Gubernatorial candidate profiles: the Mountain Party’s Bob Henry Baber

BECKLEY — Editor’s Note: Through May 4, The Register-Herald will publish a daily story featuring in-depth interviews we conducted with candidates seeking the office of governor of West Virginia. Each of the 16 people who filed were issued an invitation to appear before our editorial board, and 14 of those came to Beckley to meet with us and discuss some of the key issues in West Virginia. The stories will appear in the order in which the candidates were interviewed. Today’s story focuses on Mountain candidate Bob Henry Baber, of Glenville.


1 — It certainly appears that Marcellus shale regulation will remain a major topic of interest for the next several years. What are the key features that you see that need to be included in West Virginia law in order to best serve the interests of all the parties involved?

Obviously, I’m for the development of this relatively green energy source. We do have to have regulation, no doubt about that. That’s going to mean we’re going to have to have some fees, the tax. We’re going to have to increase the filing fees. Even the DEP says right now they really don’t have enforcement capabilities for these now about 3,000 new employees that are pretty much gallivanting around the state. It’s really, really important that we protect our water and that we make sure that the environment is protected as this new wave of development takes place.

I do want to say, interestingly enough, I have a farm in Greenbrier County. And I do not own the mineral rights. It’s a broad form deed. I actually brought two of them with me. I’ll leave them with you. These are the deeds to my grandparents’ farm, and they actually outline the rights of the surface owner as opposed to the mineral owner, and/or the gas owner in this case. And really, as I jokingly said, it’s a broad form of deed; all grandpa, all you bought, was the air.

These broad form deeds were revised, you might say outlawed, for strip mining purposes in every state in the union. Kentucky was the last in 1980. But the only thing the landowner is protected from, the private landowner, is from strip mining. They’re not protected from gas interests. And that gives me real pause because, guess what, I got a letter from a gas company saying we want to come in and test on your farm. I’ve got 30 acres in Greenbrier County. I’m surrounded by 300,000 privately held acres in Westvaco, and it kind of makes me wonder why they want to come in on my 30 when there’s 300,000 around me. It also gives me pause for my well, my land, my surface. I’ve only got seven acres that are cleared. The test might not be that big. But if an actual well came in, it could be significant.

This poses a real growth opportunity for West Virginia. But we need to protect the environment. And there’s one thing that I’m going to say, and that is, this can probably open to maybe another conversation a little about mountaintop mining and coal mining. But we need to, with this

Marcellus development, create what I’m calling the energy dividend. We need to rake some money off the top of gas and coal. I’m talking new taxes, or severance taxes, to create the new green economy. We are an energy-producing state. That’s kind of insulated us a little bit. You know, everything is happening in the country. Of course, we didn’t have a big bubble to pop. But we’ve got to bridge the future to the new energy future. We have that opportunity, being an energy-producing state now, with fossil fuels, to move into the future, to plan the West Virginia of 50 years from now. And I don’t really see anyone looking at that.


2 — As the debt for OPEB continues to rise, what steps need to be taken to stem the tide and begin reversing this trend?

It’s a huge problem, and I have to say I really don’t have a ready solution for it, and I’m not sure any other politicians really do.

A lot of our politicians say cut taxes and make jobs. I have no idea what that actually really means. We’re going to have to continue to be extremely fiscally responsible in West Virginia. I’ve been mayor. Even though I’m a liberal in the Mountain Party, I’m as tight as the bark on a tree. I was as tight as the bark on a tree in Richwood. You can’t spend money. Now, people say you’ve got to cut waste and use the waste to cut down the liability. Unfortunately, you know, waste is not like a slab of fat on the side of a steak. It’s not like that. So waste is extremely difficult to cut. It can be done. I found out when I was in Richwood. But it’s not a very small level. I’d like to speak from specificities of my experiences. Really, 10 percent of our budget was being wasted. We had a $1 million budget; about $100,000 was being wasted on equipment you couldn’t need, couldn’t use, couldn’t fix. Plus, and this is something you kind of get into, this is sort of a difficult issue, you have to have an investment strategy for your state. Sometimes you have to invest to save. We all know that. When your car gets really, really old, sometimes you’re better off to take a loan and buy a new one.

In Richwood, when I became mayor, I found out that we had old computers that no one was trained on. We weren’t paying anybody anything to work them either, $7 or $8 an hour. Well, guess what? At the end of the year, we had to hire all the accountants to come in and redo all our books and spend a small fortune doing it, because all the data we had was garbage.

