Summers, Riley, WVPA executive director guest on latest West Virginia Legislature This Week episode

Summers, who heads the House Committee on Health and Human Resources, detailed House Bill 2006, which would split the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources into three separate entities.

HB 2006 passed the House on Feb. 14 and passed the Senate during Wednesday’s floor session, shortly after Summers’ appearance on the webcast.

The legislation is a “first step” toward addressing the agency’s longstanding issues, Summers said.

“We’re going to be coming back year after year after year tweaking this and evaluating it, making changes,” she said. “But what we do know is, the current thing we’re doing isn’t working. So we have to make changes.”

HB 2006 is designed to be budget neutral. The cost of establishing three new cabinet-level secretaries will be offset by streamlining and/or eliminating certain positions.

A plan outlining which positions could be cut is due to the Legislative Oversight Commission on Health and Human Resources Accountability in June, Summers said.

“The plan will be developed by the new secretaries and people who currently work there. And they’ll come back to us,” she said.

The DHHR currently has a 24% vacancy rate, so the plan is to not eliminate any “frontline positions,” Summers said.

“But some of the upper level bureaucrats could be eliminated,” she said.

Riley, a member of the House Committee on Finance, talked about the ongoing negotiations between the House and Senate on tax reform.

Lawmakers are working to find a compromise between the 50% reduction to the state’s personal income tax rate suggested in the House’s plan and the 15% PIT reduction included in the Senate’s plan.

“I think that those negotiations are continuing to go along well,” Riley said.

“I think that the House, the Senate and the governor, all are listening very well, which is really optimistic. So when you have the House, the governor and the Senate all working toward the same goal of getting money back in West Virginia’s pockets — maybe on a path to zero for PIT long term — that’s really important.”

Smith, whose organization represents the interests of West Virginia’s newspaper industry, said Senate Bill 121 is one of the many pieces of legislation the WVPA is monitoring this session.

SB 121, the Creating Student Journalist Press Freedom Protection Act, is intended to ensure all student journalists in the state have the ability to be published and have their views heard.

“The Press Association, like so many groups here, we support free speech,” Smith said. “We don’t care what the speech is. Everyone should have a right to express themselves.”

West Virginia Legislature This Week is a webcast produced by WV News in collaboration with The State Journal and West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

Sponsors of West Virginia Legislature This Week include Mon Health, SEVA-WV and the West Virginia High Technology Consortium.