West Virginia Focus - May/June 2015 by West Virginia Focus

volume 2 | issue 3

published by

New South Media, Inc. 709 Beechurst Avenue, Suite 14A Morgantown, WV 26505 1116 Smith Street, Suite 211 Charleston, WV 25301

304.413.0104 | wvfocus.com publisher & Editor

Nikki Bowman nikki@newsouthmediainc.com designer

Becky Moore becky@newsouthmediainc.com Managing Editor

Zack Harold zack@newsouthmediainc.com Contributing editors

Katie Griffith, katie@newsouthmediainc.com Laura Wilcox Rote laura@newsouthmediainc.com Pam Kasey, pam@newsouthmediainc.com staff writerS

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Nikki Bowman, Carla Witt Ford, Elizabeth Roth contributors

Davey Coombs, Anshu Jain, Jesse Richardson, Missy Sheehan

Editorial inquiries

Email info@newsouthmediainc.com. West Virginia Focus is published by New South Media, Inc. Subscription rates: $20 for one year. Frequency: 6 times a year. Copyright: New South Media, Inc. Reproduction in part or whole is strictly prohibited without the express written permission of the publisher. ÂŠ New South Media, Inc. All rights reserved

Focus May/June 2015

Editor’s Letter

Moving Mountains

Media plays a key role in uniting our communities and championing West Virginia’s entrepreneurs, innovators, and educators.

t took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million listeners. Television did it in 13 years; the Internet in four. And in only nine months, Facebook amassed 100 million users. Technology is changing the way we produce and consume media faster than ink can dry. Will technology be the death of journalism? I don’t think so. Our role is multi-dimensional. We are more than just information gatherers, defenders of freedom of speech, and a key player in a system of checks and balances. We are storytellers, and the art of storytelling is as old as mankind. Our stories create communities, champion the voiceless, frame history, build businesses, and educate the masses. Stories are an intrinsic part of our society. They define our values, beliefs, and dreams. They help us move forward and embrace change. As the state embarks on its next 150 years, I believe media in its ever-evolving forms will play an important role in catapulting West Virginia into a more vibrant future. Entrepreneurship, innovation, and education are the key components that will transform our state. But it will be the media that will help unite our community, inspire change, champion stories of entrepreneurship and innovation, and, through fair and unbiased

storytelling, educate society. It will be our role to help articulate our state’s strategies for growth and to hold those in charge of implementing change accountable. And it is important for you, our business and community leaders, to support our local media, by subscribing and advertising. We consume more media than ever, and from more sources, in a plethora of formats. We get our news and our entertainment on demand. Media is now collaborative and participatory. Professional journalists are no longer the keepers of the keys. Thanks to social media, we don’t have to wait until the evening news or the morning paper to know what is happening in our communities. But I believe there will always be a need for authenticators and audience engagers. We will continue to look to trusted media to cut through all the noise and distill content that is relevant to our given communities. The article on page 12 on the sustainability of community newspapers backs me up. The evolution of how we communicate is now making it possible for people to choose quality of life in rural communities without sacrificing their careers. This is a great opportunity for West Virginia. Technology is now interactive and knows no boundaries. Rural communities that were once isolated due to distance and lack of infrastructure will no longer be off the grid. People won’t have to live in large cities to have access to markets. Satellite technology can connect Pickens, West Virginia, to Peru. The playing field is being leveled, and every nook and cranny of our state will have equal access to education, information, markets, and opportunities. I believe innovators will have the edge and it won’t matter where you live. Our geography, which once was seen as an inhibitor to building businesses, will now be an attractor. In our publications at New South Media, Inc., we tell West Virginia’s story. We celebrate who we are and who we are becoming. I truly believe there will always be a need to tell our story to the outside world and to those who live within our borders. It just may be in 140 characters or less. Focus on community engagement,

nikki bowman Publisher & Editor Follow us on... facebook.com/westvirginiafocus twitter.com/WVfocus

Meet Zack I’d like to introduce you to an important member of our team. Zack Harold joined us at the beginning of the year. He has assumed the role of managing editor of West Virginia Focus and is based in our Charleston office. Here are some important things to know about Zack:

He’s the son of a Baptist minister, so he knows how to spin a good yarn.

He’s a lifelong resident of Boone County but no, he’s never met Jesco White.

