News from the South - West Virginia News Feed
Morrisey’s line-item budget vetoes slash funds for vulnerable children during foster care crisis
by Amelia Ferrell Knisely, West Virginia Watch
April 18, 2025
Gov. Patrick Morrisey signed the budget bill Thursday night, but not before slashing millions of dollars in funding through his line-item veto power. The Republican governor’s cuts were wide sweeping across state programs, and services for vulnerable children were among those surprisingly hit.
“When I took office, I inherited a $400 million structural budget gap in the upcoming fiscal year, which would grow to nearly $600 million in the years ahead if it was not immediately addressed,” Morrisey said in a statement released by his office. “The fiscally conservative budget I signed tonight makes progress tackling structural gaps and begins to place us on a pathway toward financial stability in the future.”
The 29 separate line-item vetoes included slashes in funding for roads, school safety and tourism projects. There were also millions of dollars in cuts to programs that serve foster kids, families impacted by substance abuse and sick children.
Morrisey cut $250,000 in funding for Lily’s Place, a nonprofit organization in Cabell County that provides treatment for newborns with neonatal abstinence syndrome and support for families dealing with substance use disorder. West Virginia has the highest rate nationally of infants born with neonatal abstinence syndrome amid the state’s ongoing substance abuse crisis.
House Finance Chairman Vernon Criss, R-Wood, called it “the most insulting” of Morrisey’s line-item vetoes.
“This one should be right at the top — to be able to take newborns that are drug-afflicted and be able to help them,” Criss said. “[It] seems to have a very high success rate of helping newborns getting off the drug situation.”
Morrisey also decreased funding for the Ronald McDonald House in Morgantown and In-Home Family Education, a parent and child support program in West Virginia.
“It’s almost like you’re picking on kids who can’t speak up for themselves,” said House Minority Leader Sean Hornbuckle, D-Cabell.
The legislative session adjourned with little action on the state’s abundant foster care issues despite bills introduced to address a myriad of problems, including too many foster children living in hotels.
Lawmakers wanted to give $1.1 million in state funding to West Virginia’s Court Appointed Special Advocates, or CASA, a program that helps foster children in the court system.
Morrisey cut 75% of that funding in his line-item veto. His office did not respond to an email from West Virginia Watch seeking information about the funding decrease. In his veto message, the governor said the program relies on grants and could seek additional grant funding.
Shanna Gray, executive director of West Virginia CASA, said she was grateful to the Legislature for creating a dedicated line item for the program.
“We could not be more appreciative of our state lawmakers for prioritizing support for children in foster care,” she said. “Albeit significantly reduced, the governor‘s final allocation of $300,000 establishes a crucial foundation of state support. We remain optimistic about this initial investment and thankful for the state’s recognition of CASA’s essential role in ensuring children’s best interests are represented and heard.”
In total, Morrisey cut $800,000 in foster care funding.
“The fear is that we’ve got programs out there right now that we do not know if they’ll be able to continue because the federal dollars are going to dry up,” Criss said. “[Morrisey] needs to be able to take a very hard look at all the programs.”
In a news release on Friday, the West Virginia Democratic Party called on the governor to “reconsider these harmful decisions and focus state resources on supporting vulnerable citizens and vital community programs.”
Disagreement among GOP supermajority about budget
The Republican-led House and Senate passed their $5.3 billion general revenue budget bill last week.
Morrisey’s line-item veto messages used similar language often, saying, “it is imperative that a cautious and prudent approach be taken” while citing concerns about future uncertainties, like the federal stock market fluctuations and federal uncertainty. He also said that there are “ongoing budget challenges.”
The spending vetoes also included $500,000 reduction to Mountwood Park in Wood County for Jeep trails, and a $187,000 reduction to the more than $11 million allocation to the state Veterans Nursing home, and a $250,000 cut for a nursing education program.
“He decided nursing programs are not where he wants to spend money,” Criss said.
There was a $25 million reduction to the State Road Fund; Criss said that funding cuts may damage the state Division of Highways’ ability to draw down federal funds for projects.
Morrisey eliminated $250,000 allocated for the West Virginia University College of Law but did not touch the $1.5 million lawmakers gave the university to build a civics learning center overseen by a political appointee. Lawmakers passed a bill mandating the center, but it hasn’t yet been signed by the governor.
He slashed more than $110 million approved in three surplus funds, which included the funding for Lily’s Place. Morrisey said those funds may be needed for anticipated gaps in Medicaid, Public Employees Insurance Agency and federal changes.
