I’ll be honest about how this article came to be. The Clean-Seas West Virginia plant in Belle had fallen off my radar. I knew the broad outline from 2023, when then Governor Justice announced a $50 million “advanced recycling” investment with the usual fanfare, and I knew the project had slipped and shrunk since. But somewhere between the delays and the incomplete applications, I stopped following it.

Eric Caruthers brought it back to my attention. Caruthers is a Belle resident who has been organizing opposition to the plant for the better part of a year, and when he reached out about the community forum he is hosting this week, the thing that stuck with me was not the outrage. It was the fact that the state had already issued the permit, and that most people in the Kanawha Valley, myself included, had not read it.

That forum is Tuesday evening, September 22, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., at the Belle Town Hall gym, 1100 E. DuPont Ave. Organizers have sent personal invitations to 168 elected officials and community leaders, along with company representatives. Most of the conversation will, understandably, be about health, schools, and whether anyone at the county or state level can still do anything.

Before I walked into that room, I wanted to answer a narrower question: what did the state actually approve?

So I pulled Permit R13-3728, the 58-page construction permit signed by Division of Air Quality Director Laura Crowder on August 12, 2026. What follows is a plain-language walkthrough, with condition numbers cited so you can check my work. A copy of the signed permit is posted by WCHS, and the DEP’s own file is searchable through its NSR permit application database.

Why nobody in Belle, West Virginia is taking the state’s word for it.

If you want to understand why a permit fight over a 50-ton-a-day plastics plant has produced nearly 1,000 petition signatures, personal invitations to 168 elected officials, and a second packed town hall, you have to understand that the people of the Kanawha Valley have been told before that the state was watching, and have learned what that promise is worth.

This valley has hosted the densest concentration of chemical manufacturing in the country for the better part of a century. Locals call it Chemical Valley, and nobody means it as a compliment (National Geographic).

In August 2008, a pressure vessel at the Bayer CropScience plant in Institute exploded, killing two workers. Federal investigators found that Bayer management withheld information from county emergency responders while the fire burned, and that a shelter-in-place recommendation never reached 911 operators. The Chemical Safety Board’s central recommendation was that West Virginia create its own chemical plant oversight program (U.S. Chemical Safety Board). A proposal modeled on California’s program, requiring annual audits by health officials and safety experts, was put in front of the Legislature in 2009. It failed to advance (National Geographic).

In January 2010, in Belle itself, a frayed cable on a phosgene line at the DuPont plant sprayed a 58-year-old worker named Carl Fish, who died the next day. It was one of three preventable accidents at the plant inside 33 hours. Investigators cited old equipment, an ineffective mechanical integrity program, and incomplete investigations of earlier near-misses (U.S. Chemical Safety Board; BBC News). The Clean-Seas site sits on DuPont Avenue.

Then came January 9, 2014. A tank at Freedom Industries, a mile and a half upstream from the region’s water intake, had corroded through, and roughly 11,000 gallons of MCHM went into the Elk River. Some 300,000 people in nine counties were told not to drink, cook with, or bathe in their water. Freedom did not disclose that a second chemical was in the tank until 12 days later (U.S. Chemical Safety Board). The state, it turned out, had been relying on companies to self-report their risks and did not have enough certified inspectors to check (West Virginia Watch).

What happened next is the part that matters most for Tuesday. The Legislature responded with the Aboveground Storage Tank Act, passed unanimously in 2014, requiring registration and certified inspection of roughly 42,000 tanks (Mountain State Spotlight). The very next year, lawmakers passed SB 423 and began carving tanks back out (West Virginia Watch). They kept carving. By this spring, Scott Mandirola, the former DEP official who helped draft the original act, testified that the state now regulates about 4,500 of those tanks, roughly 11 percent, and that 89 percent had been deregulated (WV MetroNews). Then both chambers advanced yet another rollback, SB 641, exempting more oil and gas tanks from inspection and letting some owners in critical zones inspect themselves rather than hire an independent third party. When a senator offered an amendment to at least define what fluids the exempted tanks could hold, the Senate rejected it (Mountain State Spotlight).

Widen the lens beyond the valley and the pattern holds. In 1972, a Pittston Coal slurry dam failed on Buffalo Creek, killed 125 people, and left roughly 4,000 homeless across 16 coal communities; the company called it “an act of God” (WV Mine Wars Museum). In 2010, 29 miners died at Upper Big Branch, and an independent review concluded the federal mine safety agency could have prevented it (NPR). In Parkersburg, DuPont told workers and neighbors for decades that C8 had “no observed health effects” while it contaminated their water, and eventually paid $671 million to settle more than 3,500 lawsuits (PFAS Project Lab; The Conversation).

The sequence is always the same. A company gives assurances. Regulators accept them. Something breaks. The Legislature passes a law. The Legislature weakens the law. And every step of it is official, on the record, done by people West Virginians elected.

So when residents of Belle say they do not trust that the DEP, the county, or the Legislature will protect them from this plant, they are not being paranoid. They are being accurate about their own history. The burden here is not on them to prove the plant is dangerous. It is on the state to prove, this time, that it is actually watching.

Read the permit with that history in mind.

That is the lens I brought to Permit R13-3728, the 58-page construction permit signed by Division of Air Quality Director Laura M. Crowder on Aug. 12, 2026. Before I walked into Tuesday’s room, I wanted to answer a narrower question: what did the state actually approve, and how much of it depends on the company telling the truth about itself?

The short version, which I will spell out below: the permit lets the company decide for itself whether the gas it burns is a fuel or a waste, lets it check its own stacks with a hand-held meter, tests for dioxins once and then not again for five years, and requires no monitoring at all at the fence line shared with two schools. Each of those is a defensible legal position. Together they are a familiar shape.

What follows is a plain-language walkthrough, with condition numbers so you can check my work. A copy of the signed permit is posted by WCHS, and the DEP’s own file is searchable through its NSR permit application database (permit writer: Ed Andrews).

The forum is Tuesday evening, September 22, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., at the Belle Town Hall gym, 1100 E. DuPont Ave. Organizers have sent personal invitations to 168 elected officials and community leaders, along with company representatives.

First, the basics.

Who and where. The permittee is Clean-Seas West Virginia, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Clean Vision Corporation, a Los Angeles-based penny stock (OTC: CLNV) (Clean Vision press release). The permitted address is 2700 E. DuPont Ave., Suite 3B, Belle, the former 84 Lumber building, which sits a few hundred feet from Riverside High School and Midland Trail Elementary (West Virginia Watch).

What kind of permit. It is a “construction permit” under state rule 45CSR13, but don’t let the name fool you. The permit’s own description of change says it is “for the construction and operation of a chemical manufacturing process (pyrolysis units).” Once built, the company can run. The article that circulated ahead of Tuesday’s meeting got this right.

How the DEP classified it. The permit declares the plant a “nonmajor source” of air pollution. That single classification does most of the work in this document, and I’ll come back to it.

What gets built.

Section 1.0 of the permit lists every emission unit. Stripped of the ID codes:

* Two commercial pyrolysis reactor trains, each rated at 25 tons of plastic per day, each heated by a 3.5 MMBtu/hr process heater. That is 50 tons per day combined, a far cry from the 100 tons per day the company promised in 2023, or the 500 tons per day its CEO said he hoped to reach (West Virginia Watch).

* A “Training, Research, Evaluation” (TRE) reactor at 1 ton per day with its own small elevated flare. This is the unit the company has been running under a research-and-development exemption without a permit since before the application was filed (WV MetroNews).