When he played tee-ball in first grade, his parents had to order a special batting helmet for his extra-large head.

He spent five years at the Charleston Daily Mail covering education, health, politics, and lots more. Once, his story about a local woman who did last-minute repairs on Gene Simmons’ leather boots wound up on the Kiss homepage.

He owns many pairs of funky-colored socks.

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Dialogue Feedback Praise from the statehouse

Your magazine is an enjoyable and informative read. As a new delegate to the West Virginia Legislature, I am very much interested in the kinds of economic issues you cover. Patsy Trecost, West Virginia

“The Flip” didn’t flop

Excellent review of WV political history! (March/April 2015) Congratulations, Zack, well written and informative! Billy Garner, Charleston

delegate, Clarksburg

A new subscriber

I’m not certain how I ended up with a copy of the latest edition of Focus magazine, but I’m glad I did! I just finished reading every word of every page and enjoyed it very much. I love the perspective, the photography, the insight, and especially the emphasis on entrepreneurship. Enclosed is my subscription card and check for same. Edward Gaunch, West Virginia state senator, Charleston

Focus May/June 2015

Talk To Us!

Visit us on the web and let us know what’s on your mind. wvfocus.com facebook.com/westvirginiafocus twitter.com/WVfocus

Corrections Republican Lynne Arvon was the incumbent in the 2014 race for a Raleigh County House of Delegates seat. A story in our March/April 2015 incorrectly identified Democratic challenger Clyde McKnight as the incumbent. David Clayman is the founder of Clayman & Associates. An article in the March/ April 2015 issue of West Virginia Focus incorrectly referred to him as Henry. Margaret Hambrick is the president of the board of the Greenbrier Historical Society. A story in our March/April 2015 issue misspelled her last name.

Contents FOCUS ON 10

Turn This Town Around

Artpreneur

Ripley High School students rally for the future of their community.

Kin Ship Goods moves its growing operations to an abandoned storefront in Charleston.

Health

Centenarian

A new clinical trials network gives West Virginia cancer patients access to cuttingedge care.

Leonoro’s Spaghetti House has made a 100-year-old legacy with simple dishes done well.

Politics

Agripreneur

With a top contender out of the way, the 2016 governor’s race is getting interesting.

The maple syrup business starts with a slow drip but ends with liquid gold.

Real Estate

Bottom Drawer

A look at West Virginia’s lack of short-term, high-end housing.

West Virginia liquor distilleries score a big win at the legislature.

Community

Dashboard

With a highway project threatening its visibility, Wardensville seeks to become a destination. 24

Revitalization

Sarel Venter is a master of antique plaster restoration, a trade he is helping to invent. 26

Founders

Arria Hines from Allegheny Science and Technology talks about people skills and the importance of taking risks.

Focus May/June 2015 2014

West Virginia takes the bottom slot in another national ranking, but you should really pay attention to this one. 41

Big Idea

The West Virginia National Guard repurposed an old tunnel into a world-class training center for first responders.

Focus [ MaY/JUNE 2015]

TOOLKIT 66

How We Did It

J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works relies on smart business sense—and an ancient ocean—to capture the attention of foodies. 68

Work-Life Balance

Davey Coombs of Racer X magazine discusses the importance of firing yourself. 70

Economy

Tips on preparing for the natural gas boom, before it gets to your town. 72

Five Things

Get your feet wet in the hospitality industry with spacesharing services like Airbnb. 73

Health Care

Advances in medical care mean patients can receive top-notch treatments while staying close to home. 74

Pitfalls 46

In Evidence

West Virginia’s two largest universities lead the way in forensics training. 52

To the Dogs

With shrinking profits and animal welfare concerns, the end is probably near for greyhound racing in West Virginia. 58

Multiple Choice

Each year, hundreds of state classrooms are left without qualified full-time teachers. But will alternative certification programs like Teach For America solve the crisis?

Leaving employees to their own devices has its conveniences, but it also brings headaches. 78

B2B

Charles Town-based BarsandBooths.com provides vintage-style furnishings to businesses all over the world. Editor’s Letter

Dialogue 4 Power Points

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Focus May/June 2015

“The Great Aim of Education is not Knowledge but Action.”