Morrisey is a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump; Hornbuckle said the governor’s decision to slash state spending because concerns about Medicaid and federal changes showed, “Even the governor doesn’t believe his good friend is going to be able to help West Virginians.”
“We might have to fill back in dollars to Medicaid or PEIA,” Hornbuckle continued. “People need to be really paying attention to what’s going on there, and he doesn’t trust the Trump administration.”
Hornbuckle added that Morrisey’s line-item vetoes showed disagreement among the state’s GOP-supermajority in power.
Criss continues to refute Morrisey’s projected $400 million structural deficit.
“I am the last finance chairman still in place from the previous administration, I take that a personal cut,” he said. “[Morrisey] doesn’t understand how we have been budgeting and doing the budget process for the last seven years when we’ve tried to keep our ‘operating portion’ of our budget.” The House wanted the state to have surplus money in the back of the budget that could be used for one-time projects.
Senate Finance Chairman Jason Barrett, R-Berkeley, wasn’t available for comment.
Funds slashed for safe schools, educational programs
Morrisey’s line-item vetoes included several education-related projects, including funding decreasing to the Mountain State Digital Literacy Program, a math education program and computer science education. In a veto of $200,000 in funding for Safe Schools, Morrisey said it is, “imperative that we limit new spending.”
West Virginia’s public schools can’t afford to implement millions of dollars in safety upgrades, including secure front entries and weapon detection systems. There are more than $200 million in school safety requests in need of funding.
“How can we in good faith cut money to safe schools and that is something that goes to all of our public education when we are pumping millions of dollars into the Hope voucher program?” Hornbuckle said.
The budget passed by the Republican-led Legislature opted to put away about $33.6 million from general revenue to the state Personal Income Tax Reserve Fund. That money, Criss said, can be allocated by the Legislature at any time. The fund has more than $500 million in it, drawing frustration from Del. Kayla Young, D-Kanawha, during budget debate since other programs had gone unfunded.
The budget didn’t include $100,000 for clean drinking water in Wyoming County. Funding was cut for the state’s Jobs and Hope Program.
Hornbuckle voted against the budget when it passed the House, citing concerns about a lack of funding for child care.
“I didn’t think it had a lot of fiscal logic and appropriate the dollars that we do have to public education or child care,” he said. “I’m also confused why we went further down the hole right now in making the current cuts that we did.”
In a statement on Thursday, Morrisey said that “much work remains in the next fiscal year to address budget shortfalls.”
“ … I applaud the Legislature for sending me a budget that closely resembles my original proposal and begins to address long term issues while funding West Virginia priorities,” he said.
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West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.
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News from the South - West Virginia News Feed
Despite research, WV counties refuse to fund harm reduction with opioid funds
by Ty McClung, West Virginia University, West Virginia Watch
July 10, 2025
On a warm summer day in late May, about 100 people are waiting for their turn to go inside the Neighborhood S.H.O.P., located in the annex of Bream Memorial Presbyterian Church on the West Side of Charleston, West Virginia.
Inside the S.H.O.P. — which stands for Showers Healthcare Outreach Program — they will find resources like naloxone, clothing, first-aid supplies, food, showers and people offering services from rental to legal assistance. Director Derek Hudson says the no-barrier organization aids almost 2,000 people a month.
“The whole goal is to have people come in, be heard and know that at least someone is trying to help them,” Hudson said.
The kind of help the S.H.O.P. provides, broadly speaking, is harm reduction.
“Harm reduction for us focuses on meeting people where they are and empowering them with the tools to help prevent negative health outcomes from substance use,” Hudson explained. “Harm reduction, simply put, saves lives.”
What they won’t find inside, however, is one of the most well-known forms of harm reduction: new syringes.
Syringe Service Programs are highly regulated in the state of West Virginia, and service providers say it makes it almost impossible to run one. But SSPs are associated with an approximately 50% reduction in HIV and HCV incidence, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They also benefit communities and public safety by reducing needlestick injuries and overdose deaths.
Hudson’s S.H.O.P. has received about $80,000 in state opioid settlement funds from the West Virginia First Foundation specifically to create a re-entry program that will house people who are coming out of incarceration. It’s a program that will reduce recidivism and homelessness in the community, Hudson says, but it is not considered a harm reduction program.