So what did we do? We invested and spent some money on buying new computers and training our people to use them. We gave them pay raises from $7-$8 to $10-$12, and guess what, we saved money. So sometimes you do have to invest to save. And that’s a complex issue for people to understand, I think, sometimes. You can’t just say, well, cut, cut, cut, cut. You’re a newspaper. Sometimes you have to spend money to save money or move forward.

Waste is awful hard to get at. I think we should try to do that. But that’s going to be an ongoing issue for our state. I applaud Gov. Manchin’s first forays into paying down some of our unfunded liabilities. He was a fiscally responsible governor, rolled up his sleeves and did a few things. I worked very closely in Richwood to do some things. We’re just going to have to watch our budget like a hawk and try to pay down these unfunded liabilities as best we can.


3 — Transportation remains a significant issue, especially in our region. What, specifically, will you do as governor to try to resolve the funding crisis as it relates to financing new construction and providing for adequate maintenance of our existing roads and bridges?

It is a big issue. I do think that one of the hidden costs of coal is its toll on our roads, particularly in the southern part of the state. And we’re starting to see this with Marcellus shale, too, where a lot of these small roads in the rural areas are being torn all to pieces. So that’s another issue we have to take a look at.

If you look at the state budget, 50 percent of it goes to education. Another 20 percent goes to welfare and social systems. Another 15 to 20 percent for security. And actually, when you start getting down to the nitty gritty, there’s not a whole lot of slack in our budget.

So, I think, the federal government is not in great shape. Federal money is going to get tougher, and tougher and tougher to get. We’re going to have to get very aggressive about linking with and utilizing the federal government to... We’re already getting more than our fair share of the pie, but we’re going to have to continue to do that. We’re going to need federal dollars. It’s going to have to be part of the Marcellus shale solution, too. We’re going to have to factor in the cost to the roads and what the damage to the roads is going to be.

(Would you have signed the $40 million increase in motor vehicle fees?)

I’m not too happy about the vehicle tax, to be honest with you. Vehicles are something everybody has to have.

I think it tends to be harder on and unfair for the lower-class person. I’m more vice-oriented. I think that taxes on cigarettes should go up. Liquor and things like that. I really don’t like raising taxes, but if you do have to raise taxes, I don’t like to do it on necessities. I am glad that we lowered the food sales tax by one percent. I hope eventually we’ll get rid of that.


4 — One of former Gov. Joe Manchin’s major platform issues was education reform. While much was discussed, no wide-ranging changes to the way we educate our children have been made in the recent past. What are your plans when it comes to education reform?

Well, first, I want to say I really am a big supporter of small schools, and I think we should maintain as many of those as we possibly can, particularly our little elementary schools out in the rural area. Now, I come from Richwood. Richwood is continuing to be in decline. The elementary school would be fine. Richwood High School is hanging in there. Richwood High School actually is the heart and soul of that town right now, the town itself economically.

Richwood used to be the Lewisburg of the mountains. It’s now like a bubble of southern West Virginia with the loss of coal jobs and the emergence of Summersville as a regional hub. If Richwood lost its high school, it would literally have no heart left.

On the other hand, I’m in Gilmer County right now. Gilmer has lost half its population in 20 years. We have five little, tiny, old elementary schools, and frankly, they don’t want to lose them, because these little towns that have them, Normantown, whatever, if they lose their school, that’s kind of the end of their town, last little focal point.

On the other hand, when you’re in a county that’s lost half of its population, you may have to consolidate in some cases. And that’s to be avoided. I hate long bus rides for the kids. But it may have to happen. Going up to the next level, we definitely need to link higher education more effectively with our students coming out of high school. So many students showing up at Glenville don’t have the skills to make it. They really don’t. And I really love what our colleges are  doing. You know, we have the hidden P.R.O.M.I.S.E. Scholarship program. It’s actually the wave of the future of West Virginia. I’m going to tap my institution at Glenville. We’ve caught the wave, you might say. And our idea is to identify great students who might be first generation and have specific needs and start cultivating them in the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th grade, bring them to camps, get them introduced to college. Give them some scholarship money. If they come to Glenville, great. But if they go to college, great. If you look at the United States today, 25 percent of United States citizens have bachelor’s degrees. In West Virginia, it’s 17 percent, and in central West Virginia it’s 13 percent.

And I’m going to say something here that’s probably going to be a little unpopular with some of your readers. But I do believe that the P.R.O.M.I.S.E. Scholarship should be needs-based. Really. I’m a professor myself. And I’ve been a single dad. I’ve raised three kids. I’m not making any big money. I’ve got two in college. So it’s a bit of a struggle for me. But I’m making a decent salary, too.

