WDWVW?/WDWVN? | What do West Virginians want and need and Senator Joe Manchin

People protesting outside of Senator Joe Manchin's houseboat, which is his DC domicile.  Photo: © Sarah Silbiger / Greenpeace

The Washington Post's Paul Waldman has a column, "Joe Manchin has all the power — and a catastrophic lack of imagination," about how the Senator from West Virginia, in a closely divided Senate, has all the power to scuttle President Biden's "Build Back Better" agenda and legislation, but that he isn't interested much in particular benefits, he only expresses what he doesn't like--climate protections, child care benefits, increased taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

Waldman argues (not using the word) that Manchin is pretty much a nihilist, not concerned at all about the needs of his constituents.  The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch has a number of great articles about Manchin's wealth as derived from investments in the coal industry, which shapes his "policy" preferences and agenda ("Joe Manchin beats his chest for D.C. elites while struggling W. Va. waits for help," "Joe Manchin’s ‘blind trust’ is an utter farce").

Photo: Destination Signs.

Note that this article ("Manchin takes aim at Build Back Better, but his real focus is on West Virginia," Conversation) argues that Manchin cares about the needs of West Virginians, although making no case for it.  If his focus is on West Virginia, it's on corporations.  Also see "West Virginians Ask Joe Manchin: Which Side Are You On?," New Yorker.

West Virginia is pretty much a basket case. According to US News and World Report, the state ranks 47th in the nation, on the various criteria it ranks. It's a great example of the so-called "resource curse" experienced by nation-states in the Third World, where resource extraction has limited economic benefits within the nation of extraction ("Families of those killed in mine disaster criticize Blankenship," CBS News).

It has the worst rate of drug overdose deaths in the United States--deaths are 8x higher than the number of murders.  We know about how it was ground zero for opioid addiction ("Gazette-Mail wins Pulitzer for investigative reporting," Charleston Gazette-Mail).  

The state's coal industry continues to contract, while leaving environmental degradation in its wake ("Environmentalists allege pollution from West Virginia mine," AP), and the state only adds to the degradation by having a limited approach to environmental regulation ("'All the water's bad': In McDowell County, you have to get creative to find safe drinking water," NBC News).  The state's poverty rate is 16% and the child poverty rate is almost 20%.

Why don't federal legislators work to develop "community plans" focused on helping their constituents?  Sure they work on various stuff, federal grants for development and transportation, on military bases, VA hospitals, national parks ("Park designation delivers on promised increase in visitors at New River Gorge," WV MetroNews), and getting federal agencies if they can, but there isn't an overarching plan.  

And they do constituent services (hopefully) -- casework -- helping individual constituents break through bureaucratic logjams.

But for the most part, legislators work for the interests of corporations (Who Rules America? website by Professor G. William Domhoff).  And Manchin is a prime exhibit of this fact ("Corporate donors gave to Manchin before announcement he wouldn't support Build Back Better: report," The Hill).  Although they are not alone ("The Fracking Shill Local Newspapers Love to Publish," New Republic).

What if Senators and Representatives were to develop community plans, having a public process that wasn't a bag job, where people could have substantive input, with a planning website and metrics measuring accomplishments wrt the plan's precepts?

A State House district plan for Utah Representative Jennifer Dailey-Prevost.  This reminds me of my surprise when attending The Avenues Street Fair and seeing how Utah State Representative Jennifer Dailey-Prevost (official website, campaign website) had a whiteboard in her booth about developing a five year "community plan" for her district.

I haven't followed up with her on the progress, but I thought it was very interesting.  

How many elected officials have a "plan" for their district, let alone work to develop such a plan with constituents?

Proposed Ward 4 focused planning framework in DC. It also reminded me of when I was thinking of running for City Council in DC, how I came up with what I thought was a much more Ward-specific platform for running ("Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda," 2015), although in talking with people about mounting a campaign, I was reminded that while I like talking to people especially door to door in a campaign, I don't like the kind of people who tend to be into running campaigns.

Past entries on national and West Virginia/state economic development 

Marshall Plan/New New Deal.  In November 2020, I wrote a piece, "What should a domestic Marshall Plan/21st Century New Deal look like?," in response to an op-ed in the Washington Post by eight Rust Belt mayors, arguing for a "Marshall Plan" for their region, in response to a decline in the use of fossil fuels produced there, and the impact on their communities and economies, with the idea it is better to be proactive than reactive.

