Quantez Burks is one of hundreds of people who died in a West Virginia jail or prison since 2020. With the permission of Mr. Burks’s family, the WVCBP created this report in his name to do what the WV Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) and state leaders have not: acknowledge the people who died in their facilities and the ripples of pain created by those deaths.
The Quantez Burks Report is a list of deaths in WV jails and prisons, updated monthly. Each row in the report represents a human being – an entire world of hopes, talents, memories, and people loved.
Because this list relies on information provided by DCR, we know it will not always be accurate. For nearly two years, DCR reported the fiction that Mr. Burks died a “natural” death – in spite of the state medical examiner’s report of homicide within weeks of his death.
In March 2022, a group of state employees beat Quantez Burks to death inside Southern Regional Jail. Three years later, eight former correctional officers have been sentenced to a combined 105 years behind bars for their roles in his death.
It is hard to find justice in individualized punishment when DCR remains insulated from scrutiny or accountability.
To date, DCR has yet to publicly reckon with this organized violence against Mr. Burks. The agency, which eats up half a billion state dollars each year, has not offered any plan for how it will prevent violence and other harms in its dozens of facilities around the state. After three years, its leaders have not apologized to Mr. Burks’s family.
We owe a debt to Mr. Burks’s mother, Kimberly Burks, who made certain that her family and all of us learned the truth about what happened to her son. She pushed for a second, independent autopsy. She showed up at a gubernatorial town hall meeting to demand answers from then-Governor Jim Justice. She joined other families who lost loved ones to West Virginia’s deadly regional jail system to demand a federal investigation. (Mr. Burks was the third of at least 11 people who died at Southern Regional Jail in 2022.)
We asked the people who loved him most to tell us about the man they called “Quan.” You can read what they shared with us here.
Quantez Burks was not the only person to die under state control. Since 2020, at least 307 people have died in a West Virginia jail or prison. There is no public list of these deaths. Instead, the public must use the Freedom of Information Act law to force DCR to provide it.
We hope to help address this lack of transparency through the Quantez Burks Report. But we know reporting and information alone will not save lives and prevent harm behind bars. Which is why we call on DCR and state leaders to do what will: reduce the number of people in jail and prison.
There is a role for every person who wants a West Virginia that sends fewer people to jail and prison.
With enough determination, you can start a court watch program to bear witness to the injustices that happen every day in empty court rooms. You can help a loved one prepare for an upcoming parole hearing. You can blow the whistle on violence and neglect behind bars. You can organize for changes inside a prison or start a support group in your county for families of incarcerated people.
You don’t have to do any of these things alone.
If you are ready to begin work on any of the above–or if you have information about a person who died in DCR custody who does not appear on this list–please reach out to Sara Whitaker, senior criminal legal policy analyst here.
Mr. Burks’s family showed us that accountability will only come when we demand it.
Read the full report and introductory blog post.
In FY 2025, West Virginia saw declines in state tax collections for the second year in a row. Coupled with declining gross domestic product (GDP) and anemic job growth, the numbers paint a stark picture for the state’s economy, particularly amid a slowing national economy and significant federal policy changes set to shift hundreds of millions annually in costs onto the state budget. Here is a deeper dive into the numbers.
West Virginia ended FY 2025 with $5.52 billion in General Revenue collections, a decrease of $191 million from FY 2024, and down $964 million from FY 2023. The period between FYs 2023 and 2025 marked the first time since the Great Recession that West Virginia experienced two consecutive years of revenue decline. Meanwhile, economic growth–promised to occur due to the tax cuts–has been slow, and not nearly enough to offset the cost of the tax cuts.
Most of the decline in FY 2025 was due to further cuts to the personal income tax. The deep tax cuts of 2023 led to a steep decline in personal income tax revenue, which fell by $424 million in FY 2024. Additional tax cuts in 2024 led to even more decline, with personal income tax revenue falling by an additional $113 million.
Other major sources of revenue for the state’s budget saw little gains or declines in FY 2025. The sales tax, West Virginia’s second largest source of revenue after the income tax, saw essentially no growth in FY 2025, increasing by less than $5 million, an increase of only 0.26 percent.
The corporate net income tax saw a decline in FY 2025, falling by $89 million, or 19 percent. And after crashing by $577 million in FY 2024, the severance tax saw a small bounce back in FY 2025, increasing by $70 million.