* An enclosed combustion device (10 MMBtu/hr) that burns off gases during startup, shutdown, and malfunction.

* Eight storage tanks of 21,000 gallons each for pyrolysis oil, a truck loading rack capped at 3.96 million gallons per year, a glycol heater, a 30-ton char storage bin, and a natural-gas emergency generator.

“Burning plastic” is not quite what the permit describes.

The shorthand in most coverage, including the article promoting Tuesday’s meeting, is that the plant “would burn plastic feedstock.” That is not what the permit authorizes, and the distinction matters because the company will use it.

Condition 5.1.1.b.3 requires each reactor to run in an “oxygen-free/oxygen-limited atmosphere” with no more than 2% oxygen. Plastic is cooked, not burned. What comes out is pyrolysis oil (sold to petrochemical buyers), a non-condensable “process-derived syngas,” and solid char.

What is burned on site is the syngas. The permit lets the company fire it in the two process heaters and the glycol heater as fuel (5.1.1.c.1), route it to the enclosed combustion device during startup and shutdown (5.1.1.b.5), and flare it from the research unit (5.1.3). So critics who call this incineration are pointing at something real. It is just the combustion of gas made from plastic rather than the plastic itself. Precision here is a strength, not a concession.

The emission caps, on paper.

Condition 5.1.5 sets facility-wide annual limits, measured on a rolling 12-month basis:

Those are small numbers. They are also the reason the DEP could call this a “nonmajor” source. But read the fine print at the bottom of 5.1.5: the caps “do not include fugitive emissions sources (equipment leaks or cleaning of equipment) or the emissions released from tanker truck loading operations.” Truck loading gets its own 0.40-ton VOC allowance (6.1.2.a). Equipment cleaning gets another 319 pounds (8.1.1.a).

Hourly limits are set unit by unit. For each process heater, for example, the permit allows 0.13 lb/hr of NOx, 0.05 lb/hr of hydrogen chloride, and 0.06 lb/hr of total hazardous air pollutants (5.1.1.a). Whether a plant like this actually stays under numbers that low is exactly what county commissioners asked the DEP to scrutinize when they wrote in July asking whether the company’s emissions estimates were “based on reliable data comparable to other similar facilities” (West Virginia Watch).

What the plant is allowed to take in.

Section 4 governs feedstock, and it is stricter than I expected:

* Every shipment must be at least 85% polyethylene or polypropylene by weight, sorted and washed off-site, with a certificate of analysis. No certificate, no delivery (4.1.1).

* No bales. Shipments must arrive in sealed containers so inspectors can see what’s inside (4.1.1).

* Up to 4,500 tons of plastic may be stored on site at once, and no batch may sit for more than 12 months (4.1.3). Rejected loads must leave within five days (4.1.4).

* Any plastic the company received before the permit was issued has to be quarantined and inspected under a written plan before it can be processed (4.1.2.a). The company announced its “first commercial-scale shipment” of feedstock in August 2025, a full year before the permit (Clean Vision).

The 85% PE/PP rule is the permit’s main defense against dioxins and hydrogen chloride, which come primarily from chlorinated plastics like PVC. The stack test (5.3.1.c.7) is explicitly meant “to verify the efficacy of upstream feedstock sorting.”

Is the syngas a fuel or a solid waste?

Here is the part of the permit that I think deserves the most attention on Tuesday.

Under federal law, when you burn a “non-hazardous secondary material,” it is presumed to be solid waste unless it qualifies as a legitimate fuel under 40 CFR 241.3. If the syngas is a fuel, the heaters are just heaters. If the syngas is a waste, the heaters are incinerators, subject to the federal Other Solid Waste Incineration (OSWI) rules, with far tougher standards, and the “nonmajor” label goes away.

The permit resolves this in the company’s favor, but with a structure worth understanding:

* The company decides. Condition 5.1.1.d requires a “non-waste/waste self-determination” before startup, or a petition to EPA. The permit does not require the petition. A site-specific self-determination, documented on site, is enough.

* One report, then done. Within 180 days of startup, the company must file a “legitimacy demonstration report” (5.4.5.a). After that, Condition 5.4.5.c says “no further formal determinations under 40 CFR 241.3(d) are required unless the permittee significantly alters the accepted feedstock profile.”

* The research unit is exempt outright. Condition 5.1.3.a states that “by maintaining this operational purpose, the unit is exempt from the requirements of the Other Solid Waste Incineration (OSWI) rules.”

* The backstop. Condition 5.5.5 is the one real off-ramp. After the initial stack tests, the company must recalculate its “potential to emit” using measured data. If any single hazardous air pollutant hits 10 tons per year, or all of them together hit 25, or if “the Director determines the emission profile indicates the combustion of solid waste subject to OSWI guidelines,” the company must apply for a Title V major-source permit or implement OSWI standards.

Read that first item again. The single classification that determines whether this plant is a light-touch “nonmajor source” or a federally regulated incinerator is made by the company, about itself, in a document it keeps on its own premises. That is the same self-certification model the state was relying on when a tank nobody had inspected emptied into the Elk River.

Tom Torres of the Ohio River Valley Institute called the approval “a rollback of critical pollution safeguards put in place to keep families and children safe from the most damaging impacts of waste incineration” and said it departs “from decades of precedent” (West Virginia Watch). The fuel-versus-waste framework is what he is talking about.

What the permit does not require.

Marty Gibson, a Shrewsbury resident with asthma, told reporters after the approval that “this permit fails to require the rigorous, continuous emissions monitoring necessary to guarantee the daily safety of people like me who live right next to the site” (Earthworks). Having read it, I think that is a fair description. Specifically:

* No ambient or fenceline air monitoring. The word “school” does not appear in the permit. Nothing in it measures what reaches the property line, Riverside’s track, or the elementary school playground.

* No continuous stack monitoring for pollutants. The permit requires continuous parameter monitoring (temperatures, pressures, oxygen, feed rate) under 5.2.1, and a continuous analyzer on the syngas line for composition, hydrogen sulfide, and hydrogen chloride under 5.2.2. But the stacks themselves are checked with a hand-held portable analyzer for NOx and CO: weekly for the first six months, then biweekly, then monthly, and eventually quarterly if readings stay low (5.2.4).

* One full stack test, then wait five years. The comprehensive performance test, which is the only time dioxins and furans (EPA Method 23), particulate, hydrogen chloride, and VOCs are measured at the stack, must happen within 180 days of startup. After that, it recurs “at least once every sixty-one (61) months” (5.3.1.a).

* Visible-emission checks are by eye. Compliance with opacity limits at the combustion device, flare, glycol heater, and char bin is verified by a trained observer looking at the stack for periods ranging from one to six minutes (5.2.5 through 5.2.7, 4.2.1).

* Startup and shutdown venting is capped, not prohibited. Raw syngas may be routed to the enclosed combustion device during startups and shutdowns for up to 312 hours per rolling 12 months (5.1.2.b.5).

To be fair, some provisions are meaningful. The permit bans any “intentional, routine release” of uncombusted syngas to the atmosphere (5.1.6). It requires a leak detection and repair program with quarterly Method 21 monitoring and a 15-day repair clock (6.1.3). It requires semi-annual testing of the syngas for nine heavy metals including mercury, lead, cadmium, and arsenic, and conservatively assumes 100% of any metal found ends up in the air (5.3.7). And it requires the company to keep a log of every odor complaint (3.4.2).

