Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The sad thing is leadership since the 50's hasn't helped to attract anything and we are the only state since the 50's to actually lose population. We are the only state not to have their corridor roads completed which shows most of our representatives are useless. Corridor H was started in the 60's and even though they talk of finishing it soon it's probably other 20 to 30 years to finish what is left and Virginia has yet to commit to the remaining part in their state. No roads anywhere else takes 60 to 80 years to complete. West Virginia has a small town mentality where many times small minded leaders actually try to keep businesses out they fear will compete with businesses they own. Besides Morgantown, Putnam County and the eastern panhandle little has changed in 60 years anywhere else in the state and what change has occurred has been negative and loss of jobs and businesses. I don't care who the president or governor is even with the best of leadership anything south of Charleston is dead for generations. Welfare and addiction have taken over and education in that part of the state has always lagged behind because it was always understood in the past you would work in the mines. That part of the state has lost at least 250,000 in the last 70 years. Mcdowell County alone went from a population in 1950 98,887 to a estimate in 2019 of 17,624. That's 80,000 in just that county. Kanawha since the 60's has lost 75.000 people even with all the money that flows through there. I'm not a huge Justice fan but is Ben Salango any better. He brags about being on the commission of Kanawha County that keeps losing 10% of its population every 10 years. We have such corruption and little vision and it's now to a point the fix will take decades. Infrastructure,roads,schools and broadband has to be addressed and fixed and that wouldn't be cheap for a poor state. At this point I don't know what the answers are but electing the same people from either party to lifetime appointments that don't improve anything has to stop. I am 59 years old and in that time there have been only 6 senators from this state and primarily 5. The state road department is a corrupt joke and most elected officials have always seemed corrupt.
There are people who if they ran against Justice I would vote for. Salango would not be one of them. Trial lawyers getting into politics is not a good thing but that's just my view.
Ok I've been consciously aware of the WV situation since the 1980's and it's all I've ever heard since then from dems and reps alike. My God this is nothing new. WV has been like this for decades and they were probably saying the same thing going back to at least the 1950's as well too.
WV has a land problem. There isn't enough cheap usable land here to produce any type of meaningful economic recovery. Our economy came from our land which primarily consisted of hills because we actually have very few mountains. Anyhow those hills had coal that people mined. Once mining was basically dying all that hill land is pretty much worthless for economic development. (In before anyone cries But What About the Tourism!) which makes about as much sense and dollars as telling unemployed miners to learn to code.
GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY. WV is a poor landlocked and rugged terrain place and there just isn't much to work with or for here. I don't care what politician you support or what the agenda is. Facts are facts and WV outside of a few things here or there is not setup to have what's needed to become an economic engine.
Very few politicians outside of Byrd actually did much to generate economic activity here. I'm not much of a fan of him either but he did bring in the pork projects and probably was responsible for laying the foundation of a good but of what's going on in the north central part of the state right now.
I want to add a little explanation about what Robert Byrd did. As he attained seniority in the Senate, he eventually became Majority leader, but stepped down to chair the Appropriations Committee. He said he could better work to help WV that way. He pushed to get things like the FBI center near Clarksburg, the Treasury in Parkersburg, the CIA in the Eastern Panhandle, investments at Greenbank, huge research grants at both WVU and Marshall, and the list goes on and on. He'd point his finger at the others on Appropriations and tell them that they all got huge amounts of federal funding via large military bases employing 15,000, 20,000, and 30,000 people each, pumping millions of dollars into local economies, but WV had ZERO large military bases, so he was pushing to get those facilities built in WV as a token amount of fairness and compensation. Of course, the Senators we have now are not even shadows of Robert Byrd.
For example, he'd remind people what Norfolk, Ft. Hood, Camp Lajune, and Cape Canaveral bring into those areas while WV got a few thousand jobs at the FBI fingerprint center. It was chump change by comparison, but at least he got those jobs put in WV.
Hard times ahead for West Virginia. Solar and wind are the new energy initiative.
Hard times? Coal has been on the decline since the 90s. They already were warning WV to reinvent itself and seek new ways to generate sustaining revenue but the state ignored (and still does to this day) it and sought the lazy way out. "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" if you will - why seek new ways to improve and to cement your future when you can just go with what works. There is literally no excuse or defense for this - they had over two decades to do this and chose to do nothing. You reap what you sow.
To play Devil's advocate, Salango has only been a Kanawha County Commissioner for what, 3 years? It's unfair to lump him in with the blanket statement regarding Kanawha County's continued population decline.
Hard times? Coal has been on the decline since the 90s. They already were warning WV to reinvent itself and seek new ways to generate sustaining revenue but the state ignored (and still does to this day) it and sought the lazy way out. "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" if you will - why seek new ways to improve and to cement your future when you can just go with what works. There is literally no excuse or defense for this - they had over two decades to do this and chose to do nothing. You reap what you sow.
The 1990's? It's been on the decline longer than that. The number of employees has been consistently dropping since the 1930's.
The 1990's? It's been on the decline longer than that. The number of employees has been consistently dropping since the 1930's.
This. The decline in coal-centric Appalachia (I live just over the Potomac in Western Maryland where we still mine the big vein) has been going for 3 generations or so by now.
There is no magic switch, nor silver bullet that returns our region to those days, or magically creates the same economic conditions. I wish I had some great answers, but I don't other than to make your own life. Find a job that works for you. Find a community you enjoy living in. That's my way of dealing with it, carving out my own life here and associating with other people who find enough value living here to do the same thing.
Don't forget, there's a lot of politics and pettiness going on with the situation in California. PG&E is waging a war against the state of California, even though PG&E has been a having issues for decades and not keeping their grid updated with investments. It's been all about profit.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
