CHARLESTON, W.Va. — West Virginia’s struggling coal industry got a little boost during the regular legislative session that wrapped up Saturday, but industry officials say there’s more that could be done, starting with the presidential election.
During a town hall meeting in Columbus, Ohio Sunday night, Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton made it clear that in order to improve the economy, clean renewable energy would need to be brought into coal country.
“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” Clinton said during a debate alongside fellow candidate Bernie Sanders.
But Clinton quickly followed up by saying she didn’t want to forget miners that have been laboring for generations.
“Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on,” she added.
It’s been a tough seven years for the industry, according to Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association.
“The federal government has had their boot on our throat the whole time and they have taken the markets,” Raney told MetroNews. “They (miners) don’t want a check from the federal government. They want to work.”
“We got the best coal in the world and you would think that our federal government would do everything they could to make sure that we use our most prolific resource.”
For West Virginia, Raney said they’re still “out of step” with surrounding states they’re competing with and that a bill to reduce the coal severance tax would help.
The legislation, SB 705, would lower the severance tax, paid by coal and gas industries, by one percent per year for each of the next two fiscal years beginning July 1, 2017. That would lower the tax from five percent to three percent by July 1, 2019. The bill did not make it through this year’s 60-day session.
“They’re (lawmakers) are going to study it, so we’ve got time to put all the numbers together to get with everybody and try to reach an agreement,” Raney said.
A bill that did get the approval of both the state Senate and House of Delegates was one to do away with the special tax that industry officials pay for the workers’ compensation debt.
Raney said they had been paying 56 cents per ton for about 10 years.
“That’s going to be helpful,” he said.
The special tax will come off July 1.