But notice who does the measuring in nearly every one of those provisions. The company holds the meter, the company runs the test, the company keeps the log, and the company files the report. The DEP reads what it is sent. After 2014, the state’s own post-mortem said the system “relied on companies to self-report risks, with inadequate mechanisms for state enforcement and oversight” (West Virginia Watch). Twelve years later, that is still the architecture.

This is not the last permit.

Page 2 of the permit says the company “shall apply for a Title V (45CSR30) permit” unless the Director grants a deferral or exemption. Title V is the federal operating-permit program. It comes with its own public comment period and, unlike the construction permit, gives EPA a formal review role. Whether the DEP grants a deferral, and when the company applies, is worth tracking.

Condition 2.5.4 also says the permit “does not relieve the permittee of the responsibility to apply for and obtain all other permits, licenses, and/or approvals from other agencies, i.e., local, state, and federal.” Which brings us to the county.

The county zoning question.

This is where local government enters the picture.

Commissioner Ben Salango told West Virginia Watch in July that “we can’t zone” because of a decision made roughly 40 years ago: “They took that away from us. That was the voters” (West Virginia Watch). Organizer Eric Caruthers says nobody has been able to locate the law he is describing. Nearly 1,000 residents signed a petition asking the commission to hear them, and the answer they got was that a rule no one can produce ties the commission’s hands.

A few things worth knowing before Tuesday. County zoning in West Virginia is governed by Chapter 8A of the state code, which lets a county adopt a zoning ordinance only after it has a planning commission and a comprehensive plan, and which allows zoning to be put to voters. If Salango is right that voters rejected zoning decades ago, the record of that vote should exist in the county clerk’s election returns and the commission’s minutes. If he is wrong, and the limit is a commission policy rather than a voter mandate, the current commission can revisit it. Either way, it is a public record, and someone should produce it.

The distinction matters for a reason that goes beyond this plant. “We’d love to help, but our hands are tied” is the sentence eastern Kanawha County has heard from elected officials for two generations. Sometimes it is true. When it is offered without the document that ties the hands, residents are entitled to treat it as a choice.

The appeal timeline.

The permit says on page 2 that “any person whose interest may be affected, including... any person who participated in the public comment process,” may appeal to the West Virginia Air Quality Board. The Board’s own guidance says appeals “are to be filed within thirty days of the permit applicant’s receipt of the permit or order,” which tracks W.Va. Code 22B-1-7. For a permit issued August 12, that window closed around September 11.

Caruthers has said organizers are working with Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services to appeal.

The money, briefly.

The state has put real public dollars behind this. The West Virginia Economic Development Authority approved a $15 million bridge loan in July 2024, on top of a 2023 memorandum of understanding under then Governor Justice promising up to $1.75 million in performance-based loans against a pledged $50 million investment and at least 40 jobs (West Virginia Watch; WV News). Clean Vision has proposed at least 14 pyrolysis plants worldwide since 2020; as of December 2025, two were operating, in India and Morocco, and SEC filings show under $614,000 in lifetime pyrolysis revenue against nearly $58 million in accumulated deficits (West Virginia Watch).

None of that is in the air permit. The DEP’s final determination letter said residents’ concerns about the company’s finances “did not violate the state’s standards for issuing air quality permits” (West Virginia Watch). That is probably true as a matter of law. It is also a reason the permit’s monitoring gaps matter: a company this thinly capitalized has every incentive to run lean on compliance. Freedom Industries filed for bankruptcy eight days after the spill. The people of the Kanawha Valley know what it looks like when the operator is gone and the cleanup is not.

What to watch, and what to request.

If the state is going to trust the company’s paperwork, the least the rest of us can do is read it. The permit generates a paper trail. Every one of these is a public record obtainable from the DEP’s Division of Air Quality:

If you live nearby and smell something, call it in. The company is required to log it, and the DEP can ask for the log.

Questions worth asking.

For the company:

* Will you commit to fenceline monitoring near Riverside High School, which the permit does not require?

* Will you petition EPA for a formal non-waste determination rather than relying on a self-determination?

* Has the plastic you received in August 2025 been quarantined as Condition 4.1.2.a requires?

For the DEP (if anyone from the agency attends):

* Why is the comprehensive stack test, the only time dioxins are measured, required just once every 61 months?

* Will the Director grant a Title V deferral, and if so, on what basis?

* After 2014, the state acknowledged that self-reporting without enforcement capacity failed. What is different about this permit?

For the Kanawha County Commission:

* Produce the 1980s record that removed zoning authority from unincorporated Kanawha County. If it was a voter referendum, cite the election. If it was a commission decision, explain why the current commission cannot revisit it.

For the legislators who received an invitation:

* You have spent a decade deregulating the tanks you regulated after the water crisis. What would it take for you to vote to require fenceline monitoring at facilities next to schools?

One last thing. It would be easy to read all of this as an argument that nothing can be done. I don’t think that is the lesson. The lesson of Institute, Belle, and the Elk River is that the state will watch exactly as closely as its people insist. Trust in government is not something West Virginians owe. It is something the government has to earn back, one inspection report at a time, and the records table above is how you check whether it is trying. If this had fallen off your radar too, Tuesday night in Belle is a good place to put it back on.

The permit is 58 pages. I have tried to be accurate about what is in it and honest about what is not. If you find an error, or a condition I’ve misread, contact me and I’ll correct it.

Sources:

* Permit R13-3728, WVDEP Division of Air Quality, issued Aug. 12, 2026 (copy via WCHS)

* WVDEP NSR permit database

* W.Va. Code 22B-1-7

* W.Va. Code 8A-7-3

* 40 CFR 241.3

* WV Air Quality Board, How to File an Appeal

* West Virginia Watch, Aug. 13, 2026

* West Virginia Watch, July 31, 2026

* West Virginia Watch, Jan. 9, 2024

* WV MetroNews, April 28, 2026

* WV MetroNews, March 12, 2026

* Mountain State Spotlight, March 4, 2026

* Mountain State Spotlight, Sept. 18, 2025

* U.S. Chemical Safety Board, Freedom Industries final report (2017)

* U.S. Chemical Safety Board, Bayer CropScience report (2011)

* U.S. Chemical Safety Board, DuPont Belle report (2011)

* BBC News, July 2011

* National Geographic, Jan. 2014

* NPR, March 23, 2012

* WV Mine Wars Museum, Feb. 2026

* PFAS Project Lab, Parkersburg

* The Conversation, 2020

* Earthworks, Aug. 15, 2026

* Clean Vision Corp. press release, Aug. 14, 2026

* WV News

Carrie Clendening writes about West Virginia policymaking through the perspectives of elections and campaign finance money.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

What you’ve asked West Virginians to be “friends” with, for generations, is a system that treated them as expendable.

You built an economy that depended on people having no better options—and then congratulated yourselves for offering them one. You paid wages just high enough to keep people tethered, in places where opportunity had already been stripped bare. And when those wages cycled right back out—through debt, through company towns, through economic structures you controlled—you called it prosperity.

It wasn’t prosperity. It was containment.

You want credit for jobs. But you never want to talk about the conditions attached to them—the safety shortcuts, the long-term health consequences, the poisoned water, the flattened communities, the regulatory capture that made all of it possible. You wrapped it all in the language of heritage and pride, while lobbying to keep enforcement weak and oversight toothless.

And when things went wrong—as they inevitably did—you called it tragedy. Not policy failure. Not negligence. Not the predictable outcome of decisions made in boardrooms and backrooms.

Tragedy.

You’ve spent decades cultivating the idea that questioning this system is an attack on West Virginia itself. That criticizing the industry is somehow disrespecting the people who worked in it. That demanding accountability is equivalent to betrayal.

