DOMINION POST EDITORIAL 16 FEBRUARY 2020

APOLOGY STILL OWED GROUPS FOR REMARKS

County commissioner needs to set false accusations right

It’s a lesson most of us learn the hard way on more than one occasion.

Make your words soft and sweet because you never know when you’ll have to eat them. But more importantly, you want to check out your sources and get your facts straight first.

In mid-January, Monongalia County Commissioner Tom Bloom’s words against an environmental foundation were hard and sour.

Some of his frustration was a reaction to comments by a Sierra Club representative who questioned the C o m m i s s i o n’s transparency in negotiations with Longview Power.

The Commission is negotiating a second payment in lieu of taxes deal with Longview Power for a solar and natural gas expansion to accompany its coal-fired power plant.

Yet, when Bloom responded in a public meeting to those comments with accusations of a misappropriation of funds and maligning environmentalists for even receiving those funds, then threatening to forward the matter to the p ro s e c u t o r ’s office if certain conditions were not met, he stepped out of bounds.

The funds in question are payments from Longview Power to the Appalachian Stewardship Foundation, an umbrella organization, created to administer and distribute funds Longview pays as a result of a challenge by the Sierra Club and two other environmental groups in Longview’s permitting process for its existing plant.

A settlement with these groups resulted in Longview paying $500,000 for 10 years and $300,000 each year thereafter — $4 million to date — to be used for remediation efforts.

Representatives from the Sierra Club, the other environmentalists and two nonvoting members, Longview and AMD Reclamation, comprise ASF’s board.

Based on data provided by L o n g v i ew ’s president and CEO, Bloom asserted ASF had spent less than $355,400 on appropriate projects and had spent more than $1.2 million on “lawyers and other activities.”

After reviewing the ASF’s public data on its website we cannot find a single fact that supports those accusation.

The organizations that have received grants from these ASF funds all appear to fund appropriate activities.

The ASF has provided grants totaling $2.2 million to fund appropriate activities and has not paid $1.2 million to lawyers. Period. ASF’s list of grants and tax forms are available to the public.

And trying to cast these payments to ASF as “t a x p aye r ” funds or as shortchanging the school board is disingenuous, at best, wrongheaded, at worst.

Yet, we have yet to hear a public apology to these groups from Bloom. It’s almost as if he’s not going to admit he’s wrong, because he didn’t look at the facts. But he’s not going to look at the facts, because he would have to admit he’s wrong.

Our newspaper is well versed on making mistakes and having to clarify, correct and apologize for them. It’s better to err and apologize than to hope a problem just magically goes away.

Especially, a public problem in a public venue caused by a public official.

P.S. The President of Longview is the source of these accusations, which he repeated in a public meeting in Morgantown hosted by the Mon Valley Clean Air Coalition. dgn