2023-11-04 05:47:42
Huntington Mayor Steve Williams is touting his experience and results in that position during his gubernatorial campaign. (Photo Courtesy of W.Va. Governor’s Office)
Editor’s Note: Listen to the full interview with Huntington Mayor and Democratic candidate for governor Steve Williams by subscribing to the Mountain State Views podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and most major podcast platforms.
CHARLESTON — West Virginia has become a red state over the last several years, including a majority Republican Party voter registration, but Huntington Mayor Steve Williams believes he can overcome party differences as he mounts a Democratic campaign for governor of West Virginia.
In an interview earlier this week at the Capitol in Charleston, Williams said his executive experience as mayor of the state’s second largest city, combined with his ability to work alongside people from different political parties, makes him the perfect person to lead West Virginia as its next chief executive.
“I believe that the state needs someone with my experience right now,” Williams said. “There’s an awful lot of good things that are happening: creating jobs, the companies that are coming here, or long overdue money coming to West Virginia for infrastructure than we have ever had. We need to have someone in the governor’s office who’s actually done this before.”
Williams is in his third four-year term as the mayor of Huntington. First elected in 2012, Williams is the first Huntington mayor to serve three terms, with this being his final term due to term limits.
Before that, Williams served on Huntington City Council and was a Democratic member of the House of Delegates.
Williams has long been anticipated to run for governor, dropping hints at public events and conferences. But he announced his candidacy at the United Mine Workers of America annual Labor Day celebration in Boone County.
In a press release last week, Williams announced he had filed pre-candidacy papers with the Secretary of State’s Office, allowing him to begin soliciting campaign donations.
During his tenure as mayor, Williams turned a city budget deficit into a surplus, worked with community groups and first responders to turn around a drug overdose crisis in the city, and has invested millions of dollars in improving the city’s infrastructure.
“In the 11 years that I’ve been mayor, we’ve had a half a billion dollars of infrastructure money that we have been managing as well,” Williams said. “So, if Huntington is getting a half a billion, can you imagine how much money is coming into West Virginia? Frankly, some of the things that we have had to overcome are not just Huntington issues. There are issues that are around the state. And again, what I bring to the table … and the story that we have in Huntington in how we can turn things around is something that every community in the state and certainly state government will benefit from.”
Williams is a long-time member of the Democratic Party, but he describes himself as a free-market, limited-government, fiscal conservative and an admirer of the late Republican President Ronald Reagan.
While the Democratic Party had long held dominance in West Virginia, Republicans now have the majority in voter registration, supermajorities in the House of Delegates and state Senate, the entire Board of Public Works and Sen. Joe Manchin is lone Democrat in the congressional delegation.
Williams is not blind to the challenges a Democratic candidate for governor faces in West Virginia. Gov. Jim Justice ran as a Democrat and won in 2016, but switched parties to Republican in 2017. When Justice sought re-election as a Republican in 2020, he defeated Democratic Kanawha County Commissioner Ben Salango 65% to 31%.
However, Williams said he has never been a partisan, willing to work with anyone regardless of political party registration.
“This is an uphill climb without a doubt, but this is a climb worth taking from my perspective,” Williams said. “Frankly, I’m not concerned about the Ds and the Rs. That has never been a concern. I’ll work with whoever is on the playing field.
“In the actual election, I think folks with Ds and Rs and (independents) will be drawn to what I’ve been able to do,” Williams continued. “I think when people hear what I’m having to say, they’re not going to be paying a lick of attention to what is after my name. They’re going to be looking at the results that I drive, and I think that will prove to be persuasive.”
Williams said Huntington ended the most recent fiscal year with a $20 million surplus. As someone who has set the budget for his city for years and as a former lawmaker who has voted on state budgets, Williams is knowledgeable about budgets and tax revenue.
West Virginia has ended the last several fiscal years with major budget surpluses due to artificially low revenue estimates, federal COVID-19 funds freeing up state tax dollars, modest tax revenue growth, and a period of high coal and natural gas prices contributing to severance tax revenue. This allowed Justice and lawmakers to lower personal income tax rates this year and pass other tax reforms. But now, tax revenue is coming in just above estimates.
Williams believes in low taxes, but he believes in basing tax revenue estimates on what the state is actually bringing in and basing a balanced budget on those numbers and ensuring that government services are being financed.
“If you are being fiscally responsible and very conservative on your projections, very conservative on expenditures, but being very aggressive on the expectation of what we’re going to be delivering, after a while when you have those conservative projections, you find yourself creating a path where you’re accomplishing things that nobody else ever imagined,” Williams said.
Huntington is home to Marshall University, one of the state’s major higher education institutions. Under the leadership of President Brad D. Smith, Marshall is undergoing a renaissance, with enrollment on the rise, new construction, expansions of programs, and a growing research component. Williams said West Virginia needs to tap into its public colleges and universities to become a leader in research and economic development.
“We have to be a top -five state. And in order to be a top-five state, you have to be going more aggressively than any other state in the country,” Williams said. “So, what is it that we want to do? The one thing that we can take full advantage of is being an Appalachian state. Being from West Virginia, we have the capacity within ourselves to start being very innovative because that’s in our culture.”
Williams’ parents were educators. He said the efforts to create public charter schools and voucher programs such as the Hope Scholarship should be a wake-up call to public education and the need to unchain teachers to better do their jobs, including looking at how teachers are paid. Williams also called for more wrap-around services for students to help with social and mental needs so teachers can focus on teaching.
“I think our teachers need to be given every opportunity in the world to be able to succeed,” Williams said. “What I start seeing is that we need to do everything that we can to help the helpers … You have to have all hands on deck, and defunding public education is not the way to do that. It can’t be done that way. But what we have to do is we have to draw all of our resources together. We have talent hiding in plain sight in all of our communities and in our schools. Frankly, I believe that we have to have a higher emphasis on public education.”
Huntington was once the poster child for the substance use disorder crisis in West Virginia, once making headlines in 2016 for 26 heroin overdoses reported in a four-hour span. But Williams helped form partnerships with Marshall University, Marshall Health and local nonprofits and community organizations.
The city created quick response teams to meet with overdose patients to help address needs and develop plans to help those patients, worked to bring in federal grants to help fund treatments and recovery efforts, and collaborated to provide additional support services. While drug overdose death numbers in West Virginia are coming down, the state’s overall drug overdose death rate remains the highest in the nation. Williams believes some of the lessons learned in Huntington can be used across the state.
“We have an addiction problem in this state, and we must hit it head on,” Williams said. “I’m not saying to others do what Huntington did. All that I’m suggesting is to take those resources that you have that are unique to your community, to your county, to that region of the state. And we put those to work, and it’s amazing how we start identifying innovative, innovative solutions.”
As of now, Williams is the only Democratic pre-candidate for governor. The official candidate filing period for the 2024 elections begins Jan. 8.
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