It’s a convenient narrative. It’s also a dishonest one.

Because the truth is, the people of this state were never the priority. The resource was.

And when the resource changed—when coal became chemical, when extraction became more mechanized, when fewer workers were needed—you didn’t pivot toward protecting communities. You doubled down on extraction. You fought regulations. You fought diversification. You fought anything that threatened the control you had built.

Then you turned around and asked the rest of us to celebrate it.

“Friends of Coal” isn’t a grassroots movement. It’s a message discipline strategy. It’s a shield. It’s a way to blur the line between an industry and a people—so that any criticism of one feels like an attack on the other.

But they are not the same.

West Virginians are not a brand. They are not a mascot for your lobbying campaigns. They are not props in your legislative testimony. And they are not obligated to keep sacrificing their health, their land, and their future so your balance sheets stay intact.

And let’s be clear about something else: this didn’t happen in a vacuum.

It happened with the full cooperation of elected officials who wrote the laws you wanted, ignored the violations you committed, and repeated your talking points back to the people they were supposed to represent. It happened because political power in this state has too often been aligned with industry interests instead of public ones.

That’s not heritage. That’s a system.

And systems can be dismantled.

So no, this isn’t about being “anti-coal” or “anti-industry.” It’s about being honest. It’s about rejecting the idea that exploitation—no matter how long it’s been normalized—is something we owe loyalty to.

You can keep the slogans. You can keep the billboards. You can keep the coordinated messaging campaigns.

But you don’t get to keep rewriting the story.

And on a day when we’re told to honor sacrifice, let’s be clear about the difference between service and exploitation. One is given freely. The other is extracted and repackaged as pride.

If we are going to invoke freedom, then let it mean more than a slogan on a bumper sticker or a decal on the back of a pickup paid for by a trade association. Let it mean freedom from companies and politicians who think our people are disposable, freedom from an industry PR machine that confuses loyalty with silence, and freedom from the idea that our children’s futures must be collateral damage for somebody else’s profit.

So let freedom ring—not as background noise to another corporate marketing campaign, but as a reckoning. Let it ring in the boardrooms and at the Capitol, in every office where decisions are made about our land and our lives. Let it ring until it drowns out the PR, outlasts the billboards, and breaks the grip of the “Friends of Coal” myth once and for all.

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During a recent meeting of the West Virginia Professional Charter School Board (PCSB), leadership announced an ambitious legislative goal for the upcoming 2027 regular session: granting public charter schools equal “border privileges” with traditional public county school boards.

Executive Director Barry Holstein framed the proposal around a statutory “disconnect.” Under West Virginia Board of Education (WVBE) Policy 8100, traditional county school boards are required to charge out-of-state students per-capita tuition to attend West Virginia public schools. However, W. Va. Code §18-5G-3 explicitly prohibits public charter schools from charging full-time tuition to any student.

On the surface, amending the code to give public charters parity with traditional school districts sounds like a commonsense technical cleanup. In fact, initial coverage of the meeting—such as the News and Sentinel article published on September 11, 2026—treated the issue as a procedural summary of board discussion, capturing Delegate Joe Statler’s insistence on upfront parental payments and board member Chanda Adkins’s concerns regarding delayed reconciliations.

However, viewing this push strictly as a technical “disconnect” misses the profound legal and financial machinery underneath. Striking the tuition prohibition without embedding strict, surgically crafted statutory guardrails does not fix an oversight—it opens a massive financial trap that could force West Virginia taxpayers to subsidize the education of out-of-state residents.

While initial media reporting accurately captured the surface-level debate, it left out four critical statutory and fiduciary mechanisms that govern West Virginia education finance:

* The PSSP State Aid Mechanics: How foundation aid is calculated under October 1 headcount rules.

* The Sovereign Taxing Authority Gap: The structural difference in solvency protection between traditional county boards and public charters.

* The “Arrears” Legal Loophole (§18-5-16): Statutory protections that shield parents from tuition liabilities under cross-border district agreements.

* The Statewide Virtual Charter Exposure: The risk of inadvertently creating state-sanctioned, nationwide tuition academies.

To understand why a simple statutory repeal is dangerous, lawmakers must examine each of these hidden mechanisms.

The PSSP Funding Reality: Out-of-State Students Equal $0 in State Aid

The bedrock of West Virginia’s K-12 financing is the Public School Support Plan (PSSP). Under state law and WVDE accounting regulations, state aid eligibility is strictly tied to residency. To generate state foundation allowance dollars during the crucial October 1 enrollment headcount, a student must reside in West Virginia.

When a public charter school enrolls a West Virginia resident, the state funding follows that student to cover their educational costs. But when a charter school accepts an out-of-state student, that student brings zero state tax dollars. The school relies entirely on collecting 100% of the per-capita cost through external tuition.

If that tuition is delayed, disputed, or unpaid, the charter school receives no state bailout. Every unpaid dollar directly creates an operational deficit that must be absorbed by the school’s existing budget.

Sovereign Taxing Power vs. Charter Solvency Fragility

Why can traditional public school districts handle out-of-state student transfers without risking bankruptcy, while public charters cannot? The answer lies in local taxing authority.

Traditional county school boards operate as sovereign local entities with deep financial backstops. When a traditional district accepts non-resident students and encounters delayed tuition collections or administrative friction across state lines, it possesses robust safety nets:

* Local Share Property Tax Revenue: Continuous streams of local tax dollars.

* Excess Levies & Bond Issuances: The voter-approved statutory authority to raise local funds for operational and capital needs.

* Large Cash-Flow Buffers: Multi-million dollar countywide operating budgets.

Public charter schools possess zero sovereign taxing authority. Under W. Va. Code §18-5G-3, charters are explicitly barred from levying property taxes or issuing public bonds. They operate on tight, per-pupil revenue margins.

If a traditional county board experiences a temporary gap in out-of-state tuition collection, local property taxpayers absorb the timing mismatch. If a public charter school experiences the same gap, it has no tax base to call upon. It must immediately divert funds meant for West Virginia children to keep the lights on and pay teachers.

The “Arrears” Legal Loophole: §18-5-16

During the PCSB discussions, Delegate Joe Statler rightly argued that West Virginia taxpayers should never foot the bill for out-of-state students, demanding direct parental billing. However, current law creates a severe legal obstacle to this requirement.

Interstate public school transfers are governed by W. Va. Code §18-5-16. When school districts arrange cross-border attendance, they typically execute mutual district-to-district transfer agreements. Crucially, §18-5-16(g) includes an explicit parental shield:

“No parent, guardian, or person acting as parent or guardian is required to pay for the transfer of a student or for the tuition...”

Under this statutory model, neighboring school systems bill one another in arrears at the conclusion of the school year.

For a public charter school, relying on end-of-year billing in arrears is a fiduciary nightmare. If a charter school accepts 30 students from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, or Virginia, and the sending out-of-state school district refuses or delays payment at the end of the fiscal year, the charter school cannot legally go after the parents under §18-5-16(g). The charter school is left holding an uncollectible debt—effectively forcing West Virginia state revenue to finance neighboring states’ educational obligations.

Physical Border Optimization

vs.

Unintended Virtual Expansion

There is a legitimate operational argument for physical, brick-and-mortar charter schools located in border communities. Institutions like Eastern Panhandle Preparatory Academy (EPPA) in Kearneysville or the proposed WISH Academy in Huntington (exploring operations near the Marshall University campus) face unique geographic realities.

