Statehouse Beat: Justice shows his small side (again)

One of the hallmarks of Jim Justice’s tenure as governor has been his tendency to fire or demote people at a drop of a hat, a trait he evidently carried over from his private-sector persona.

That includes petty, vindictive firings, as when he dumped Nick Casey as his chief of staff after Justice reverted back to being a Republican, or removed longtime state Racing Commission Chairman Jack Rossi after learning Rossi was serving as treasurer for Ben Salango’s gubernatorial campaign.

We’ve read about how Justice tried to get Marshall administrators to fire Doc Holliday as football coach, and I understand he’s tried on at least one occasion to get me fired.

Which brings us to our reading of the tea leaves in the personnel shakeup at the Department of Administration and Department of Revenue, where, out of the blue, it was quietly announced that Insurance Commissioner James Dodrill would be “stepping down,” then Allan McVey was demoted from Secretary of Administration to Insurance Commissioner and word leaked of the pending retirement of longtime Public Employees Insurance Agency Director Ted Cheatham.

For 14 years, Cheatham’s service as PEIA director has been exemplary.

Sure, there have been bumps in the road, mostly involving attempts to promote fitness and healthy lifestyle initiatives, including one that was widely denounced as a “fat tax” and quickly abandoned. (For the record, my BMI is 22, according to the calculator PEIA gave out to promote that program.)

Notably, PEIA has gone three straight years without a premium increase for active employee coverage. How many health insurance plans can make that claim?

However, PEIA also has been a flashpoint for the Justice administration, contributing to two statewide teachers’ walkouts to protest a combination of low pay and lack of a plan to assure long-term stability for health benefits.

Cheatham has never been one to mince words about PEIA’s financial situation. Last fall, for instance, he said rising medical and pharmaceutical costs likely would make the current 2021-22 plan year the last without a premium hike — even with the $105 million in the PEIA Rainy Day Fund that legislators created after the 2019 walkout.

Also, Cheatham likely ran afoul of Justice earlier this year over the governor’s office insistence on putting PEIA’s Medicare Advantage Plan contract out to bid two years before the option years with Humana were to expire.

In announcing the request for proposals, Cheatham sounded almost apologetic about putting the contract back out to bid, saying of the Humana plan, “There’s no financial issues. There’s no quality issues. There’s no service issues.”

Of course, speculation at the time was that rebidding had something to do with the fact that Justice’s personal lobbyist (for The Greenbrier), political advisor and consultant on Justice’s 2020 reelection campaign, Larry Puccio, also represented a rival managed health care and insurance company, United Healthcare Services, which bid on the contract but lost out to Humana.

As noted last month, this seems to be a pattern for the Justice administration, which currently has the state Department of Health and Human Resources’ advertising and marketing contract out to bid, even though the current contract-holder, the Manahan Group, is not even halfway through the lifespan of its contract, counting option years. It was duly noted here that company owner George Manahan frequently produces campaign spots for Democratic candidates, including Sen. Ron Stollings’ gubernatorial run in 2020.

Cheatham’s abrupt departure could not come at a more inopportune time.

For the director of PEIA, this is the busiest time of year, as the agency is working on developing the benefits plans for the coming year.

On Oct. 21, in what will be Cheatham’s penultimate week as director, the PEIA Finance Board will take up the preliminary benefits plan for the 2022-23 budget year.

In November, after Cheatham has ridden off into retirement, the Finance Board will conduct six public hearings across the state over the course of 11 days, and, theoretically, will use input from those hearings to make adjustments to the final plan, which will be approved in December.

PEIA approves the plans six months before they go into effect in order to give the various agencies and governmental entities a head’s up if they need to adjust their finances accordingly.

For Cheatham to retire in the middle of this process would be the equivalent of me retiring after the third week of a legislative session. The timing just doesn’t make sense.

Cheatham has declined to comment on his retirement, but we can presume for one or more reasons, he got on Justice’s wrong side.

Likewise, by all accounts, Dodrill was doing an exemplary job as insurance commissioner, including expanding the commission’s Fraud Unit, rebranding it as the Special Investigations Division, and broadening its scope beyond consumer fraud.

