Parkersburg News and Sentinel - A town hall meeting concerning the impact of school closures on education will be held from 6-7:30 p.m. Monday in the banquet room at the Worthington Golf Course. Read the full article. The meeting, which will include a time for questions and answers, is sponsored by the Parkersburg Area Labor…
Tax and Budget
Following this year’s regular legislative session, the need for sufficient funding and support for public schools remains. Although several bills were introduced this session to modernize the school funding formula, prevent school closures, and provide increased pay and benefits for school employees, none of these bills passed. Meanwhile, the legislature approved continued funding for the…
Hampshire Review - The Hope Scholarship is an education savings account program available for K-12 students. It is an entitlement program that allows parents to use the state portion of their child’s education funding to provide individualized schooling for their child. For the 2024-2025 school year, just under $5,000 is being provided to each scholarship…
The final FY 2026 budget passed by the legislature during the 2025 legislative session closely resembled the budget introduced by Governor Morrisey back in February- largely flat from previous years with the impact of tax cuts and the ballooning cost of the Hope Scholarship crowding out many new investments. While the final budget was balanced…
Engineering News-Record East - West Virginia is gearing up to capture a big part of the booming data center market with new legislation that would allow developers to create independent microgrids to power their data centers. Read the full article. The Power Generation and Consumption Act, which is now awaiting Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s signature to become…
Charleston Gazette-Mail - “It’s kind of the perfect storm,” said Kelly Allen, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy. “All of the spending and tax cuts are starting to hit the budget at the same time that those temporary revenue factors helped us make the case for the tax cuts have…
West Virginia Watch - West Virginia has a foster care problem, and despite lawmakers introducing several bills to try to address the issues, only one of those passed both chambers. The governor has yet to sign it into law. Read the full op-ed. That one bill — House Bill 2880 — passed on the final night of…
Huntington Herald-Dispatch - The West Virginia Legislature has passed controversial, far-reaching legislation aimed at attracting facilities that could grow the state’s tax base but also threaten to raise power bills and cause environmental harm. Read the full article. In the final hours of the state’s 2025 regular legislative session Saturday night, the Senate sent House…
HB 2014, the "Microgrid bill" establishes special rules for the property tax distribution from High Impact Data Centers. Under it, all ad valorem property tax from the incremental assessed value of the data center is diverted to the state rather than the county sheriff’s tax office- that includes property tax revenue that would have been…
West Virginia Public Broadcasting - On this episode of The Legislature Today, microgrids are one of Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s top legislative priorities this year, and House Bill 2014 is the vehicle to bring more of them to the state. But county officials came to testify earlier this week against the diversion of local property taxes from those facilities…