Public Comments

I strongly support Delegate Pritt’s bill proposing a 25% raise for West Virginia teachers. As an educator who has worked in multiple educational settings and has chosen to serve in a West Virginia public school, I have seen firsthand how low teacher pay directly affects staffing, morale, and student outcomes.

West Virginia teachers earn significantly less than educators in surrounding states, making it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain qualified teachers. Many talented educators leave for neighboring states or leave the profession entirely, not because they lack commitment to students, but because they cannot afford to stay. This constant turnover disrupts learning, strains remaining staff, and ultimately harms students.

A 25% raise is not excessive. It is corrective. It is a necessary step toward making teacher pay competitive and recognizing the professional skill, time, and emotional labor required to educate today’s students. Teachers are expected to address academic gaps, mental health needs, trauma, and family instability, often with fewer resources and increasing demands.

Investing in teachers is an investment in students, communities, and the future of West Virginia. If we want strong schools, stable classrooms, and long-term economic growth, we must value educators in a tangible way. Delegate Pritt’s bill is a meaningful step in the right direction, and it deserves serious consideration and support.

As a Christian, I do not support requiring public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. Public education exists to serve students and families of many different faiths and belief systems, and it should remain a place where no single religious doctrine is promoted or imposed.

Taxpayer dollars, instructional time, and administrative energy are limited. These resources should be focused on improving literacy, math achievement, student mental health, school safety, teacher retention, and addressing chronic absenteeism...not on symbolic measures that do not improve student learning outcomes.

Faith is deeply personal and meaningful, but it is most powerful when chosen freely, not mandated by the government. Just as we would not expect Islamic, Jewish, or other religious texts to be posted in public school classrooms, we should not require Christian doctrine either. Religious freedom includes the freedom from having beliefs imposed by the state.

Our schools are facing real, urgent challenges. We should be prioritizing policies that strengthen education for all students rather than creating unnecessary division or distractions from the work that truly matters.

"The registrant shall permit inspection of his or her mobile device to verify all identifiers for mobile applications used by the registrant are provided."

Encouraging larger families aligns with West Virginia's commitment to promoting the institution of the family and ensuring a nurturing environment for children. Providing tax relief to families with four or more children reflects the state's recognition of the vital contributions these families make to the community.

House Bill 4009 does not offer a viable solution to the problems it identifies. While the bill acknowledges that gig and contract workers face instability around healthcare, retirement, and other benefits, the proposed Portable Benefit Account model does not meaningfully alleviate those burdens.

Under this bill, participation and contributions are entirely voluntary, with no requirement that hiring parties contribute to worker benefits in any meaningful or proportional way. As a result, workers remain responsible for funding their own healthcare, retirement, and income protection, leaving the underlying precarity of contract work unchanged.

More concerning, the bill explicitly provides that contributions to a portable benefit account may not be used as evidence in determining a worker’s employment classification. This provision protects hiring parties from misclassification challenges and weakens existing labor protections, effectively insulating corporations from responsibility while offering workers little more than a new financial account.

Portable benefits can be part of a serious labor reform only when they include enforceable employer obligations and preserve workers’ rights to proper classification. House Bill 4009 does neither. For these reasons, I urge the House to vote no on this bill as written unless it is substantially revised to prioritize worker protections and corporate accountability.

I strongly support HB 4627, which provides preventive cancer screening for professional firefighters in accordance with International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) guidelines.

Firefighters are exposed throughout their careers to known carcinogens, and medical research consistently shows significantly higher cancer rates among firefighters than in the general population. The IAFF clearly demonstrates that early cancer detection saves lives and reduces long-term healthcare costs. Cancers identified at early stages require less invasive treatment, have higher survival rates, and avoid the substantial costs associated with advanced disease, extended disability, and long-term care.

Preventive screening is fiscally responsible. Studies show that investing in evidence-based cancer screening reduces overall healthcare spending by preventing late-stage diagnoses, lost work time, and workers’ compensation claims. Removing copays and deductibles ensures firefighters can access these screenings before symptoms appear, when treatment is most effective and least costly.

HB 4627 reflects nationally recognized best practices and appropriately treats cancer screening as an occupational health necessity for firefighters. I respectfully urge the Legislature to pass this bill.