But you know, traditionally, the vehicle by which people could move up in our society was through higher education. And really, when you have doctors and lawyers and professors such as myself, those kids are more apt to get P.R.O.M.I.S.E. Scholarship but don’t have as great a need. We need to reach down here and help these students who are not going to make it to school unless we help them out.

And I will say on the federal level, even though this is not specifically about West Virginia, Obama has called for $44 billion for Pell Grants and loans. The Republicans want $17 billion. To me, that’s a cut that should not be made. That’s an investment strategy. We’re now No. 9 in the world in terms of graduation and sinking fast. If we’re going to compete in the world of the future, we’ve got to continue to get college graduates, and that means giving them the money to go to school. Even as it is, the students... My son is going to Glenville right now. He’s borrowing some serious money. He’s going to be $30,000 in debt, or more, when he gets out. Well, that’s daunting to me, to think about starting out life that way. We’ve got to help our students.

(On the issue of dropouts)

I think this program we’ve got at Glenville... We’ve got a mentoring component, identifying students who are leader students. We’ve really got to start reaching down in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades. You cannot wait until the ninth, 10th and 11th grades. They’re lost to you by then.

So we’ve got to start intervening early in identifying the at-risk students and trying to get them interested in going to college and keeping them going.

Also, we traditionally in West Virginia, unfortunately, have sort of brought up the rear in terms of community colleges. We’ve made some progress that way. But they really are the gateway institutions. So, linkages to those students who may not want to do a traditional four-year school but would want to be in the different trades. I’ll give you a great example from Glenville. We have a land resources program. Those students are doing very, very well now, with everything that’s going on in the gas fields.

Well, you know a bunch of our programs are associate degree programs. Most people don’t know that, even though we’re a four-year school. So you can get a two-year degree and leave Glenville and go right out into the oil and gas fields and make a good salary for yourself and a good living. So, these are the kinds of things we need to look at, very pragmatic linkages with what our state’s needs are and the needs of our students.

(On charter schools)

I’m not opposed to charter schools. They don’t really seem to be that big of an issue in West Virginia. We really don’t have the wherewithal to make a whole lot of charter schools. In urban areas, charter schools have been used and some by the Republicans, I think, as kind of a wedge into the public school system. I like the public school system and support the public school system.

To come back to one of your earlier questions, I would like to see us have sort of... Obama had sort of a Race to the Top. I like the idea that we would put out grant programs that would not penalize schools that are necessarily doing poorly but reward schools for doing very well and reward teachers who are doing well.

So I think that would be a way to improve our schools.


5 — We are constantly being told, and are witnessing every day the far-reaching impacts of drug abuse. What will you do as governor to address the epidemic and do you have any specific plans for interdiction efforts?

That is a deep, deep-breath question. I saw plenty of it in Richwood. We’ve got plenty of opportunity to walk around the corner and get some OxyContin if you’ve got a mind to do it. And OxyContin is terribly frightening to me. These designer drugs are so enticing. I feared for my own children, to be honest with you, when they were in Richwood.

You’re just thinking, “Hey, you know, it’s one thing to be smoking marijuana, and a lot of our kids do, right?”

That doesn’t really frighten me that much.

But when you think about them crushing up the first OxyContin pill and doing it, and knowing their brain circuitry is going to be rewired, that’s a terribly frightening thought.

I think we’ve just got to — our education system —  we’ve just got to get our kids interested in making a life for themselves. And it’s tough. I know in Richwood, you know, that town is very depressed. The kids are depressed. And the temptation, you know, to self-medicate, is very, very strong. So I think we need to do education. We need to be talking to students about the perils of this. To be honest with you, I think our “Just Say No” strategy is a bit naive and foolish, because you can say that and the kids will be with that until they’re about 10 or 12, and they’re going to try marijuana, and they’ll get a little high and kind of enjoy it.

And then they’ll start drinking and saying, “Well, you say drinking was bad, but I kind of enjoyed those first couple of beers. Now maybe I’ll hit it a little bit harder.”

So I think some reality-based discussions with the, about the true nature of what can happen to you if you head down the serious drug road. We need to get that word out there. Maybe we need to get people who have really lost it and fallen apart, have them in schools talking more about this to kids, where they can see people who have gone to prison, people who have lost their families and their jobs. A little reality-based talking.

Please highlight the key points of your platform.

I want to say a couple of things. First, I run kind of as a common person. You might say in the Mountain Party, we’re sort of the bake-sale party. And I think that actually speaks well of us. Because as the big money is raised by the Republicans and Democrats, you got to be wondering, you know, what influence is that buying? It will buy influence. I’ve lived all over West Virginia. I have a child born here in Beckley. I’ve been in Beckley, Williamson, Montgomery, Richwood, Charleston, Huntington and Glenville. I’ve lived all over the state. And I’ve been everything from a house painter and a landscaper to an executive director, a Kellogg fellow, and a mayor. I’ve really got a breadth of experience that I think probably many of the other politicians don’t have.

