other thing is, we’re still not good at taking care of our mentally ill and the drug problem is a part of mental illness. We have to address it. We’re going to have to address it. We’re going to invest more money in the problem. Down at Clarksburg, United Hospital Center built a new building. They’re trying  to convert the old hospital into a big drug treatment facility. And I think that is a great idea. One of the biggest problems we have is still public assistance. When I talked to local drug groups, school systems, it seems like people on public assistance and workers’ compensation seem to be the biggest abusers, particularly of prescription pain medicine. School administrators tell me the children that are causing the most problem within our schools are the children of the same people that are on public assistance, and they’re also abusing drugs as well.

I’m OK with drug testing, but only if we’re prepared to deal with the problem. Not necessarily just, “Jack over here takes a drug, he’s on public assistance, he fails his drug test, now we take his kids and his wife and all that off.”

It’s got to be more than that. We’ve got to be prepared to deal with kids, the children, his rehabilitation, etc.



Please highlight the key points of your gubernatorial platform.



I believe you’ve hit most of them already. I think those are certainly areas of the people’s greatest concerns. I think particularly in conservative America, and when I say conservative West Virginia, I’m not talking just Republicans, I’m talking about probably most Democrats as well. We have concerns about the growth of government. Even though our population in West Virginia has been stagnant for decades, the growth of government has just been phenomenal. If there’s anything that we can do that’s going to change our business climate from the aspect of what we can do as a state, it’s...Let’s start making government work with people, with businesses, instead of feeling like government bureaucracies are there to be an impediment to everything happening. And I think that’s an attitude of government a lot of time, particularly bureaucracies, and employees within bureaucracies, is that “I was hired to stop you from doing whatever it is you want.”

We need to change that attitude of every employee within state government to “I’m here to help you with whatever you want.”

That doesn’t mean we don’t enforce regulations. We do. But regulation is another issue. We need to examine our entire regulation system and find out what’s overburdensome, what are we regulating that don’t even need to be regulated. My gosh, I get tired of reading regulations in Judiciary Committee. It’s like, do we really need to add another regulation to this, or can we just throw this whole thing out the window? And sometimes, it would seem that way.