For these physical campuses, accepting cross-border commuters helps fill empty classroom seats, optimizing facility utilization and reducing fixed overhead costs per student.

However, West Virginia also authorizes statewide virtual charter schools. Under current code, virtual charters are governed by the same foundational statutes as physical charters.

If the Legislature passes a broad, blanket exemption removing the tuition prohibition in §18-5G-3 without structural qualifications, virtual charters would instantly gain statutory authority to recruit tuition-paying students nationally and internationally.

Without explicit guardrails, West Virginia could inadvertently transform its public virtual charter framework into state-sanctioned, online private academies operating worldwide. This would represent a radical departure from the original intent of West Virginia’s charter school legislation passed in 2019 and expanded in 2021.

Educational choice should empower West Virginia families, encourage innovative learning models, and maximize resource efficiency in our local communities. But school choice should never mean West Virginia taxpayers pick up the tab for another state’s constitutional duty to educate its residents.

As the 2027 legislative session approaches, lawmakers must look past surface-level arguments about “equal privileges.” By insisting on strict upfront billing, eliminating arrears loopholes, protecting virtual boundaries, and prioritizing local residents, the Legislature can fix statutory inconsistencies without putting West Virginia’s financial integrity at risk. Without a legislative amendment explicitly carving out an exception for out-of-state students, charter schools cannot safely adopt the border privileges utilized by traditional county boards.

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Why do regions with the most to gain from economic and social change often appear the most resistant to it? For decades, the national media has attempted to answer this by peering into the Appalachian “Valley” and emerging with a collection of static cultural stereotypes. From “hillbilly” caricatures to the “Trump Country” label, these narratives suggest a region defined by a “culture of poverty” or a “forgotten tribe” of white woe.

But if we look past the exceptionalist tropes, we find that Appalachia is not a backward outlier. Instead, it is a microcosm of the broader American political economy—a “sacrifice zone” where the mechanics of institutional power are simply more visible. By examining the “architecture of power” within the region—the systems of ownership, legislative capture, and civic control—we can see how power is maintained, how it evolves from illicit bribes to “legalized rent-seeking,” and where the real seeds of resistance are planted.

The “Appalachianization” of America:

Sociologist John Gaventa argues that the distress once thought unique to Appalachia has become a national phenomenon. The region’s history of “poverty amidst riches”—tremendous natural wealth alongside glaring inequality—is now reflected across the American heartland. Power and Powerlessness Revisited (2026)

Data from the Economic Innovation Group reveals a “ruralization of distress”: between 2007 and 2016, the number of rural Americans living in distressed zip codes increased by nearly 1 million. While the United States was once a country of disparate places converging toward prosperity, it is now a country of places “drifting further apart.” This isn’t just a domestic drift; it’s a global resource play. In the 1970s, Gaventa found that 90% of the Valley’s land was owned by the British “American Association.” Today, that has been replaced by a “Chinese rush for resources,” with massive influxes of Chinese capital targeting West Virginia’s infrastructure—a pattern of “pharmaceutical colonization” and resource extraction that treats the heartland like a global colony.

“Appalachia is not poor, then, but its people are… in a word, Central Appalachia is a region of poverty amidst riches, a place of glaring inequalities.” — John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness (1980)

The Three Faces of Power: Why Silence Isn’t Always Consent:

To understand why disenfranchised populations appear quiet in the face of inequality, we must look at the three dimensions of power that shape their lives:

The First Face (Direct Resource Mobilization): This is the visible mobilization of cash to defeat opponents. In West Virginia, the WVCar PAC pooled $457,000 in the 2021-2022 cycle to ensure only “pro-business” candidates remained viable, essentially buying the “viability” of the candidate pool.

The Second Face (Agenda Setting): Power is used to prevent issues from even being discussed. Through “protectionist moats,” trade associations codify franchise laws (W. Va. Code § 17A-6A) that legally bar original equipment manufacturers from entering the market. By the time a session begins, the possibility of free-market competition has been structurally excluded.

The Third Face (Internalized Powerlessness): The most insidious dimension. It involves shaping the cultural and civic environment so thoroughly that the status quo is defended by those it harms. When elites control the “foundational funding of the community itself,” the community views their dominance as an “inherent necessity.” Resistance becomes unthinkable because challenging the elite threatens the very survival of the local hospital or charity.

The New Barons: From Coal Mines to Car Dealerships:

The era of the “absentee coal baron” has transitioned into an era of localized “service monopolies.” As the region moves away from legacy extraction, the new power brokers are automotive dealership owners, trucking magnates, and logistics giants.

The LeRose family in Nicholas County exemplifies this shift. By controlling a network including Mid-State Chevrolet, LeRose Wrecker Service, and the real estate holding firm Anthony Thomas Associates LLC, they have anchored themselves as “indispensable” to local governance. These entities are the primary engines of local payroll, sales tax, and supply chains. This “economic anchoring” grants them a seat at the table with state politicians, who recognize that any disruption to these businesses carries immediate, localized electoral consequences.

Reputational Laundering: Surviving the “Criminal Crucible”:

The true measure of regional power is the capacity to survive severe institutional crises. Figures with documented histories of federal fraud maintain high-trust civic roles through “reputational laundering.”

In the late 1990s, the LeRose family faced a federal check-kiting scheme that resulted in a $3,364,958 loss for First Community Bank. At the time, John Steven LeRose was the Mayor of Summersville. Simultaneously, Rodney LeRose was caught in a bribery scandal, paying $2,725 in bribes to State Senator Randy Schoonover to secure exclusive towing referrals on the West Virginia Turnpike.

Despite these federal convictions, the family remains civically embedded. Rodney LeRose serves as Chairman of the 28th Judicial Circuit Public Defender Corporation. This role is a masterclass in institutional symbiosis: it forces local judges, attorneys, and law enforcement to treat the family as key facilitators of the legal infrastructure rather than former targets of federal probes. By leading hospital charity drives and hospital foundations, they turn their influence into a transactional commodity, neutralizing the stigma of the “criminal crucible.”

Legalized Rent-Seeking: The Evolution of the Bribe:

The “old way” of doing business in Appalachia—illicit envelopes of cash—has evolved into a sophisticated, legal form of regulatory capture. The price point of influence has shifted from the $2,725 illicit bribe of the 90s to the legalized symbiosis of modern campaign finance.

A pinnacle example is Senate Bill 422 (2026). The bill mandates that the state DMV build custom IT infrastructure—at taxpayer expense—to allow towing companies to bypass federal privacy hurdles and maximize profit margins. The lead sponsor, Senator Brian Helton, is a logistics entrepreneur who shares a direct financial interest with the beneficiaries: he and Rodney LeRose Sr. are listed as organizers of the same real estate vehicle, Anthony Thomas Associates, LLC.

This is the new “crony capitalism”:

* A maximum individual contribution is made to a candidate.

* A shared corporate real estate venture is established to align long-term interests.

* A customized state law is passed that mandates a state agency to subsidize the donor’s administrative operations.

The “Hidden Transcript” of Resistance:

National media focuses on the ballot box, but this misses the “hidden transcript” of resistance. While voter absenteeism is highest in the central mining regions—a signal of profound distrust in national politics—local, place-based activism is surging.

Contrary to the “Trump Country” caricature, the region is a laboratory for radical movement-building:

The West Virginia Teachers’ Strike: A statewide labor victory that inspired a national wave of teacher walkouts

The “Queer Appalachia” and Appalshop movements: Creative efforts to challenge external stereotypes and document a diverse, nuanced regional culture.