Six New Things to Try This Spring And when to give up on them already and get on with your life Golf

Why you should start: The beautiful outdoors, socializing, golf carts. When you should quit: When you realize you’re getting worse with practice. So, somewhere around hole three.

Spring Cleaning

Why you should start: Declutter your home, declutter your mind. Also, Marie Kondo. When you should quit: When you realize you can’t part with any of your three copies of Christmas with The Carpenters, and decide Marie Kondo is full of it.

Jogging

Why you should start: Bathing suit season is just around the corner, and you got new running shoes for Christmas. When you should quit: As soon as your iPhone dies.

Gardening

Why you should start: Fresh, homegrown tomatoes! And squash! When you should quit: Did you know you have to water those things every day? You never cared much for tomatoes anyway. And how, exactly, do you eat squash?

Hiking

Why you should start: Unplug, unwind, and breathe in that fresh mountain air. And you got new hiking boots for Christmas. When you should quit: When your allergies kick in.

Getting up early

Why you should start: The early bird catches the worm.

Herbert Spencer

Philanthropy Wheeling’s Oglebay Park gives back to the city’s needy children. pg. 20

Power Lunch Dobra Zupas in Beckley offers freshmade food and unique brews. pg. 11

Media Local newspapers still thrive in Williamson. pg. 12

Queen for a Day The royal edicts of Gail Adams, West Virginia Teacher of the Year. pg. 15

Recreation Monongalia County opens a new baseball park, funded by a special tax district. pg. 36

Top Issues Lawmakers roll back regulations on chemical storage tanks. Well, that didn’t take long. PG. 44

When you should quit: You like worms even less than tomatoes.

in teacher Emily Oakes’ senior English class in fall 2014. Inspired by a similar project by a teacher at Wirt County High, Oakes had her students research the Turn This Town Around campaign West Virginia Focus is conducting with the West Virginia Community Development Hub and West Virginia Public Broadcasting. The students learned about its debut in January 2014, looked at each of the towns that were considered that first year, and watched the Written and photographed by Zack Harold progress in the original Turn this Town Around communities, Matewan and Grafton. Oakes then moved tudents at Ripley High School into the second phase of her assignment: have the same complaint about She challenged students to figure out how to their hometown as most small emulate Turn This Town Around in Ripley. town teenagers. They say Serendipity soon intervened. As part of a there’s nothing to do. “When class assignment, students Kaitlynn Weaver sports are done, it’s a drag,” Ripley High and Alyssa Ballard attended a city council junior Tyler Hilbert says. Fellow junior meeting in December. During the meeting Jeana Mahan says Ripley’s young people council members mentioned their comhead to Charleston or Parkersburg when munity was one of the finalists to become they are looking for fun—or they’re forced a 2015 Turn This Town Around participant, to make their own. “A lot of the kids go to although “no one really knew what Turn Walmart.” She once watched some friends This Town Around was,” Weaver says. tie a shopping cart to a pickup truck for a So Weaver and Ballard spoke up and parking lot version of water skiing. But instead of just complaining, some stu- told the council what they knew about the program. Ripley Mayor Carolyn Rader dents at Ripley High are working to improve paid a visit to the school to continue the their community. It started with a project Turn This Town Around

Something to Do High schoolers are taking charge in Ripley’s Turn This Town Around push.

S 10

Focus May/June 2015

discussion. In January, after an online vote that drew tens of thousands of ballots, Ripley and Whitesville emerged as the 2015 Turn This Town Around communities. Oakes said her class project quickly morphed from a thought exercise to something with big potential. She pulled together interested students from several of her classes and formed a Turn This Town Around club. “If it’s happening, I want them to be involved,” Oakes says. In the weeks leading up to Ripley’s first Turn This Town Around community meeting on March 16, club members wrote stories for the school’s Viking Press newspaper, set up an email list and promotional Twitter account, and recorded videos to play over the school’s TV system. They also badgered their peers to attend the meeting. “We love Ripley. I think we are the future of this town,” Mahan says. “If we didn’t speak up, how are people going to know what we want?” Several club members participated in Ripley’s first meeting, where residents identified projects they hope to complete over the next year and beyond. And while Ripley is just beginning the process, the students’ research has already taught them an important lesson about Turn This Town Around. “It’s more than just a wish list. People have to realize what you put into it is what you get out of it,” Weaver says.

the power lunch

“GOOD SOUP”

UNIQUE BREWS

The restaurant’s name is a play off owner Joe and Rebecca Zupanick’s last name. His grandparents immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s from Slovenia. “Dobra Zupas” is Slovenian for “good soup,” according to the website, although the menu contains much more than that.

