How unfirm a foundation, O counties of West Virginia

West Virginia’s founding math is slowly strangling the most vulnerable parts of the state to death. 

Right after the preamble affirms to “seek diligently to promote, preserve and perpetuate good government in the State of West Virginia for the common welfare, freedom and security of ourselves and our posterity” the Constitution of West Virginia quickly moves from flowery words to hard numbers and legal necessities. Forty-four counties came out of the rebellious Commonwealth of Virginia, six more upon ratification of the constitution in the counties of Berkeley, Hampshire, Hardy, Jefferson, Morgan and Pendleton, plus Mineral and Grant (1866), Lincoln (1867) and Summers (1871) added by acts of Legislature. Once Mingo County was carved out of Logan by the Legislature in 1895, the 55 counties every West Virginia eighth grader gets quizzed on were set. 

The West Virginia Constitution also dictates how each of those counties must be set up. Three-member county commissions, plus prosecuting attorney, sheriff, county clerk, assessor and surveyor. Mandatory offices in all 55 counties. Whether governing the over 80,000 West Virginians in Wood county or the 8,000 in Webster, the foundational government structure is mandated the same. Six offices minimum, times 55 counties, equals West Virginia local government. There have been tweaks, efforts to streamline, while counties have options to change some of the particulars. But the majority of counties still function under the mandate. A mandate based on a 19th century idea of what a county should be, untethered from the reality of minimum viable government based on the reality of population. 

The very words meant to free West Virginia from oppressive rebellion and make it a state are now the pressure points cutting off the future for most mountaineers striving to be free.

Arbitrary structures for declining areas cease to be skeletons to hold up local governance and become cages of fiscal doom when the demographic floor drops out. Without a tax base to support it, local governments cannot function unless heavily subsidized by a state that doesn’t have enough money itself unless heavily subsidized by the federal government. The State of West Virginia’s own conclusion over 20 years ago was blunt: while legally it would have to be voluntary, some consolidation of municipal and county-level government functions — if not the municipal and county governments themselves — was necessary. While an imperfect law with real legal questions, such as  how the state would readjust to a consolidated entity compared to existing, the now codified and legally available Consolidated Local Government Act was on the books. The Act uses legal phrasing like “Certain local governments are at their taxable limits and yet are facing fee increases to remain financially viable” and “The Legislature finds that consolidation of local governments is in the public interest.” 

In the 20 years since, no local government took the state up on it. 

Part of it was the exceptionally high barriers and ballot processes to instigate consolidation, a confusing and tangled web of petitions, reviews, resolutions and charters only the government could conceive as a process of doing something. The need for voluntary consolidation had legal constraints as well as letting the state Legislature write a process that was wholly on someone else’s initiative to implement. Still, in a representative democracy, the government reflects the voters either by omission or commission, and ultimately it is the voters, the people, that would have to make consolidation happen. 

Consolidation is a dirty word in West Virginia after two score and some odd years of school fights that have no end in sight. There is no version of the state telling local folks to “consolidate” that doesn’t come off as having less for yourself. Nomenclature like “right-size” and “cost-efficient” sounds painless, whereas “consolidate” has visceral pain many folks in many communities know first hand. 

Primarily, no move towards consolidation happened for a much more core, human nature reason: the folks with the legal authority to consolidate are also the folks who will lose their own power doing so. Voters have the say, but the commissioners gatekeep the process. Local identity, patronage jobs, parochial weight, the way things are always done, everyone will hate me on Facebook, and dozens of other highly personalized reasons that no amount of math can prevail against paralyzing any movement for change. Thus, not. And didn’t. 

The problems for most of West Virginia’s local governments have only increased since that 2005 change in code. Out West Virginia’s 55 counties, 47 are declining in population, a total loss of 54,832 between reporting periods, more than the population of Charleston. While West Virginia’s decades-long march of school consolidations runs concurrent with politicians, pundits and policy people perpetually talking about “right-sizing” government, the minimally viable local government crisis deepens. But almost all arguments in state and local government eventually boil down to the same thing: a fight over resources, and the county split between the eight haves and the 47 have-nots when it comes to the counties of West Virginia. 

There is an insidious political game at work in the increasing crisis of declining counties. The eight growing counties are continuously highlighted and resourced as success stories. Those counties gained 27,220 in population, increasing the tax base and all the resources that come with it. The 47 declining counties are continuously told to do more with less, do better, and be quiet about it, lest they upset the success narrative of the growing counties. The Legislature can point to West Virginia Code 7A and go “see, we gave you the tools to fix this yourselves” while the local governments are unwilling and unable to take that route while still, and not unjustly, claiming the state isn’t helping them enough. Even imperfect code needs a modicum of political courage and a commensurate amount of give-a-damn to at least try and work. Currently, West Virginia seems to be lacking in both. 

One of the most abused quotes in all of American history is Lincoln’s “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln was diagnosing a legal structure that permitted the most grotesque of human abuses in slavery, and yet modern discourse has bastardized it into a watered-down “can’t we just all get along” plea. America was either going to be free or it was not, and remixing scripture with the righteous worry for his country being that wrong about something so fundamental birthed one of Lincoln’s greatest insights and quotable quotes. His own following of such a mandate was uneven, and even Honest Abe as president filtered his principles through political expediency under the justification that war changes things with no precedent for peacetime. 

West Virginia, which has Abe in statuary form eternally contemplating in front of the state Capitol building, isn’t an illustration of a house divided; it is a product of the political and moral next step once the principle was established. Turning division into a better unity so that a free people could self-govern was the genesis of the 35th state, born of blood, battle and some questionable legalities that nevertheless endures as proud history, heritage, and culture. But the inarguable math demands change. 

Consolidation is really a fancy word for together, something West Virginians usually pride themselves on, but painful change has to be acknowledged and accepted to make the required sacrifices worth it to the people. It will be a very hard sell. Whereas school consolidation was done to a community, governmental consolidation has to be pitched and approved as the communities doing it for themselves. It requires courage to change the structure of local government while there is still enough community left to change. But the alternative for many of those communities is a slow decline that only ends in governments in name unable to serve. West Virginia has a long history of generational suffering for far less noble reasons. It can be done. It must be done. Modern mountaineers can never be fully free without a government that gives them a chance today, not arbitrary numbers fixed in the century before last.