The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia

Local News

November 19, 2009

OPEB delay clears house

Mannix Porterfield

CHARLESTON — Delegates moved Thursday to give school boards a one-year breather in paying medical costs of retirees, but the lopsided approval proved nothing more than a gesture.

Over in the more conservative Senate, the bill was a goner, even before arrival.

“It’s still dead over here,” Senate Finance Chairman Walt Helmick, D-Pocahontas, said after the 82-14 passage by the House.

Gov. Joe Manchin wanted to give school boards a one-year moratorium until the Other Post-Employment Benefits issue can be more carefully examined.

But Helmick’s committee only a day earlier rejected the idea and instead formed a special interims panel to look over the issue before the 2010 session starts. “The committee just doesn’t have a real appetite for it right now,” Helmick said.

OPEB’s liability is pegged at $7 billion, or twice the old red ink that had accumulated in the workers’ compensation system before it was privatized.

“We can talk intelligently about it,” Helmick said of his special panel.

“We need some type of plan. We just can’t simply delay, and that’s what we’re doing (in Manchin’s bill).”

Republican lawmakers put up a futile battle against it on the House floor.

“This is a one-year moratorium to hide debt and cook our financial reports from which the government will sell bonds,” Delegate Daryl Cowles, R-Morgan, complained.

“That bothers me and worries me. It creates some big trouble.”

Delegate Jonathan Miller, R-Berkeley, said the same tack was taken in other states and failed.

“This is not a solution at all,” he said.

Miller likened it to taking a 30-year home mortgage to a bank and trying to get it considered as a one-year loan.

“That doesn’t solve anything,” Miller said. “It doesn’t even buy you any time.”

In defense of the bill, Delegate Sam Cann, D-Harrison, said no one can say for now how to properly deal with OPEB.

But to give school boards some breathing room for one year is “appropriate,” he said.

“Until we answer these underlying questions, I’m not sure that we haven’t cooked the books the other way,” he added.

Named to Helmick’s panel were Sens. Bill Laird, D-Fayette; Brooks McCabe, D-Kanawha; Robert Plymale, D-Wayne; Roman Prezioso, D-Marion; Richard Browning, D-Wyoming; Dave Sypolt, R-Preston; and Mike Hall, R-Putnam.

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