Much of the lack of revenue growth from sources other than the personal income tax can be attributed to a lack of economic growth. Though the personal income tax cuts were promised to promote economic growth, growth has been slow in the state in the two years since the tax cuts were enacted.
Total nonfarm employment growth in West Virginia trailed the nation in FY 2025. While the state saw a 0.6 percent increase in total nonfarm employment, the national rate was nearly twice that, at 1.1 percent. West Virginia had no job growth in the first half of FY 2025.
Overall West Virginia ranked 37th among the 40 states when it came to total nonfarm employment growth in FY 2025, trailing all but one of its neighboring states.
While the national economy shrank to start 2025, West Virginia experienced a steeper decline. Nationally, real (inflation-adjusted) GDP fell by 0.13 percent in the first quarter of 2025, while in West Virginia, real GDP fell by 0.58 percent.
And while the state’s unemployment rate fell from 4.1 percent to 3.7 percent during FY 2025, fewer West Virginians are actually working. The number of unemployed workers in the state fell from 32,200 in June 2024 to 29,000 in June 2025, a decline of 3,200. Rather than falling mainly due to unemployed workers finding work, West Virginia’s unemployment rate fell due to workers leaving the labor force. The number of West Virginians in the labor force dropped from 788,400 in June 2024 to 779,500 in June 2025, a decline of 8,900, dropping the state’s labor force participation rate from 54.9 percent to 54.2 percent.
Falling revenue, weak economic growth, and looming federal cuts to SNAP and Medicaid–amid growing state budgetary pressures–should raise alarms for lawmakers. They should heed these warning signs and avoid doubling down on ineffective and costly tax cuts.
Read Sean’s full blog post.
Medicaid in our nation’s history. The legislation will have far-reaching impacts on hospitals and health care access in the Mountain State. A recent article provides further details. Excerpt below:
Fewer obstetricians to help bring West Virginians into the world.
Fewer doctors and nurses to keep them from leaving it.
Fewer equipment upgrades and renovations at hospitals.
Fewer hospitals.
And more crowded emergency rooms at the hospitals that remain — spreading pain and suffering across West Virginians of all ages whether they have Medicaid or not.
That’s what West Virginia Hospital Association President and CEO Jim Kaufman says is on the state’s table as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, far-reaching budget reconciliation legislation signed into law by President Donald Trump this month with approval from West Virginia’s congressional delegation.
“I do think over the long term, over the next couple of years, as the provisions of the Big Beautiful Bill Act go into effect,” Kaufman said, “hospital leadership teams will be making very, very difficult decisions.”
Those decisions are in store, hospital and other health care advocates say, because of sweeping cuts the budget reconciliation law makes to Medicaid, the joint federal and state program that helps cover medical costs for over 500,000 West Virginians — roughly 30% of the state population.
Designed to extend tax cuts enacted under Trump in 2017 that have benefited the wealthy, the law will result in about 17 million more people without health insurance nationwide, according to a projection by KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The budget reconciliation legislation will increase West Virginia’s uninsured rate by 70%, according to an analysis from Families USA, a nonpartisan health care consumer advocacy organization.
Health care experts expect the law to sever critical Medicaid revenue for hospitals while raising costs of uncompensated care, doing so by:
The upshot will be a downturn in health care for West Virginians of all income levels, Kaufman and other hospital advocates say.
According to discharge data from the WVHA, Medicaid covered these services in West Virginia in 2024:
Kaufman, said hospital leadership teams will look at what services they offer and consider equipment and renovation delays.
In the meantime, hospital advocates plan to lobby Congress to concerning provisions of the law that don’t take effect for years, including provider tax phasedowns that begin in fiscal year 2028 for states like West Virginia that have adopted Medicaid expansion and grandfathered state-directed payment reductions that begin in 2028.
“[T]here are dates and rates that can be revisited, but it depends on us to tell the stories about the potential impact that this will have on patients and communities that we serve,” American Hospital Association President and CEO Rick Pollack said on his industry group’s Advancing Health podcast recorded last week.
“If we can’t tell those stories in a very compelling way, we’re not going to get the attention we need to get people to go back.”
Mindy Holcomb is willing to share her story.
