CHARLESTON — West Virginia’s Legislature headed toward the end of its regular session Friday with just a handful of measures from its recession-inhibited workload left on the agenda.
On the eve of the 60-day session’s midnight finish, the House and Senate began exchanging a final batch of bills that include several items from Gov. Joe Manchin’s agenda. Having passed 73 already this session, they sent nearly two dozen more to the governor before recessing until today.
Friday’s votes included endorsements of the governor’s proposal to fund certain highway projects with new road tolls and approval of a hotly debated measure offering ultrasound images to women seeking abortions.
Lawmakers still have some unfinished business, most notably the budget. They’ll come back next week in extended session to complete the $11 billion spending plan for the budget year that begins July 1.
Lawmakers had passed or at least exchanged versions of all 19 items from Manchin agenda in advance of Saturday. But the Senate Finance Committee voted Friday to remove a key portion of his proposed constitutional amendment that seeks to exempt new business inventory and equipment from taxes.
The committee stripped out language allowing counties to decide whether to offer such breaks, if voters loosened the constitution’s language controlling property taxes. Senate Finance Chairman Walt Helmick afterward cited a lack of enthusiasm for measure among both business and labor.
“There are some positives in that legislation,” the Pocahontas County Democrat said. “We had to get together and meet on it and come with something that’s workable and also something that, at the end of the day, will be a job-creating bill.”
Counties, which rely heavily on property taxes, have seen their officials divided on the proposal. Some had welcomed the county-level decision-making. Others feared it would pit counties against each other to lure employers.
“That was never the intention,” Manchin said Friday. “We were for letting counties have an opportunity to have a say in their own destiny.”
The full Senate must still vote on the amended measure. The House would then have to concur with the change.
The Senate must also consider House changes to the ultrasound bill. Friday’s 80-17 vote sent the Senate a watered-down version of its proposal that also removes long-standing criminal penalties against doctors who violate the state’s Women’s Right to Know Act.
As amended by the House Judiciary Committee, licensing boards would instead handle sanctions for any failures to provide required information to women seeking abortions. Such changes still prompted several lawmakers to stand and condemn the bill as an insult to women that infringes on their right to choose.
“On every given occasion, when we have made a gain on a right, you have tried to take it away from us,” Delegate Nancy Guthrie, D-Kanawha, said. “It is not an easy decision, but it is our law. All that any of us is asking is that you stop dragging us by the hair through Congress and in statehouses across America.”
But supporters countered that even as amended, the measure offered information to a woman that could prompt her to change her minds.
“She may see little arms and little legs,” said Peggy Donaldson Smith, D-Lewis. “She may hear and see, after about six weeks, the flutter of a little beating heart, a heart that is alive and that may soon stop beating, very soon, forever.”
Despite a majority holding anti-abortion views, measures on the topic haven’t passed the Legislature for five years.
