CHARLESTON — West Virginia’s Legislature ended its special session Friday with tweaks to the gas tax and state energy policy among the final bills to pass.
Party-line debates and votes marked the House’s approval of both those measures. The Senate ended its work with unanimous passage of the energy-related bill, and of a funding measure that earmarks $27 million for the state’s secondary roads.
Lawmakers approved all but one of Gov. Joe Manchin’s 11 proposals during the four-day session. The House and Senate also endorsed one resolution honoring U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., as history’s longest-serving member of Congress, and another defending the state’s coal industry.
The coal measure reflects anxiety over increased federal scrutiny of mining practices, and the Capitol Hill debate over climate change legislation. The House’s minority Republicans invoked such concerns in opposing Manchin’s energy policy proposal, which passed 59-28.
The governor has set a 2025 goal of relying on alternative and renewable sources for 25 percent of the energy sold by West Virginia’s producers. The policy counts several forms of “clean coal” technology as alternative sources. The bill approved Friday aims to encourage high efficiency coal-burning power plant boilers, capping the credits for less-efficient types.
“The bill allows coal to be used more efficiently to meet our energy needs and is a step forward for energy independence and for our natural resources industries,” Manchin spokesman Matt Turner said Friday.
Manchin’s fuel tax bill, passed 64-23, limits the annual changes to that levy that are based on average wholesale prices. Raising the tax’s price floor from 97 cents per gallon to $2.34, the measure also sets a 10-percent range for any changes after 2010.
Republicans argued the bill would prevent the tax from dropping 1.7 cents per gallon Jan. 1, as currently projected. They also targeted the bill’s provision making permanent a nickel-a-gallon component of the tax. Adopted as a temporary measure in 1993, it has since been repeatedly extended and would otherwise expire in 2013.
West Virginia’s fuel taxes total 32.2 cents per gallon, ranking it 13th nationwide in figures compiled last month by the American Petroleum institute. Among its five neighbors, only Pennsylvania’s are higher.
Manchin and his fellow Democrats in the Legislature argued that Friday’s proposal makes more predictable this chief revenue source of the chronically strapped State Road Fund. West Virginia’s government maintains 92 percent of the roads found within the state’s borders, and is by that measure the sixth largest road system nationwide. The average for other states is 19 percent.
Other states holding autumn special sessions are largely wrestling with recession-blasted budgets. The key item on Manchin’s agenda, passed Thursday, helps municipal police and fire pension plans deal with massive funding shortfalls.
The governor’s other successful items include one allowing counties to sell up to $225 million in stimulus-related development bonds. A pair of funding measures distribute $28 million, with more than half that benefiting state Medicaid programs.
The sole failed bill offered a temporary reprieve from the way the state’s public employers account for the cost of retiree health coverage. County school boards in particular are struggling with the reporting rules for these “other post-employment benefits.”
West Virginia
Tweaks to the gas tax, state energy policy among final bills to pass
- West Virginia
-
-
W.Va. texting bill evolves, heads to House
The Senate has approved a bill that would allow police to ticket drivers for texting or talking on their cellphones while on the road.
-
Report: Residents lacking savings
A nonprofit group says nearly one in five West Virginia residents have almost no savings or other assets to weather a financial crisis.
-
Lawmakers navigate lobby ban, social media
In this era of Twitter and smartphones, citizens and lobbyists alike have all sorts of ways to reach out to lawmakers at a moment’s notice. But the West Virginia Legislature has rules meant to insulate its members from last-minute pressures while they’re debating and voting on bills.
-
Firm shows off ‘Guardian Angel’ for miners
A West Virginia company is working on a piece of equipment designed to keep miners safer.
Trinity Resources, headquartered in Putnam County, demonstrated its a mobile mine safety chamber this week at the West Virginia Mining Symposium in Charleston. -
Vietnam correspondent Esper dies at 79
George Esper, the tenacious Associated Press correspondent who refused to leave his post in the last days of the Vietnam War, remaining behind to cover the fall of Saigon, has died. He was 79.
Esper died in his sleep on Thursday night, his son, Thomas, told the AP on Friday. -
Main says mines can’t be complacent
If there’s one lasting cultural change Mine Safety and Health Administration Director Joe Main wants to make in both the federal agency and the industry it regulates, it’s ending the cycle of intensity and complacency.
-
W.Va. moves to tighten laws for wild animal owners
West Virginia has joined a string of states looking to regulate or ban exotic animals kept as pets following the release of dozens of wild animals in an Ohio town last year.
-
Tomblin expects miner drug testing approval
Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said Thursday he believes lawmakers will quickly come to agreement and pass his proposed mine safety legislation, including a provision that calls for mandatory drug testing of coal miners.
-
Autism law in jeopardy, supporters warn
West Virginia’s new law extending health care coverage to children with autism may not do what its supporters intended, and a fight is brewing with insurers over pending legislation on the subject.
-
Main says violations at U.S. coal mines down in 2011
Coal operators across the country are changing the way they work, and mines are becoming safer, but the head of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration said Thursday there are still too many who “don’t get it.”
- More West Virginia Headlines
-
W.Va. texting bill evolves, heads to House