Cross-Racial Solidarity: In Tennessee, over 300 residents marched to support immigrant workers following a federal meatpacking plant raid, defying the “anti-immigrant” narrative.

The Legacy of Activist Scholarship: The landmark Appalachian Land Ownership Study of the 1980s didn’t just collect data; it acted as the literal blueprint for groups like Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) and SOCM to fight for land reform.

This resistance isn’t just local; it’s global. In 2018, at the climate talks in Poland, Kentucky activist Teri Blanton (a product of KFTC’s organizing) interrupted a Trump administration coal panel to challenge the “death march” of the industry on a global stage.

The Future of the Appalachia:

Power in Appalachia is not a monolith; it is a “Power Cube” of interacting spaces and levels. To change the region, activists must navigate Closed spaces (where elites make deals), Invited spaces (where tokens of participation are offered), and Claimed spaces (where the grassroots seize the agenda).

The “activist scholarship” that has grown in the region over the last fifty years has begun to transform the narrative of what is possible. The final question for the region, and for an “Appalachianized” America, remains: When do these small-scale “building blocks of resistance” finally reach the scale necessary to transform the national political landscape? The answer lies in recognizing that the silence of the heartland isn’t consent—it’s a symptom of an architecture that is finally being dismantled from the inside out.

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UPDATES:

1. CLA PAC’s A.M.G. Vendor:

WV Senate Victory Fund

WVSOS Committee Webpage

Lobbying Disclosure Report

CLA PAC

WVSOS Committee Webpage

Independent Expenditure Report 1

Independent Expenditure Report 2

Republican Senate Caucus Committee

WVSOS Committee Webpage

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I have been home sick all day with the summer cold that seems to be making its way through everybody’s house, office, school, and grocery store checkout line.

So, lucky—or unlucky—for my readers, I have had time to sit still long enough to read, and write about Elon Musk’s VoteSafe.org.

And I have to say: my mind has not changed.

Back in June, I wrote about why I told my newly 18-year-old daughter to wait before registering to vote. Not forever. Not because I do not want her to vote. Not because I want young people to disengage, become cynical, or sit quietly while other people make decisions about their lives. Quite the opposite.

I want her to vote. I want her to be informed. I want her to understand that her voice matters and that democracy is not something we inherit automatically—it is something people have to keep showing up for, protecting, and demanding better from.

But I also want her to understand that her personal information has value.

And increasingly, the people asking for that information are not treating it like something precious. They are treating it like campaign fuel.

That was my argument in June. I was worried about government demands for sensitive voter files, third-party vendors, insecure databases, politically connected data firms, and the long history of voter information being exposed, copied, shared, misconfigured, and left sitting on the internet for anybody who knows where to look.

Then I read about VoteSafe.org.

And now I am wondering whether, as sacrilegious as it feels to say it, I may ask my daughter to sit this election cycle out too.

Not because voting is the problem.

Because the modern political system has turned ordinary citizens—especially young people registering for the first time—into inventory.

A voter-registration site should not be a surveillance machine!

There is a difference between helping someone register to vote and building a detailed political profile of them.

Vote.gov, the federal government’s official voter-registration portal, directs people to the appropriate state registration resources. According to the Election Assistance Commission’s privacy policy, it does not collect personally identifying information simply because someone visits the site, and it says its cookies do not store information that can personally identify a visitor.

That is what a voter-information site should look like.

Do you need to know where to register? Here is where to go.

Do you need to check a deadline? Here it is.

Do you need your state election office? Click this link. (If you are in West Virginia go here: https://ovr.sos.wv.gov/Register/Landing)

Simple. Useful. No politics. No hidden agenda. No giant surveillance apparatus lurking behind a cheerful little “Are You Registered?” button.

VoteSafe.org appears to be something very different.

According to reporting by Judd Legum, the site is operated by America PAC, Elon Musk’s super PAC, and it is being promoted heavily to voters in key states. The site collects more than the basic information a person might expect to provide while checking registration status: name, date of birth, home address, email address, cellphone number, IP address, location information, device and browser information, referral source, pages viewed, and links clicked.

Think about that for a second.

A young person who thinks they are simply checking whether they are registered may be handing over a home address, contact information, date of birth, online activity, device information, and location data to a political organization funded by one of the richest men in the world.

That is not a neutral public service.

That is a data-collection operation wearing a “go vote” costume.

The part that should make every parent, voter, election official, and privacy-minded person stop cold is not merely that VoteSafe.org collects information.

It is what the site’s policies reportedly allow America PAC to do with it.

Legum reported that an earlier VoteSafe.org privacy policy said personal information collected through the site would be used only to support America PAC’s activities and would not be shared with advertisers, political organizations, or third parties not directly affiliated with the PAC.

But that language was removed in an August 29 update, according to the report. The updated policy reportedly permits America PAC to “share” or “sell” personal information with “business partners,” including information about whether someone is registered to vote and, where lawful, how they submit their vote. It also permits the sale or sharing of inferences drawn from the data—things like predicted attitudes, behavior, predispositions, intelligence, abilities, and aptitude.

Read that again: inferences.

Not just who you are. Not just where you live. Not just whether you are registered.

What they think they can determine about you.

Your habits. Your fears. Your likelihood of voting. Your political leanings. The kind of message most likely to move you. The kind of message most likely to make you angry. The kind of message most likely to make you stay home.

That is the part of modern politics we are supposed to accept without asking questions.

We are supposed to shrug and say, “Well, everybody does it.”

No. Everybody should not get to do it.

And we especially should not build voter-participation systems around the idea that a citizen’s basic democratic act—checking registration, finding a ballot, or asking how to vote—is an opportunity to create a permanent commercial and political dossier.

This is Bigger than Elon Musk!

I do not care whether the surveillance machine is funded by Elon Musk, George Soros, the Koch network, a labor union, a Democratic consulting firm, a Republican consulting firm, a nonprofit, a tech company, or some unnamed vendor with an LLC registered in Delaware.

I do not trust any of them with more personal information than they genuinely need.

And right now, they do not need this much.

The argument is always that data makes democracy more efficient. It helps campaigns reach voters. It helps organizations encourage participation. It helps candidates communicate.

Fine. But there is a line between communicating with voters and constructing behavioral profiles of them.

There is a line between reminding someone of an election deadline and following them across websites, apps, and streaming services.

There is a line between providing useful election information and building a device fingerprint so that a person can be tracked even after deleting cookies.

Legum’s reporting says VoteSafe.org is configured to share information with numerous partners and advertising systems, including Meta, Google, X, The Trade Desk, Iterable, and other tracking companies. It also reports that the site uses data practices that can connect a user’s activity to advertising systems and create tracking identifiers tied to the technical characteristics of a person’s device.

That is not what most people picture when they hear the phrase “voter registration website.”

Most people picture a government form.

Most people picture a county clerk’s office.

Most people picture paperwork.

They do not picture a political data pipeline.

But that is what we have allowed elections to become.

When I Wrote in June that I Wanted My Daughter to Wait Before Registering, Some People Probably Heard it as Anti-Voting.

It was not.

It was pro-privacy.

It was pro-consent.

It was pro-democracy in the fullest sense of the word—the kind of democracy where a citizen does not have to trade away her personal information, her online behavior, her address, her device identity, and her predicted psychological tendencies just to participate.

My daughter is 18. She is old enough to vote. She is old enough to have opinions. She is old enough to be targeted by campaigns, candidates, political influencers, advertisers, partisan media outlets, fundraising operations, and every other person who sees a first-time voter as an opportunity.