Dodrill’s departure was announced in a cryptic press release put out on the Friday before the long Labor Day weekend, stating only that he “will be stepping down as West Virginia Insurance Commissioner,” but would continue to serve in that capacity until his replacement is appointed.

Commission staff, I’m told, were not given even that much notice of Dodrill’s pending departure.

Meanwhile, we know McVey had issues as commissioner, going back to when he tried to oust Administrative Law Judge Rebecca Roush when she was falsely accused of sending threatening social media messages to an employee (who later pleaded guilty to sending the fake messages to herself).

Justice at the Wednesday state COVID-19 briefing downplayed the personnel shakeups, saying, “There’s going to be times when people retire or move on … Our cabinet is functioning and functioning very well.”

Right …

•••

As has been noted repeatedly, regardless of his physical stature, Justice can be a little, little man.

One of the routine things I write about every year is the release of the state’s public utilities property tax assessments for the coming year, with state law broadly defining public utilities as everything from traditional electric, water and natural gas companies to railroads and airlines and telephone and cell phone companies.

Prepared by the Property Tax Division of the Tax Department, the assessments are significant in that the resulting property taxes go a long way toward funding public schools and county governments, and they also provide a snapshot of the economic health of the state, depending on how the value of corporate assets in the state are trending year to year.

While for many years, as a matter of routine, I’ve received a copy of the one-page document on the same day it is presented to the Board of Public Works, as of press time Friday, I have yet to be able to obtain a copy of the 2022 assessments now three days after my initial request.

After getting no responses from the Tax Division for a day, I called Kathy Torlone, executive assistant to Revenue Secretary Dave Hardy, who said the department did not have access to the document.

Asked how the Department of Revenue would not have access to a document produced by its Property Tax Division, she said, “Everything has to go through the governor’s office.”

Checking back later, she said she still had not received authorization from the governor’s office despite numerous inquiries.

“I can’t send anything out without permission from the governor’s office,” she said.

A Freedom of Information request was also rejected.

This is not the first time this has happened to me, nor to other Gazette-Mail reporters, another case of obstruction simply because Justice does not care for the Gazette-Mail’s aggressive coverage.

At any rate, the next time Justice goes on about how he’s all about open government and transparency, you can know he’s giving you bull-you-know-what on a silver platter.

•••

We like to have fun with retired South Charleston lawyer Thornton Cooper every 10 years, as he earnestly and dutifully spends hundreds of hours drawing up his personal versions of House, Senate and congressional redistricting maps, but those maps serve a significant purpose.

Cooper’s only motivation is to come up with districts that are as equal in population as possible, and meet high standards for compactness, continuity and preserving common community interests.

That makes his maps more than an amusing divertissement. They can serve an important counterpoint and contrast to the maps the House of Delegates and Senate are producing.

Cooper doesn’t draw districts to protect incumbents or make it more difficult for opposition party candidates to win.

With the House going to 100 single-member districts, each with an ideal population of 17,937, cities (which tend to vote blue) will have to be split up.

Do the splits preserve continuity and common community interests, as Cooper intends, or dilute Democratic votes?

You’ll have to be the judge.

•••

Finally, here’s my dive into the shallow end regarding the new name for the Charleston professional baseball team:

For all the criticism of the new name, it does make clear coal mining is part of our past, not our future. Miners’ use of canaries to detect methane gas was an early 20th century practice, not a modern day mining technique, which tends toward blasting tops off mountains.

The homage to the canary in the coal mine also delivers the message that coal mining was a dangerous and dirty undertaking. If you go into a mine, the best outcome you can hope for is to come out at the end of the day covered in coal dust.

The Power nickname was deliberately selected to pay tribute to the state’s extractive industries, and the team initially had mascots representing different energy sources, including coal and natural gas.

Had it been my choice, would I have named the team “Dirty Birds?” No, but there are worst choices.

The worst alternative of all would be having no professional baseball in Charleston, and having an empty ballpark in the middle of town. We should be happy that the current ownership group has opted to keep a team here — at long as we support it.

Besides, the team will continue to wear Charlies uniforms two days a week, and since the Atlantic League generally schedules Mondays as off days, that amounts to one third of all games.

As has been noted, perhaps some of the righteous indignation over “Dirty Birds” could be directed at the high schools around the state that continue to use racially insensitive nicknames.