The restaurant keeps a wide variety of craft beers on tap. Soon the selection will include house-made beers from Dobra Zupas’ in-house craft brewery—making it Beckley’s first brewpub.

FRESH IS BEST

You won’t find much in the way of traditional home cooking at Dobra Zupas—the dinner menu is more chicken marsala than chicken-fried steak. But Rebecca Zupanick says she strives to keep the food and atmosphere cozy. “People come here after they get off work. They like the fact we’re cooking like they cook at home,” she says.

NOT “HOME COOKED” BUT HOMEY

“Everything we do, we take pride in,” Rebecca Zupanick says. “We pride ourselves in serving the freshest possible food.” She estimates 95 percent of the food served in the restaurant is prepared from scratch using fresh meats and vegetables.

Three Popular choices

Bleu Turkey Sandwich $9

Cranberry Walnut Salad $10

Crab Cake Sandwich $13

Rebecca Zupanick made her career as an engineer, working in the mining and oil and gas industries. But she was always fascinated by restaurants. When both her children went off to college, Zupanick enrolled, too, taking courses at Mountain State University. “I took all the culinary classes they had,” she says. “I thought if we’re going to do this, this is probably the time to do it.” After two and a half years of classes, Zupanick and her husband, Joe, opened the original Dobra Zupas in the Beckley Greyhound bus station as a lunch joint and catering business. “The menu grew from what I learned in school, plus what I had at different restaurants while traveling,” she says. Two years later, an old house on Oakwood Avenue came up for sale and Zupanick realized it was a perfect opportunity to expand the business. Dobra Zupas reopened as a full-service restaurant in March 2014 and now draws a steady crowd of lunch and dinner regulars. “It’s going really well. We’ve been very well received,” Zupanick says.  600 South Oakwood Avenue, Beckley, WV 25801, 304.253.9872, dobrazupas.com

written and photographed by Zack Harold

Media

Black and White Despite industry hard times, community newspapers continue to thrive.

Written and photographed by Zack Harold

he years following the Great Recession were not kind to newspapers. The industry was already smarting from declining subscriptions and advertising, due in part to the migration of readers to free online content. But the economic downturn hurt advertising dollars even more, and papers around the country began laying off staff and cutting their printed products. Many just shut their doors for good. Some media watchers predicted the age of newspapers was coming to a close. They didn’t look close enough, however. While big city papers were struggling, the nation’s small community newspapers were

Focus May/June 2015

thriving and, in some cases, growing. Like many small towns in West Virginia’s coalfields, Williamson isn’t quite the bustling little burg it used to be. But three years ago this community of just over 3,000 people became a two-newspaper town with the launch of the Mingo Messenger, a weekly publication meant to compete with the 103-year-old Williamson Daily News. “There’s been a thousand people who’ve told me we’re going to fail at this,” Mingo Messenger publisher Jeff Vanderbeck says. So far, they haven’t. The paper has a steady advertiser base and has a circulation of about 4,000. The Messenger is an outgrowth of Vanderbeck’s other publication, the

Pikeville, Kentucky-based Appalachian News-Express. The News-Express was covering lots of news from Mingo County— county commission meetings, town council meetings, crime news, etc.—to make up for the lack of coverage by other local media. “Some things were slipping through the cracks,” Vanderbeck says. Former NewsExpress editor Jerry Boggs suggested they spin the West Virginia content into a separate publication. Vanderbeck crunched the numbers and decided it could work. “If it looks good on paper, you’d be crazy to not at least try it,” he says. After launching the Messenger in December 2011, the newspaper sent a free issue to every mailbox in Mingo County for six months. “It gave them a feel for the type of journalism we are known for producing,” Vanderbeck says. Once the trial period was over, readers started calling to ask how they could keep the paper coming. They were more than happy to fork over $10 a month to have it delivered. Editor Russ Cassady says the newspaper is drawing readers for the same reason people have always read

“

People here, they don’t want to read about what’s going on in the Middle East. They can see that on Fox News or CNN.” Kyle Lovern, Editor, Williamson Daily News

local newspapers. “It’s content. You can go to Yahoo News and find out what’s going on in national politics. Kyle Lovern is trying to rebuild the Williamson We sit through the Daily News’ reputation Kermit Town Council for local news. meeting, the Gilbert Town Council meeting, the Mingo County Commission meeting,” he says. “We have somebody there.” Jeff Vanderbeck and Russ Cassady say the weekly Mingo Messenger has continued to grow since it launched in late 2011.