One thing that has to be addressed in our discussion here today is the issue of mine safety. I’m very unhappy with what happened at Upper Big Branch. I am not an enemy of coal. However, if coal is gong to put profits above the lives of 29 miners, and that’s what happened at Upper Big Branch... We all know there were no carbide tips on the front of the machine. The mine was laced with coal dust. So those sparks followed the coal dust to the methane. It’s murder. I’m not against coal. We are going to be dependent on coal. We are going to mine coal in West Virginia. But we need to do  it safely and responsibly.

Also, in regard to mountaintop mining, which is a huge plank of the Mountain Party, none of the Republicans or Democrats who are running are going to say they’re against mountaintop removal, because they want to be governor, and if you say that, you can’t get to be governor, which is unfortunate.

>From an ecological point of view, we should stop mountaintop removal today. However, we have to take a reality bite here and that is right now, there are 6,000 miners directly tied to that employment, and probably another 10 to 15,000 indirect jobs. So we need to phase out mountaintop removal. We need to put the bulldozers in reverse, actually, and start reclaiming the land that’s already behind us. And I have a proposal to do that. We should take abandoned mine land; that’s what the money is for. We’ve got to start a transition in those southern counties toward what I call a green economy.

We take some money off of coal and gas, and we create solar manufacturing plants and solar collector stations, and we transition to the new green economy, which is coming. And we need to get ahead of the curve and think forward, not backward. We have a lot of politicians now digging in their heels, looking backward, trying to defend coal. No, let’s take this last window of opportunity with coal and this new window of opportunity with fracking and create the new green that’s coming.

I wanted to say this about jobs. So we have green energy jobs. I’ll not talk about the West Virginia Development Office.

You may not be aware of this. I’ve been in grant writing and have written $21 million grants in my life. West Virginia is getting one-fourth of the federal and private grant dollars that Mississippi is getting. Why? We don’t have enough people in West Virginia that know how to write grants to get our fair share of the pie. Our West Virginia Development Office should have 10 grant writers that do nothing but follow the big foundations around — Wal-Mart, Lumina, putting out huge money for education.

And on the list goes. Grants for health care, obesity — all the issues that our state needs to address. We’re not getting the private dollars to augment what we need.

Tourism. I’m huge on tourism, and that is one place I would invest more money in. Tourism is huge for West Virginia’s future; that would include bringing the retirees back. We’re seeing quite a bit of that. Tourism is huge for West Virginia. We need to push, push, push on that. But unfortunately, mountaintop removal is antithetical to tourism. So, we’ve got to protect our environment.

One little catch phrase I’d like to throw out to you — what I call the “green new deal.” I want to talk about the jobs that are going to be the new green jobs for West Virginia.

Does coal have a future in green energy world? Coal is going to be with us for awhile. It does not matter. Right now, the environmental groups are trying to end mountaintop removal. You know, the Spruce Knob has been significantly downsized, or even stopped, by EPA for now. They had other alternatives, and they did not submit them. They could have done 80 to 90 percent of what they wanted to do, but they got a little greedy.

Here’s the big story that’s not being told to West Virginia: Mountaintop removal will end, and it’s not going to end because of the EPA or the environmentalists. It’s going to end because we are in competition with the Powder River basin in Wyoming, which is now producing 400 million tons of coal a year, 40 percent of all the electrical energy made by coal in the United States. And that mine is growing by leaps and bounds.

We’re not going to compete much longer with that mine. I believe that mountaintop removal is going to end in West Virginia, no matter what, probably at a maximum 15 to 20 years. My biggest fear is that it’s going to end, and in its wake, the coal companies are going to pull out and leave behind massive chunks of unreclaimed land. That’s the worst possible scenario that can happen. The country is going to continue to consume coal. We’re hooked on it. We’re hooked on coal, and we’re hooked on oil. We have no place else to go. So, coal’s not going anywhere. Now, our metallurgical coal will continue to be a very viable export.

When people say I’m an environmentalist, but guess what, I tanked up my car to drive down here to see you guys here today. And I like to turn on the lights in my house, too. I’m just as dependent as you are. We’re all part of the problem. So, I haven’t got my head stuck in the clouds, saying, “We’re just going to pull the plug on coal,” and say, “Oh, well, that’s it for coal.”

That ain’t going to happen.

Mountain Party's Bob Henry Baber talks about green jobs and the economy in W.Va. gov race