Marion County delegates weigh on on W.Va. House bill fast tracking
FAIRMONT — A chaotic Friday session of the W.Va. House of Delegates didn't help when it came to passing a cap on electricity rates.
House Bill 3173 would have placed a two year cap on electric rates, beginning July 1, 2026. According to the legislative findings in the bill, electric rates for state residents more than doubled between 2005 and 2022, outpacing increases in every other state in the country.
'Because West Virginians have the second lowest median income of any state, these electric rate increases have caused great hardship to lower income residents, including elderly residents living on monthly Social Security checks,' the bill's text states. 'In many instances electric bills are the single highest expense, particularly in the winter and summer. Rising electric rates also harm West Virginia's economy and impede the state's ability to attract technology businesses such as data centers and other industries that use large amounts of electricity.'
House Democrats introduced the bill. However, House Republicans killed the bill after Democrats tried to move the bill out of committee to the floor of the House. Typically, bills have to go through a committee process before reaching the main chamber of the House. The discharge motion from State Del. Evan Hansen, D-79, would have fast tracked the bill. Del. Mike Pushkin, D-54, accused Republicans of killing the bill.
'What we voted no on was not the bill,' House Del. Mike DeVault, R-74, said. 'The wall was a discharge, meaning we're going to circumvent the process and bring it to the floor. We weren't voting no on the bill. We're voting on someone saying it's referred to us as a nuclear option.'
DeVault said he's never seen a discharge motion successfully work. He added there's a process to considering bills. The process allows for deep consideration of a bill while it works through committee, where delegates can vet the bill and hear testimony on it. DeVault said he didn't like the idea of something being force fed onto the floor.
However, on Monday, Democrats pointed out it was the Republicans who were in disarray.
'What happened Friday was an embarrassment to our government, an embarrassment to our state and everybody needs to be paying attention to what's happening,' Del. Shawn Fluharty, D-005, said. 'Nothing but chaos on Friday.'
Democrats posted a video of the House's Republican leadership befuddle themselves after switching rulesets between Jeffersonian rules of legislative procedure to Masonic rules of procedure and back. It wasn't immediately clear what the goal was.
'Let me tell you what they were doing,' Fluharty said. 'They're originating bills out of committee, and let's talk about what that really means when bills originate out of committee. They bypass the actual procedural process of introducing a bill, having a lead sponsor, a list of sponsors and the public having notice of what the bill is about.'
Fluharty accused Republicans of doing this fast track for a bill that would remove residents from Medicaid in the event the federal government reduced its Medicaid contribution to the state, as well as for a bill that would cap child sexual assault claims to 18 years after reaching maturity.
After receiving assurances from the federal government that Medicaid would not be cut, state lawmakers shelved the Medicaid bill.
The math doesn't look particularly reassuring in case of a cut, however.
'It would cost the state about $170 million to take that up, because that's a federal program, right?' DeVault said. 'What do you want to cut? All of a sudden, we got $170 million expenditure to pick up on. Where are we going pull $170 million from? So what they wanted to say is, if the feds cut it, we can't pick up the check. If the feds don't cut it, then this bill means nothing.'
DeVault called House Bill 3518 a safety measure for the state. Suddenly facing a $170 million cost would mean having to cut other things in the state, such as road patching.
State Democrats sounded the alarm on the trigger bill on Monday, after the bill was introduced into the House of Delegates on March 28. The bill has been moved into inactive status.
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