The Competition

While the Mingo Messenger tries to build a reputation for local news, the Williamson Daily News is trying to rebuild its own presence in the community. Newly appointed editor Kyle Lovern was flooded with congratulations when he got the job in February 2015. He received tons of emails, Facebook messages, and letters—even a note from an expat in Beaver, Oregon. A greeting card on his desk reads “God bless you on your success.” “I’m sort of living a dream,” Lovern says. He started his career in radio but in 1984

joined the Daily News as a sports reporter. He remembers a newsroom filled with editors, reporters, page designers, and advertising staff. “It was like something off of Lou Grant,” he says. Lovern eventually left the paper to return to radio before spending several years in public relations. Then, about three years ago, he started to reevaluate his career. “I started thinking, what would I really want to do?” He returned to the Daily News as sports editor, but found lots had changed in the intervening years. The newsroom had moved across town to a smaller space. There were only a few reporters. Circulation, which was around 18,000 when Lovern first arrived at the newspaper, had fallen to about 4,000. The printing press was gone—the publication was purchased some years ago by Civitas Media, and the papers are now designed in North Carolina and printed in Ohio before being trucked to Mingo County for delivery. But that wasn’t the worst of it. “I think the paper really went downhill,” Lovern admits. Under previous editors, the Daily News stopped producing as much local content and lost vital relationships with community newsmakers. Circulation and advertising suffered as a result. As Daily News editor, Lovern is trying to right those mistakes. He has renewed the paper’s commitment to local news, and tries to limit the amount of copy he uses from national wire services. “People here, they don’t want to read about what’s going on in the Middle East. They can see that on Fox News or CNN.” There are limitations on what the small newspaper can do, however. Each day, Lovern and his reporters write two or three stories apiece. Busy news

days might require them to write four. But with only three writers and a 5 p.m. daily deadline, there is often not enough time to cover smaller town meetings in the Daily News circulation area. The paper tries to make up for that by calling officials to write follow-up stories, but Lovern knows it’s not the same as being there. The extra efforts seem to be paying off, however. Since he took over as editor, Lovern says the paper has seen a slight bump in both circulation and advertising. “I think it’s getting better. It’s never going to be the same, but I think there’s a market for it.” He’s not just being optimistic. Don Smith, executive director of the West Virginia Press Association, says community newspapers are doing just fine in West Virginia. Some are struggling, but many others are doing well. There are 48 weekly papers all around the state, plus 10 more that publish two or three days a week. So what’s their secret, when even The New York Times and Washington Post have had difficulty making ends meet? Smith says these small publications provide information readers cannot get anywhere else. These papers tend to focus on what Smith calls “chicken dinner” news: updates on fundraisers, church news, community events, the goings-on of local government bodies, letters to the editor, and coverage of local school sports teams. “People have went from seeing their own Little League picture in that paper … and now they’re seeing their grandchildren’s pictures in there. They’ve followed their friends and neighbors their entire lives through that newspaper,” Smith says. “It’s the thread that bonds that community together.” Focus wvfocus.com

Drs. Scot Remick and Manish Monga co-chair the board of the WVCTN. WVCTN board member Dr. Donald Fleming.

The Latest Treatment Health

Emerging therapies offered through the West Virginia Clinical Trials Network will be close to home and targeted to the cancers West Virginians suffer most.

written by Pam Kasey | Photographed by bob beverly

f anyone needs access to cancer clinical trials, it’s West Virginians. The state has among the highest cancer mortality rates in the nation. Yet, while experimental drugs are lengthening lives and improving quality of life for trial subjects across the nation, that opportunity has been limited here—until now. The new West Virginia Clinical Trials Network (WVCTN) is making it possible for West Virginians to get the latest treatments without leaving the state.