My basic point was that we need a "Marshall Plan" for the nation, not just the Ohio River Valley Basin.

Economic planning in response to the contraction of the coal industry.  In March, I wrote another piece, in response to the United Mine Workers calling for a retraining and economic revitalization program because of the continuing contraction of the coal industry ("United Mineworkers Union calls for a revitalization/economic development/mitigation program in response to the decline of the coal industry").

I was remiss in not responding to a couple comments on this piece, which made the point that these industries are contracting and that rebuilding many of those micro-economies is a long shot, so out-migration should be part of the equation.

This is not unlike how Hurricane Katrina led many New Orleanians to leave the city, and they found better economic opportunities as a result ("Starting Over Many Katrina victims left New Orleans for good. What can we learn from them?," New Yorker).  From the article:

Kirk is a sociologist at the University of Oxford. He trained at the University of Chicago under Robert Sampson, and, for Sampson and the small army of his former graduate students who now populate sociology departments around the world, neighborhoods are the great obsession: What effect does where you live have on how you turn out? It’s a difficult question to answer because the characteristics of place and the characteristics of the people who happen to live in that place are hard to untangle. As Kirk drove around the Lower Ninth, however, he realized that post-Katrina New Orleans provided one of those rare occasions when fate had neatly separated the two variables. In the course of bringing immeasurable suffering to the people of New Orleans, Katrina created what social scientists call a “natural experiment”: one day, people were in the neighborhoods where they had lived, sometimes for generations. The next day, they were gone—sometimes hundreds of miles away. “They had to move,” Kirk said. What, he wondered, were the implications of that?

This billboard is famous in urban planning circles.  It was put up in Seattle, when Boeing laid off 60,000 employees, 60% of its workforce (HistoryLink).  Photo: Seattle Times.

Place versus People strategies.  This is tough for local economic development authorities, whose jobs are place-focused and who would be fired for advocating for contraction, the way Youngstown, Ohio did with the Youngstown 2010 project ("Study calls Youngstown 2010 plan a ‘cautionary tale’," Youngstown Vindicator), or in the European Shrinking Cities initiative from the 2010s.  The city was once an economic powerhouse of steel production.  Now all those plants are closed.  

ED officials saying that people are better off leaving for jobs elsewhere is a big no no.

The Vindicator story discusses a study of the Youngstown 2010 project, offering caution based on an academic study of the initiative ("Plan Implementation Challenges in a Shrinking City," Journal of the American Planning Association, 2019, also see this).  The authors do focus on the barriers to change.

At the same time, I think the authors miss key points.  The first, being that ten years is hardly enough time to seriously evaluate a plan under these conditions.  (For example, it took 25 years to see substantive benefits from the DC area Metrorail system, and even longer to see impacts outside the core of the center city.)

Second, the kind of economic devastation faced by Youngstown (or Flint or Detroit Michigan, etc.) is comparable to a natural disaster, and it takes decades to recover from such, even infavorable circumstances.  Third, in this situation, the difficulties such communities face in lack of access to capital as well as customers and needs for the capital also take decades to rectify.  Revitalization in such situations takes 30-50 years.

-- The Future of Shrinking Cities:Problems, Patterns and Strategies of Urban Transformation in a Global Context, UCB Institute for Urban and Regional Development
-- "Why can't the "Bilbao Effect" be reproduced? | Bilbao as an example of Transformational Projects Action Planning," 2017
-- "Lessons from CNN story on Allentown, Pennsylvania," 2020

As an example of the issue of capital, This Christian Science Monitor article ("One neighborhood reaches for resilience: A letter from Chicago") discusses the revitalization program in the Pullman neighborhood of South Chicago, which has landed $450 million in inward investment, and the program is still in early phases with limited visible improvements.  It's a good example of how much capital is needed to counter long term disinvestment.

Photo from the Toronto Star article, "‘These good old boys done stole our damn boots’: In his home state, protesters want Joe Manchin to get with the Biden program."

Conclusion.  Activists should come up with a social and economic revitalization plan for West Virginia, and challenge Senator Joe Manchin to support it, and to outline his objections in a substantive way.