But she is not a lead.

She is not a consumer profile.

She is not a political product.

She is not a data point to be sold, shared, scored, modeled, matched, and chased around the internet until somebody figures out the exact combination of fear, outrage, hope, or guilt that might get her to click.

That should not be controversial.

The fact that it is controversial tells us how badly we have normalized the commercialization of citizenship.

Voter Participation Cannot Require Surrender.

I am not telling anyone else what to do.

If you are comfortable registering today, register. If you need to check your registration status, check it. If you have a child turning 18, teach them how the process works and encourage them to learn about the candidates and issues that will affect their lives.

But please use official state election resources or Vote.gov to find them.

Do not assume that a professional-looking website, a polished ad, a celebrity-backed campaign, or a friendly reminder text message is a public service. It may be. Or it may be a political organization gathering information it can use long after Election Day.

And before you type in your name, address, date of birth, phone number, or email, ask a few very basic questions:

* Who owns this website?

* Is it a government election office, or is it a political organization?

* What information does it collect beyond what is necessary?

* Does it sell or share data with “partners”?

* Does it track activity across devices, apps, websites, or streaming platforms?

* Can it use the information to create assumptions about a voter’s beliefs, behavior, or vulnerabilities?

* Is there a direct official state election website I can use instead?

Those are not paranoid questions.

They are the minimum questions responsible adults should be asking in 2026.

We Have Spent Years Watching Big Money Colonize Every Corner Of American Politics.

It is in the ads. It is in the mail. It is in the text messages. It is in the dark-money groups. It is in the consultants, the data brokers, the super PACs, the online fundraising platforms, the microtargeted videos, and the supposedly grassroots organizations that somehow have a million dollars to spend on “reminding” us to do something.

Now it is at the front door of voter registration itself.

Something has to give.

We have got to get big money out of politics—or at least stop allowing it to build private surveillance systems around one of the most basic rights we have.

We have got to get a handle on voter-data controls.

We need clear rules that say a person should be able to register, check registration, find a polling place, or request election information without becoming a monetizable political profile.

We need real limits on the collection, retention, sale, sharing, and behavioral analysis of voter information.

We need transparency about who funds these sites, who operates them, where the data goes, which vendors receive it, how long it is retained, and what voters can do to delete it.

And we need consequences when political groups and their vendors treat civic participation as a permission slip to track people everywhere they go.

Until then, I am still going to protect my daughter’s information as fiercely as I can.

I still want her to vote.

But I refuse to teach her that being a good citizen means blindly handing over her life to whichever billionaire, super PAC, consultant, or data broker has built the slickest website.

Democracy is supposed to belong to the people.

Our data should too.

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I found the information below about a month ago, and I have decided it is time to bring it into the sunlight.

I am putting these records and connections out publicly because West Virginians deserve to know who is involved in shaping policy that affects them—especially when it involves public benefits, public money, and the people closest to power.

If you are a journalist, researcher, or fellow Substack publisher, please feel free to use this information, follow the trail, and build on the reporting.

In the first quarter of 2025, First Lady Denise Henry Morrisey was listed as a lobbyist for Food Fix Campaign Action, Inc., a national advocacy organization working on nutrition policy, chronic disease, “Food as Medicine,” and improvements to SNAP-Ed.

Less than two months after that lobbying report was filed, the Morrisey administration submitted a request to the Trump administration seeking permission to bar West Virginia SNAP recipients from using their benefits to buy soda.

And the state’s waiver did not simply mention SNAP-Ed in passing.

It made SNAP-Ed part of the plan.

The waiver says West Virginia would use SNAP-Ed to encourage alternative drink choices, produce educational materials, collect information about soda consumption, and evaluate whether taking soda off the SNAP-eligible list changes the behavior of low-income families.

That does not prove that Denise Morrisey wrote the waiver. It does not prove Food Fix Campaign Action drafted the state’s proposal. And it does not prove that the First Lady personally lobbied USDA for West Virginia’s soda ban.

But it does raise a straightforward question: What was the relationship between the First Lady’s lobbying work for Food Fix Campaign Action and the Morrisey administration’s decision to build a statewide SNAP policy around the same nutrition, chronic-disease, Food as Medicine, and SNAP-Ed framework?

The public deserves an answer.

A Federal Disclosure Names Denise Morrisey

A lobbying report filed April 21, 2025, lists Capitol Counsel LLC as the lobbying firm and Food Fix Campaign Action, Inc. as the client.

The report covers the first quarter of 2025. It lists $100,000 in lobbying-related income for the quarter and identifies the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives as the targets of the lobbying activity.

Among the individuals listed as lobbyists is Denise Henry Morrisey.

That is Denise Morrisey, the wife of Governor Patrick Morrisey and West Virginia’s First Lady.

The lobbying disclosure lists her with a group of lobbyists working on several issue areas for Food Fix Campaign Action. The most relevant one is agriculture and nutrition policy.

The report says Food Fix Campaign Action was lobbying on:

“Support regenerative organic agriculture, improvements in nutrition, and food as medicine, including nutrition and chronic disease-related improvements to SNAP-Ed, and advocacy related to Farm Bill reauthorization.”

That is not vague language.

The disclosure specifically refers to SNAP-Ed, the federally supported nutrition-education program connected to SNAP.

It also names chronic disease, nutrition, and Food as Medicine—three themes that later appear throughout West Virginia’s soda waiver request.

The Waiver Followed

On June 10, 2025, West Virginia’s Department of Human Services submitted a request to USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service asking for authority to prohibit SNAP recipients from buying soda with their benefits.

The state proposed excluding regular soda, diet soda, and zero-sugar soda from SNAP eligibility statewide.

The request would affect every SNAP household in West Virginia. At the time the state submitted the waiver, it reported 146,488 SNAP households and 273,981 individual recipients. It also said all 2,118 SNAP-authorized retailers in the state would be required to comply.

West Virginia’s justification was built around the same set of ideas that appeared in the Food Fix disclosure:

* Nutrition.

* Chronic disease.

* Health outcomes.

* Food choices.

* Obesity.

* Diabetes.

* Medicaid spending.

* Nutrition education.

* Behavior change.

The waiver argues that soda has no nutritional value, connects sugary drinks to weight gain and chronic disease, and says restricting soda purchases could push SNAP households toward healthier drink options.

West Virginia also tied the proposal to the state’s obesity statistics, youth soda consumption, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and Medicaid spending on diabetes and weight-management medications.

Again, none of that proves Food Fix supplied the research, the language, or the policy idea.

But it is hard to ignore the overlap when the governor’s wife was listed as a Food Fix lobbyist on a disclosure that specifically mentioned SNAP-Ed and chronic-disease-related nutrition policy.

SNAP-Ed is Not a Side Note

This is where the connection becomes more specific.

The waiver does not merely say that the state will encourage healthier choices. It gives SNAP-Ed a defined role in making the waiver work.

West Virginia wrote that it would use its SNAP-Ed implementing agency to offer SNAP households alternative drink options.

The state also said SNAP-Ed would create targeted graphs and one-page documents explaining healthy drink options to households affected by the restriction.

The waiver identifies the WVU Extension Family Nutrition Program as West Virginia’s SNAP-Ed implementing agency. That program would be asked to gather state-specific data on soda consumption before and after the restriction.

The proposal also says SNAP-Ed would:

* Collect information about recipients’ beverage behavior and consumption.

* Use adult nutrition-education outreach.

* Conduct surveys and interviews.

* Use 24-hour dietary recalls.