Programs that provide more typical harm reduction in the form of practical strategies that reduce the negative consequences of drug use — which can include anything from free naloxone to wound care — are not receiving any of the tens of millions of dollars coming into state, county and city level government coffers in West Virginia from the 2021 global opioid lawsuit settlement agreement so far, according to an analysis by students from West Virginia University’s Reed School of Media of Freedom of Information Act responses from 50 of the state’s 55 counties. And without those funds, many of the people working to provide these services worry that disease transmission and overdose death rates will buck a national trend and rise in West Virginia once again.
The high cost of a crisis
The funds are the result of a global settlement, agreed to in federal court, of a class action lawsuit brought by states, counties and cities across the country against opioid distributors, manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and others, in the wake of the country’s opioid epidemic.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 720,000 people died from an opioid overdose in the U.S. between 1999 and 2022. West Virginia saw its peak in 2022, when 1,335, or 75 out of every 100,000 people, died of an overdose.
West Virginia will receive about $980 million in total from the settlement agreement, split into payments over 18 years, with larger payments coming up front. The West Virginia First Foundation — a nonprofit created by the state Legislature — will control the spending of 72.5% of the funds, local governments 24.5%, and the West Virginia Attorney General’s Office 3%. A Memorandum of Understanding dictates what the money can be spent on, ranging from law enforcement, prevention education, treatment and recovery to harm reduction.
In 2023, more than $73.5 million of those funds were distributed to county officials in the state’s 55 counties. An analysis of FOIA responses by journalism students at West Virginia University’s Reed School of Media lacks information for five counties, but of the 50 others, Logan County received the highest distribution at $3,983,631, and Jefferson County received the least at $62,773.
Kanawha County, where the state’s capital Charleston is located, received just more than $3.9 million, and, according to County Commissioner Lance Wheeler, is focusing on funding recovery options. But Wheeler says they are also considering funding harm reduction organizations as well.
“This is something I strongly support,” Wheeler said. “We’re going to continue to do that, helping those who have a track record of success and those who are helping people who are struggling.”
The collapse of a program — and the fallout that followed
Harm reduction has a long, complicated history in Kanawha County and Charleston. With a population of 47,000, Charleston is the largest city in the state. It also had the highest overdose rate per capita in the entire country in 2022.
The city health department started a syringe service program in 2015, but was open for just three years before public and political pressure forced the city to shut it down. Then-mayor Danny Jones, a Republican, called the program a “mini-mall for junkies and drug dealers.”
The program’s closure in 2018, however, had dire consequences for public health. HIV and hepatitis rates skyrocketed, eventually requiring CDC officials to travel to Charleston in 2021 to help the city contain the outbreak.
Then-CDC HIV Prevention Chief Dr. Demetre Daskalakis called the outbreak “the most concerning HIV outbreak in the United States.”
The fight for evidence-based and person-first
Iris Sidikman, the harm reduction coordinator at the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, said the reluctance to fund harm-reduction services has directly impacted organizations that go beyond providing syringe services.
“When you have a tool to give someone in a non-judgmental space, it can open a world of possibilities,” Sidikman said.
In 2024, the Women’s Health Center applied to the Kanawha County Commission for $250,000 in opioid settlement funds twice, first through an online application and again at a public commission meeting. The clinic intended to use some the funds to provide increased naloxone training and education, cover costs related to screening and treatment of HIV and Hepatitis C and to fund a portion of clinical and programmatic staff salaries for the Harm Reduction Program, Sidikman said. Their application was denied without explanation.
The Women’s Health Center also applied with Charleston City Council in August 2023 to create a syringe service program on Charleston’s West Side, but was denied due to fear of an “increase in drug use and crime.”
Research on harm reduction by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has shown that these practices reduce disease transmission and overdose rates, and experts believe politicians should look at the numbers more often.
“What we want to do with data analysis… is to be able to produce the evidence to show to political power that these interventions are working and capable, they are saving many lives,” said RTI International Research and Public Health Analyst Barrett Montgomery.
SOAR WV, another grassroots, Charleston-based harm reduction group, works to promote the health, dignity and voices of individuals who are impacted by substance use disorders, according to its website. SOAR and other organizations picked up the task of providing new syringes until the state Legislature passed Senate Bill 334 in 2021, which included strict regulations for running a syringe service program, such as requiring a West Virginia state ID in order to participate.
The city of Charleston also passed stipulations requiring that each syringe be uniquely labeled for tracking purposes.
