Mountain State Matters

The Charleston Gazette reported today that Bob Graham, the former director of the Wyoming County Council on Aging, maintains that he did nothing wrong and is not apologizing for his actions while director.

In 2006, Graham was tried on charges of embezzlement and mismanagement of the county’s senior citizen center. According to federal prosecutors, Graham had a hot tub installed at the Itmann West Virginia center and repeatedly visited strip clubs on the Council’s dime. Graham was convicted of collecting money for unpaid sick leave without board approval, but the conviction was overturned last month by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Regardless of whether or not Graham is innocent on the other charges, he was receiving $185,000 a year for overseeing the Council on Aging. This, reported the Gazette, is compared to most senior citizen center directors in West Virginia who make around $42,000.

Graham said he believes he deserved that higher pay because he had an expanded program. “They were supervising 20 people,” he said, “and I was supervising over 400.”

The West Virginia Record reported that Graham was also paid $133.41 per hour for overtime work, much of which could have been performed by minimum wage employees.

Included in those tasks were: 16 hours to clean his office, costing $2,135; 25 hours at a Las Vegas conference and “getting caught up,” costing $3,335; 19 hours to check on the floor sealing, costing $2,535; and a total of 10 hours “picking up supplies,” costing $1,334.

The median household income in 1999 (the last year data was available) for Wyoming County was $23,932. The Wyoming County Council on Aging is a non-profit, and the question begs to be asked whether a hot tub (even if it was used exclusively by seniors) and an astronomically high salary for the director are the best uses of the organization’s money. In a rapidly-aging community where some seniors live without basic necessities (such as running water), it seems that in the future the Council should find other ways to allocate the money previously spent on Bob Graham.