* Track beverage purchasing and consumption patterns.

* Include the soda restriction in evaluation criteria for the state’s “Rethink Your Drink” program.

The waiver describes Rethink Your Drink as an effort to encourage water consumption and reduce sugary-drink intake, especially among children.

That means SNAP-Ed is not simply being used to hand out informational flyers after the fact.

It is part of the state’s communications plan, behavior-change strategy, and evaluation plan.

The program is being asked to help tell SNAP households what to buy instead, measure whether their behavior changes, and help produce evidence that the policy worked.

That is the same federal program Food Fix Campaign Action listed in its lobbying disclosure when it named Denise Morrisey as a lobbyist.

The Timeline Matters

Here is the sequence:

* January 13, 2025: Patrick Morrisey becomes governor of West Virginia. Denise Henry Morrisey becomes First Lady.

* January - March 2025: Denise Morrisey is listed as a lobbyist for Food Fix Campaign Action.

* April 21, 2025: Capitol Counsel files the Food Fix lobbying report.

* June 1, 2025: Governor Morrisey and First Lady Denise Morrisey appear at a healthy-eating event involving a mobile teaching kitchen. The Governor’s Office described it as part of the administration’s effort to promote healthy eating.

* June 10, 2025: West Virginia submits its waiver request to ban soda purchases with SNAP benefits.

* August 4, 2025: USDA approves the waiver.

* January 1, 2026: The approved project was scheduled to begin.

The timeline does not prove coordination.

But it raises a legitimate question about how a national lobbying agenda involving SNAP-Ed, Food as Medicine, nutrition, and chronic disease came to overlap so closely with a major policy initiative of the Morrisey administration.

That question becomes more important because Denise Morrisey was not merely a supporter of healthy eating in a ceremonial role. The lobbying disclosure lists her as someone who “acted as a lobbyist” for Food Fix Campaign Action.

USDA Approved the Soda Restriction

USDA approved West Virginia’s request on August 4, 2025.

The approval allows West Virginia to exclude soda from the definition of SNAP-eligible food. The restriction applies statewide and initially runs from January 1, 2026, through December 31, 2027. The state can seek annual extensions, potentially allowing the project to run for up to five years.

The approval says no West Virginia SNAP household may opt out of the purchase restriction.

However, participation in surveys, interviews, dietary recalls, and other evaluation tools is voluntary.

USDA required the state to submit final communications, retailer-compliance, budget, and evaluation plans before implementation. The agency also required quarterly reports during the first year of the project.

Those reports must address issues including:

* SNAP household and retailer complaints.

* SNAP-related hearings.

* Administrative costs.

* Out-of-state SNAP transactions.

* Retailer transaction data, where available.

* Behavioral and health-related measures.

* Changes in food purchasing and shopping routines.

The state’s own request says part of the evaluation expense would be paid with prior-year SNAP-Ed carryover funds.

That matters because SNAP-Ed is not just a rhetorical link between the Food Fix disclosure and the waiver. It is part of the state’s planned spending and evaluation structure.

Food Fix Campaign and Food Fix Campaign Action

There is another issue that should be sorted out before anyone treats all of these records as if they involve the same legal entity.

The lobbying report identifies the client as Food Fix Campaign Action, Inc.

The tax returns attached to the public records are for Food Fix Campaign, Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization. Its stated mission is to educate and engage national policymakers about what it calls America’s broken food system, chronic disease, Food as Medicine, and regenerative organic agriculture.

The 2024 Form 990 shows Food Fix Campaign, Inc. reported $1.93 million in contributions and grants, $1.63 million in total expenses, and $1.23 million in program-service expenses. Its principal program was described as raising administration and congressional awareness about food-system policy, health, the environment, and the economy.

Its 2024 filing also answered “yes” to the question asking whether it engaged in lobbying activities or had a section 501(h) election in effect.

The current public documents do not explain the relationship between Food Fix Campaign, Inc. and Food Fix Campaign Action, Inc.

They may be affiliated. They may share leadership, consultants, donors, offices, or policy priorities. Or they may be legally separate organizations that simply use similar names.

That should not be assumed.

It should be investigated.

What is Known

The available records show the following:

* Denise Henry Morrisey, West Virginia’s First Lady, was listed as a lobbyist for Food Fix Campaign Action in the first quarter of 2025.

* Food Fix Campaign Action’s lobbying disclosure specifically mentions nutrition, chronic disease, Food as Medicine, and “improvements to SNAP-Ed.”

* West Virginia submitted a statewide soda-restriction SNAP waiver less than two months after the lobbying report was filed.

* West Virginia’s waiver uses nutrition, chronic disease, health outcomes, obesity, diabetes, and behavior change as its policy rationale.

* The waiver makes SNAP-Ed part of the communications, education, data collection, and evaluation plan.

* The waiver identifies WVU Extension’s Family Nutrition Program as the SNAP-Ed implementing agency involved in the project.

* The state proposed using prior-year SNAP-Ed carryover funds for part of the waiver’s evaluation expenses.

* USDA approved the waiver and required extensive reporting on implementation, complaints, purchasing behavior, and health-related outcomes.

What is Not Known

The public documents do not yet show:

* Whether Denise Morrisey participated in developing West Virginia’s waiver.

* Whether Food Fix Campaign Action provided research, policy language, strategy, or outside assistance to the state.

* Whether Food Fix Campaign Action or Capitol Counsel communicated with the Governor’s Office, West Virginia DHS, WVU Extension, or USDA about the waiver.

* Whether Denise Morrisey discussed the waiver with her husband, administration officials, or state agency staff.

* Whether Food Fix Campaign Action received any West Virginia public funds, contracts, grants, reimbursements, or other payments related to the waiver.

* Whether Food Fix Campaign, Inc. and Food Fix Campaign Action, Inc. share board members, officers, vendors, donors, staff, or other resources.

Those are not minor questions.

They go to whether West Virginians were being asked to accept a statewide SNAP restriction that emerged from a public process, a private lobbying network, or some combination of the two.

The Records West Virginians Should See

The appropriate next step is not speculation. It is records.

The Governor’s Office, West Virginia Department of Human Services, and WVU Extension should release records showing who discussed the waiver, who drafted it, and what outside groups were involved.

That should include:

* Emails, text messages, calendars, meeting notes, and call logs involving Denise Morrisey, Governor Morrisey, and senior staff.

* Communications involving Food Fix Campaign, Food Fix Campaign Action, Capitol Counsel, and the lobbyists listed on the federal disclosure.

* Documents containing the terms “SNAP-Ed,” “Food as Medicine,” “Food Fix,” “Rethink Your Drink,” “soda,” “sugar-sweetened beverages,” and “Healthy Food Choice.”

* Drafts of the waiver request and comments showing who contributed language or research.

* Contracts, grants, invoices, reimbursements, and vendor payments connected to SNAP-Ed implementation or waiver evaluation.

* Correspondence between West Virginia officials and USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service.

* Records documenting whether the First Lady disclosed her lobbying role to state officials or recused herself from any state policy discussions involving Food Fix’s interests.

West Virginia residents deserve to know whether the state’s soda ban was designed entirely within the Department of Human Services or whether it was shaped by people and organizations operating in a connected national food-policy network.

The paperwork already raises the question.

Now the state should provide the records that answer it.

* West Virginia SNAP Waiver

* Food Fix Campaign's 990s

* Capitol Counsel's Food Fix Lobbying Activity

Substack Articles of Interest: There is a Deeper Connection to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) and West Virginia than the public is aware of. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

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