As of June 2025, West Virginia Health Right operates the only syringe-service program in Charleston, but according to one source, “doesn’t even begin to make a dent in the problem.”
The political appetite is lacking because of a lack of information around the subject, says Dr. Susan Margaret Murphy, president of the Drug Intervention Institute in Charleston.
“Unfortunately, we are in a political climate where I don’t think research and scientific knowledge necessarily pleads the case. So sometimes it’s got to be kind of a heart-on-the-sleeve storytelling type of approach,” she said.
Stigma and the struggle for support
In neighboring Boone County, Commissioner Brett Kuhn agreed.
The county currently does not have any harm reduction services, and, so far, its three elected commissioners have not spent any of their $2.9 million in opioid settlement funds to provide them.
“I think in a rural setting, you’re going to see more pushback than you would in more of an urban setting,” Kuhn said. “I think with the syringes, it’s like people think we’re subsidizing the drug use, whereas with naloxone the attitude is more like, ‘well, we’re trying to help somebody that’s in trouble.’ And really, if you look at it, in both cases, is there any real difference between the two?”
Kuhn says that informing the public about how harm reduction works and its benefits to the community is key to fighting pushback.
“You’ve got to get out ahead of the curve. You’ve got to get out there and get the information out,” Kuhn said. “I sometimes think we don’t do a good enough job of that.”
Kuhn said his county experienced the brunt of the nation’s opioid overdose epidemic firsthand. Its opioid mortality rate in 2023 was 82.0 per 100,000, the second-highest rate in West Virginia, according to the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.
Instead of harm reduction programs, the county spent its funds on paying off its regional jail bill, supporting a food pantry, a county arrest record-keeping system, a rapid response vehicle for EMTs, and a 25-bed expansion at Hero House, a faith-based sober living home in Madison.
Kuhn and officials in other counties say the vague nature of the state’s MOU overviewing how the money can be spent puts the duty of interpretation on local officials. The county did not hold special community meetings or town halls to gather input on how to spend the funds.
But Kuhn says it’s rebuilding a sense of community that could help garner support for harm reduction services.
“I think it’s sometimes the attitude is ‘well, those people don’t want to help themselves,’” Kuhn said, “[but] if they don’t want to help themselves, then what do I need to do to try to help? And I think in a certain sense, we’ve lost that sense of community, that we’re all in this together.”
Kuhn hopes that can change in the future.
This story was published in partnership with West Virginia University’s Reed School of Media and Communications, with support from Scott Widmeyer.
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West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.
The post Despite research, WV counties refuse to fund harm reduction with opioid funds appeared first on westvirginiawatch.com
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
This article presents a sympathetic view toward harm reduction programs and critiques the regulatory and political barriers limiting their effectiveness in West Virginia. It highlights the public health consequences of shutting down syringe service programs and emphasizes scientific evidence supporting harm reduction. The tone favors evidence-based, compassionate approaches to drug policy and health crises, implicitly criticizing conservative political opposition, such as the cited Republican mayor’s negative framing of harm reduction efforts. However, it maintains a largely factual reporting style with multiple sourced statements and avoids overt partisan language, placing it in a center-left position focused on public health advocacy.
SUMMARY: Jay’s Evening Weather for Tuesday 07/08/25 reports showers in southern West Virginia this afternoon and evening, raising humidity and causing wet roads. Showers are mainly in western areas, including McDowell, Wyoming, and Tazewell counties, moving eastward. Dense fog may reduce morning visibility. Severe thunderstorms have been warned near Lynchburg, Virginia, with a disturbance expected Wednesday into Thursday, increasing thunderstorm intensity. The strongest storms will be east and southeast but may affect southern West Virginia. Main threats include damaging winds and flooding rains with over an inch possible, causing ponding. Temperatures will range in the 80s by day, 60s at night with scattered storms continuing through the week.
We’ve seen showers around the region this afternoon, and more are possible over the rest of the extended forecast.
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SUMMARY: Fire crews are returning to the scene of a house fire that started just after midnight this morning along Township Road 1-72, off Route 7-75. Firefighters report the initial fire began around 12:30 a.m. Investigators are back on site today, searching for the fire’s cause. It remains unclear if anyone was hurt in the blaze. Meanwhile, an Arizona man has been charged with attempted murder in Dunbar following the incident, according to police. Fire crews continue to manage the situation as authorities conduct their investigation.
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