I support West Virginia HB 4009 because it modernizes our workforce by allowing portable benefits that follow workers across jobs. This bill supports independent contractors and gig workers by expanding access to health, retirement, and financial security benefits without disrupting flexible work models or obligating an employer to costly, regulated benefit structures. HB 4009 helps West Virginia stay competitive while respecting worker choice.

• Clear, measurable job creation benchmarks tied to real wages;
• Sunset provisions so credits expire if goals aren’t met;
• Strong accountability and clawback provisions so companies must repay credit if performance promises aren’t delivered - including enforcement
• Transparency requirements to ensure public reporting on outcomes.

• Preserve strong local zoning and land-use authority
• Require full, independent infrastructure and environmental impact studies
• Protect utility ratepayers and public water resources
• Ensure transparency and meaningful public participation

I disagree because bringing boards together would do nothing but damage with multiple opinions. It also might make it hard to understand students situations.

I agree because it causes a unnecessary financial burden to people that own dogs especially elderly dogs. Also dogs being took away because someone cant pay is hard. With this bill it could remove the upsetting feelings and potential loss of their pet.

On behalf of the West Virginia EMS Coalition, which represents over 80% of all emergency ambulance responses in the state, I would like to express our support for HB 4121 regarding the reporting duties of county commissions on ambulance services.

This bill was developed in response to legislative requests for information on how counties are delivery and funding EMS. Counties are increasingly passing levies, adopting ambulance fees, or making direct budget appropriations to support EMS within their counties yet there is no centralized system for collecting and reporting this information.

In working with the bill’s sponsor, we carefully crafted the legislation to ensure there were no unfunded mandates created for county commissions. We recognize a bill that imposes additional costs on counties would be difficult to pass.

The bill does require every county to make EMS service available without any requirement for funding it. Every county is already in compliance with the requirement.

Each county's 911 center has designated one or more emergency ambulance agencies for response, ensuring compliance with the proposed requirements.

Line 11 of the bill and current law says, "The county commission may provide the service directly through its agents, servants and employees; or through private enterprise; or by its designees; or by contracting with individuals, groups, associations, corporations or otherwise; or it may cause such services to be provided by an authority, as provided for in this article…” This existing law provides significant flexibility to counties in balancing emergency care and financial responsibility.

The current method of ensuring access to EMS in counties would remain unchanged. Approximately, half of West Virginia’s counties have established a county ambulance authority or a similar structure for the delivering of EMS. The rest designate or contract with a non-profit/private agency to provide the response.

For instance, Raleigh County, which designates agencies such as Jan-Care, Ghent VFD EMS, Best Ambulance, and Bradley-Prosperity VFD for EMS, will continue operating as they currently do without any additional funding requirements.

The bill does not impose any mandates that would result in increased costs for counties, including no provisions regarding the manner of emergency ambulance service delivery, the required number of ambulances per county, or specified response times.

The proposed deletion concerns outdated language from 1975 when the EMS Act was initially drafted. At that time, the modern EMS system in West Virginia was still developing, and not all counties had established centralized 911 systems or well-organized and regulated EMS agencies. Today, however, all counties provide EMS services in some manner. There is a consensus that EMS is an essential service, and no exemptions should be allowed for failing to provide life-saving response capabilities.

What HB 4121 does:

• Explicitly require counties to make emergency ambulance service available.

• EMS could be provided by county employees, an ambulance authority, private enterprise or by contracting for service (current law).

• Counties would not be mandated to provide any minimum level of funding.

• Counties would report annually the amount of county funds expended the prior fiscal year to fund emergency ambulance services.

• The Office of EMS would compile an annual report on local EMS system structures and funding to help guide future policy and state funding decisions.

The WV EMS Coalition believes this legislation is an important step towards provide legislators with the information needed to support future decisions about the funding and structure of EMS in West Virginia. We hope the Legislature continues to advance this bill towards passage.

• Cancer caused 66 percent of the career firefighter line-of-duty deaths from 2002 to 2019, according to data from the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF).

• Firefighters have a 9 percent higher risk of being diagnosed with cancer and a 14 percent higher risk of dying from cancer than the general U.S. population, according to research by the CDC/National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH).

• Firefighters are two times as likely to contract mesothelioma, two times as likely to contract testicular cancer, 1.5x as likely to contract multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and are at an increased and elevated risk for numerous other specific cancers. (NIOSH)