House of Delegates

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — As the West Virginia House of Delegates gets close to the halfway point of the regular 60-day session, members are spending even more time in debate during floor sessions and lengthy committee meetings. A total of 11 bills have completed legislation and are waiting for action from the Governor, including Senate Bill 14, which would allow more avenues for potential teachers to receive certification in an effort to mitigate the state’s current shortages for teachers.

One of the most crucial issue Delegates from both political parties wanted to make strides to improve broadband access throughout the state. House Bill 2002, which passed the full House this week, would make it easier for telecommunications providers to attach fiberoptic cable to poles, provide right-of-way access on state rights of way and define what actually constitutes broadband service in West Virginia.

“The pandemic and the situations that have grown out of it in the past 11 months have made it clear that broadband service is a critical component of overall educational opportunities, healthcare services and business expansion here in West Virginia,” said House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay. “The purpose of this bill is to make sure West Virginia is heading into the 21st Century as prepared as we can possibly be.”

The West Virginia Legislature’s bipartisan work on broadband this year was even highlighted this week by the Pew Research Center.

“Even though the federal government has the greatest amount of funds available to support these efforts, and the laws passed by the Congress — and subsequent regulations — are supreme, state and local leaders have the ability to innovate and to act significantly more nimbly than our federal partners,” Delegate Daniel Linville, R-Cabell, and lead sponsor of the broadband bill, said to Pew this week. “State and local leaders can identify challenges at the federal level and look to solve them — like our recent work in utilizing consumer-supplied rather than provider-supplied data to map the state of internet access across West Virginia.”

Another topic the Legislature has debated for the past several years, creating an intermediate court of appeals, continues to move through the legislative process in the form of Senate Bill 275. The House Judiciary Committee hosted a virtual public hearing on the measure this week before making some changes to the bill. The committee offered changes that would trim the number of judges created by the new court, as well as ensuring the Supreme Court maintains some discretion in where cases are heard. Another change made in the Judiciary Committee would send fees collected by the new court to The Ryan Brown Addiction Prevention and Recovery Fund, rather than the West Virginia State Police Forensic Laboratory, where previous drafts of the measure had directed those potential fees. “When this bill clears the House next week, West Virginia will join a majority of states in guaranteeing an intermediate and full and meaningful right of appeal to all litigants in civil and criminal cases,” Hanshaw said. The bill goes to the House Finance Committee next week for further debate.

Many of the measures considered to be a priority for House leadership already have passed the entire House of Delegates and are now in the hands of the Senate for debate, including bills that would eliminate duplicative and unnecessary layers of bureaucracy that stands between many of our professionally licensed workers already in West Virginia and those working in other states who may want to relocate to the Mountain State as well as students looking to get licensed and start performing contractor work.

Another measure designed to improve the quality of life in West Virginia while promoting economic growth, House Bill 2024, would allow health care professionals from other states, when registered through the appropriate West Virginia board, to practice in West Virginia through telehealth. This bill aims to get government out of the way, so residents have easy access to a much wider scope of services, even in remote and rural areas. This measure also passed the full House and is awaiting action in the Senate.

The full Legislature also fast-tracked Senate Bill 459 this week, which would undo an unintended loophole for a narrow issue related to the state retirement system. Delegate Philip Diserio, D-Brooke, told Delegates this week the need for this measure was made clear to him after a 17-year-old high school student in his district had tragically lost both parents who both were part of the state retirement system. Under current law, a minor is entitled to receive the parents’ retirement benefits payments in the event of the parents’ death, but this student will turn 18 soon, and under current law, he would have been cut off from those benefits after 3 months.

“I’m happy we could step in and work to help this family in this specific situation, because the young man’s father was a local firefighter who had died after falling ill with COVID,” Diserio said. “But overall, this is something that needed to be done for all our first responders so we can be sure we protect those who protect us.”

This bill has completed legislation and is waiting for action from the governor.

Members of the Legislature this week also saw an outline of Gov. Jim Justice’s proposals for eliminating the personal income tax.

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