Mountain State Matters

The Associated Press reported today that Massey Energy plans on opening up a new coal mine at the rate of one every 17 days this year.

Massey is positioning itself to take advantage of soaring demand and prices for Appalachian coal. The expansion is centered on underground coal mines, giving Massey alternatives if a court decision that would make it more difficult and time consuming to get federal permits for surface mines is upheld.

“We have all the permits,” Chief Executive Don Blankenship told Wall Street analysts during a conference call Friday. “We have a line of equipment that’s set up that takes us beyond these currently announced expansion plans.”

Massey has a significant presence in West Virgina. Most recent notable Massey news:

• The company had to pay $20 million civil penalty in a corporate-wide settlement for polluting the streams of West Virginia and Kentucky in a flagrant violations of the Clean Water Act.
• Massey refused to do anything about the fact that one of their mountaintop removal mines was located 400 yards upslope from an elementary school (Marsh Fork Elementary in Sundial, WV), and a break in the impoundment dam would allow school officials only three minutes to evacuate the entire student population before the school would be under 15 feet of water.
• Massey CEO Don Blankenship was accused of threatening to shoot an ABC News producer when the reporter tried to interview him in a parking lot.

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.