Holcomb, a health care organizer with the West Virginia Citizen Action Group, a progressive advocacy organization, recalled having to ration insulin as a Type 1 diabetic despite being insured with a full-time job.
“I hate to say this,” Holcomb said, “but I’ve already started stockpiling again because of fear.”
Holcomb announced she’s planning a tour with the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, a progressive policy analysis group, of the seven areas served by hospitals listed as being at risk of closure due to the budget reconciliation law in a widely cited Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina study.
Negative net incomes common among flagged hospitals
The University of North Carolina study indicates seven West Virginia hospital organizations at risk of closure, based on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services health care cost reporting:
Some of those hospitals have reported negative net incomes in tax returns submitted for recent years.
Kaufman said the average hospital in West Virginia has about a 1% operating margin — the profit it makes on a dollar of sales after deducting production costs but before factoring in taxes or interest.
“We do struggle,” Kaufman said, “because the payments that hospitals are receiving, especially from governmental programs, are not keeping pace with the increasing costs, and that’s actually forcing them to reevaluate services, capital investments, efforts to ensure access to care in their local community.”
Which hospitals could struggle most under new law?
The West Virginia Hospital Association consists of 72 member hospitals that fall into three categories, Kaufman said:
The larger acute care facilities and critical access hospitals will be impacted the most by the budget reconciliation law, Kaufman said.
Hospital leaders declined to identify what services could be on the chopping block if the law remains as is.
But Kaufman offered a chilling bottom-line projection: More than $1 billion will be stripped from West Virginia hospitals by the new law.
How $50 billion fund for rural health could fall short
Capito and other supporters of the law have touted its creation of a $50 billion relief fund for “rural health transformation.”
But that $50 billion is only one-third of the estimated loss of federal Medicaid funding in rural areas, according to a KFF analysis of financial impact estimates from the independent, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The $50 billion is to be allotted in grants to states between fiscal years 2026 and 2030, but that distribution will happen before many of the health care funding reductions in the law hit.
Nearly two-thirds of reductions in federal Medicaid spending occur after fiscal year 2030, KFF’s analysis of CBO estimates determined.
The $50 billion program has been framed by Capito and others as for rural hospitals, but the law doesn’t require that the funding go to hospitals – discretion that KFF President and CEO Drew Altman, predicted in an analysis published Friday would result in diluted benefit to rural hospitals as state health departments and other state agencies, counties, and community organizations compete for support.
‘It’s going to mean life and death’
Kaufman says there’s time for hospitals to figure out what they can they do.
“Also,” Kaufman said, “it gives us time to point out potential impacts on rural communities.”
Holcomb plans to use her time to do just that. She says she’ll hit the road to start the advocacy tour in Philippi, home of Broaddus Hospital Association, in September.
“We’ve got so many people in such rural areas that if some of these rural hospitals close, it’s terrifying,” Holcomb said. “It’s going to mean life and death for people.”
Read the full article.
Read the WVCBP’s recent blog post highlighting the budget bill’s sweeping impacts on health care and food security
In addition to its significant impacts on health care access, the federal budget reconciliation bill includes the largest cuts to SNAP food assistance in history. Tens of thousands of West Virginians are expected to lose their SNAP benefits as a result. Arecent article, including data from the WVCBP, provides further details. Excerpt below:
Nonprofit leaders in West Virginia are speaking out about potentially harmful impacts to communities after changes to federal funding are put in motion from President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act.
According to the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy’s data in 2025, federal dollars make up nearly half of the state’s overall budget, with about $5 billion specific to programs like Medicaid and other human service initiatives.
“West Virginia is one of the most impoverished states. We have one of the lowest average incomes of any state in America,” Rosemary Ketchum, the executive director of the West Virginia Nonprofit Association, said.
She then talked about how she felt the Big Beautiful Bill Act would affect the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in West Virginia.
As of 2025, according to the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy’s data:
“One in six residents (277,400 people) rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to help put food on the table. SNAP is the nation’s most important and effective anti-hunger program, playing a key role in reducing poverty and improving health and economic outcomes for households with children, adults with disabilities, seniors, veterans, and low-wage workers.”
Ketchum said she expects tens of thousands of West Virginians who utilize the SNAP program to have their benefits cut or eliminated entirely, sharing that, “If you want your communities to grow- if you want West Virginians to thrive, maybe the last thing you do is take away their access to food.”
Ketchum said one of the earliest signs of impact from the Bill was a $400 million dollar funding cut to the AmeriCorps.
The reduction in funding, she said, has led to the loss of more than 200 positions in the state—many of those roles filled by students who get a stipend for their education, in regards to AmeriCorps.
She warned that the funding changes could lead to rising hunger, homelessness and joblessness, potentially affecting residents at all communities with individuals of all income levels and in all tax brackets.
Read the full article.
Do you have questions about how recent federal funding changes will impact health care access and your community?
The WVCBP is here to help. We are offering to host community conversations for concerned community members to:
If you are interested, please fill out this form and we will be in contact with you about scheduling a community meeting near you!
Data center development is being considered in multiple counties across West Virginia, raising concerns for local residents. A recent article, including insight from the WVCBP, provides additional details about the environmental and economic threats these developments pose in the Mountain State. Excerpt below:
Fifteen-year Tucker County resident Sheena Williams told the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection her child has asthma.
Williams said she feared an expected data center facility for which the DEP has signaled it will approve an air quality permit despite facility plans to potentially emit hundreds of tons of air pollutants annually.
“We are scared,” Williams said. “We need your help.”
Williams was one of several dozen speakers who urged the DEP to reconsider its preliminary determination to approve an air quality permit for Purcellville, Virginia-based Fundamental Data LLC’s proposed gas turbine-fueled facility in Tucker County at a July 17 virtual public comment hearing on the permit request.
Fundamental Data’s permit application doesn’t include a data center, and the company hasn’t been definitive regarding the end use of its power, a nondisclosure the DEP says isn’t a cause to deny the permit. But despite significant redactions in the permit application the DEP has drawn Tucker County residents’ ire by accepting, enough planned facility details have been revealed to suggest it would be a large-scale data center site with vast diesel tank storage and a substantial increase in local air pollution.
And Tucker County isn’t the only front on which community advocates fear data center development.
The DEP this month invited public comment on two virtually identical proposed air quality permits for New York City-based TransGas Development Systems LLC to build neighboring gas-powered facilities for data center campus operations in Mingo County.
The proposed TransGas facilities would have the potential to emit hundreds of air pollutants, and the applications indicate there would be onsite haul road activities and equipment leaks.
The West Virginia Citizen Action Group, a progressive advocacy organization, has called for the DEP to hold public hearings covering both planned facilities.
“The public will bear the cost of living with air emissions, without any benefit to the public grid, and may face increased electric bills,” West Virginia Climate Alliance coordinator Tyler Cannon wrote in a recent blog post published by West Virginia Citizen Action Group.
Similar concerns have been triggered by Houston-headquartered Fidelis New Energy LLC’s plan for a 2,000-plus-acre data center campus in Mason County. In 2023, the West Virginia Economic Development Authority approved a forgivable $62.5 million loan for Mountaineer GigaSystem LLC, a Fidelis subsidiary.
Fundamental Data and TransGas representatives have not responded to requests for comment.
Large-scale data center development is still new to West Virginia, but it’s commonplace elsewhere in the United States. Northern Virginia is home to the world’s largest data center market. Several hundred data centers dot Loudoun, Fairfax and Prince William counties.
That development has been costly to Virginia ratepayers, whose bill burdens don’t appear to be going anywhere.
A typical Dominion Energy residential customer could see an increase in generation- and transmission-related costs of an estimated $14 to $37 monthly by 2040, according to a December 2024 Virginia state legislative staff report.
Large data centers can consume enough energy to power 80,000 households. They can consume 3-5 million gallons of water per day — roughly 5-8% of the total amount withdrawn for public water supply throughout West Virginia in 2023, according to DEP data.
West Virginians already have experienced one of the country’s sharpest rises in electricity prices in recent years, which energy experts say has been driven by the state’s nation-highest dependence on increasingly uneconomic coal-fired power.
The carbon intensity of West Virginia’s economy — metric tons of energy-related carbon dioxide per dollars of gross domestic product — also has been one of the nation’s highest, pointing to a reliance on pollution-heavy industry that has saddled economically challenged communities with air quality worries.
“As we continue to see these data center proposals built out, that increase in electricity costs [is] just going to continue to go up, and West Virginians are going to continue to bear that brunt of the cost in their pocketbooks and in their health,” Morgan King, climate and energy manager at West Virginia Citizens Action Group, said at a virtual AI-focused roundtable discussion hosted by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., Wednesday.
Not a ‘minor source’ to residents
Speaking on behalf of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and the Friends of the 500th, a Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge-supporting nonprofit, Marilyn Schoenfeld urged the DEP to make Fundamental Data reclassify its facility as a “major source” for permitting at the DEP’s hearing on the company’s site proposal.
Because Fundamental Data hasn’t reported the proposed facility as having the potential to emit more than 100 tons per year of any regulated pollutant, it’s not defined as a major stationary source. Instead, Fundamental Data has proposed the facility be permitted as a “synthetic minor facility,” a designation that includes limits on capacity to remain below major source thresholds.
But the proposed facility comes close to the 100-ton annual threshold with the potential to emit 99.35 tons per year of nitrogen oxides, which can harm the human respiratory system and contribute to acid rain.
“To treat this permit as a synthetic minor designation is totally inappropriate for a project of this size,” Schoenfeld said.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General found in 2021 that facilities may emit excess pollution that would otherwise subject them to more stringent federal major-source permitting requirements without clear and enforceable limits in synthetic-minor source permits.
The EPA watchdog found that, in 16 gas extraction industry synthetic-minor source permits from Colorado and Oklahoma, 102 of 529 permit limits didn’t have enough information in permitting documentation to determine whether the limits were technically accurate.
Tucker County residents have contended the Canaan Valley’s proneness to temperature inversions would make it especially susceptible to adverse air quality impacts from Fundamental Data’s planned operations. Temperature inversions occur when cold air builds up in a valley.
The Canaan Valley has had long-term summer temperatures similar to those found in northern New England and a shorter growing season than that of Fairbanks, Alaska, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed Southeastern Naturalist journal in 2015 that drew from climate data spanning 1944 to 2002.
But the DEP has declined to agree to conduct air dispersion modeling for the proposed project. Because the proposed facility isn’t subject to a state rule governing major stationary air pollution sources, air dispersion modeling isn’t required.
“It’s not just a label,” Tucker Countian Amy Margolies said of major-source classification at the DEP hearing. “It is a critical safeguard for public health.”
How HB 2014 could limit local data center tax revenue
House Bill 2014, which Morrisey has held up as the economic development highlight of the West Virginia Legislature’s 2025 regular legislative session, is designed to ease in-state data center development in part by prohibiting counties and municipalities from enforcing or adopting regulations that limit creation, development or operation of any certified microgrid district or high-impact data center project.
HB 2014 includes a provision requiring that costs from electrical service to a microgrid district be absorbed by the generator or electricity consumers within that district rather than other electric utility customers.
But Appalachian Power regulatory and finance vice president John Scalzo predicted in testimony before the House of Delegates Energy and Public Works Committee during HB 2014’s advancement the legislation wouldn’t ensure against increased rates as intended.
Appalachian Power has said opening up business districts to nonrenewable energy as HB 2014 does could raise customer bills if independent power producers taking advantage of it need backup service from the utility since nonrenewable backup needs dwarf those of renewables.
HB 2014 claws property tax proceeds away from local governments, leaving just 30% of those proceeds to the county or counties where a data center is located and another 10% to all counties on a per capita basis.
A hypothetical high-impact data center investment of $2 billion in Tucker County would yield only $4.64 million in tax revenue for local entities under HB 2014 as opposed to $15.5 million prior to its passage, according to an analysis published last week by the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, a progressive think tank.
The analysis predicts HB 2014 could unintentionally incentivize school districts to enact excess levies to try to capture some benefit from data centers locating in their district.
Read the full article.
Learn more about how HB 2014 harms communities, local governments, and schools in our recent fact sheet.
Last month, the Together for Public Schools Coalition hosted a webinar for school employees, parents, community members, and anyone who supports public education in West Virginia to learn more about school funding in our state. Topics included a closer look at the current school funding formula, challenges to school funding in West Virginia, and ways to modernize the school funding formula to better support public schools.
You can watch the recording here.