Focus May/June 2015

“I believe that access to a trial is access to state-of-the-art care,” says Dr. Scot Remick, director of the Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center at the West Virginia University Health Sciences Center and co-chair of the trials network board. “We want access for people closer to home.”

What are Clinical Trials?

Cancer is a fertile area of pharmaceutical innovation. New drugs come onto the market as often as once a month, says Dr. Donald Fleming, director of the oncology

program at Davis Medical Center and a member of the WVCTN board. Through rigorous trials, each new drug has been found to provide benefits previously unavailable to patients: better control of the cancer, lesser side effects. “I know clinical trials have this ‘guinea pig’ connotation, but they’re far from that,” Fleming says. They take place in several well-defined phases, he explains. Phase I is the first time an experimental therapy is tested on humans. It begins to establish a safe dose, and participation offers hope and gives patients who’ve been helped by nothing else a chance to help future cancer patients. Safe therapies move to phase two, where they are tested for their effectiveness on specific cancers. And those found to be effective move to phase three, where they are compared with current standard treatments. Therapies offered in the network would be primarily phase two and three clinical trials and would come with conscientious patient information about potential risks and benefits. “We see it all the time—a new drug comes on the market and patients are just glad they lived long enough,” Fleming says. Trials give patients early access to those breakthrough treatments when time is of the essence.

This is not the first access West Virginians have had to clinical trials—doctors can and do refer patients out of state. But travel puts a personal and financial burden on patients and families, Remick observes, and doctors can be reluctant to cede control of their patients’ care. This is also not the first access patients have had to clinical trials in-state. Cancer centers in Huntington, Morgantown, and Princeton take part in some trials as members of the nationwide Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology, for example. But getting trials offered throughout the state, closer to patients, is hard because it requires administrative resources rural practices don’t often have. Take the example of Davis Medical Center, the smallest of the six WVCTN founding sites. Fleming heads up the oncology program there. When he left the University of Louisville in 2002 to practice in a small Indiana community, he found he needed the support of a network in order to offer clinical trials outside an academic setting. Since coming to Elkins in 2008, he’s had the same experience. “At times the process was so difficult that, without a cooperative group such as the WVCTN, I questioned our future ability to continue with clinical research,” he says. Maintaining the office support for cancer clinical trials is simply expensive, Remick says. “Centralizing administrative and regulatory services lets smaller practices, and bigger practices that may not be as robust in their clinical trials portfolios, provide trials to patients.”

Benefits of a West Virginia Focus

This network will not only be close to home—it’ll be West Virginia-focused. “Right out of the box, we want to identify trials that serve the needs of our patients,” Remick says. That means lung cancer will be an early focus, along with cervical, ovarian, and colorectal cancers—all big killers in the state. How many West Virginians will benefit? “There are about 12,000 new cases of cancer diagnosed a year in this state, and about 100,000 people living with cancer,” Remick says. “Something over 10 percent of those might be eligible

WVCTN Founding Member Sites Berkeley Medical Center Martinsburg* Camden-Clark Medical Center Parkersburg* Davis Medical Center Elkins Ruby Memorial Hospital Morgantown* St. Mary’s Medical Center Huntington

Queen

United Hospital Center Clarksburg*

for a

*Hospitals in the West Virginia United Health System

DAY

for treatment in a given year. We’re hoping to start with 3 to 5 percent and get participation up to 10 percent, which is the rate at some of the bigger centers. So you look at maybe 1,000 patients a year, maybe more if it becomes robust and is well received by our patients and our physicians in the state.” It might take five to seven years to get to that point, however.

Wheeling native Gail Adams is West Virginia’s 2015 Teacher of the Year. After high school, she had a 13-year career in banking and spent 16 years as a stay-at-home mother. She eventually went back to school at West Liberty University and earned an education degree in 2004. She teaches English at Wheeling Park High School— when she’s not teaching Jazzercise classes, that is.

Prognosis

Remick expects the WVCTN to identify its first trial by mid-summer. Of course, patient access is only the most visible aspect of the organization’s activities. Behind the scenes, it will train medical providers to ensure they’re meeting standards of care and educating the public. It will seek financial support. And it will extend membership to more sites so that, ideally, no resident is more than a couple counties away from the latest treatment. The WVCTN is modeled on a highly successful clinical trials network in New Mexico, so Remick has high hopes for its success. “Health care is unfortunately very siloed in this state, and we really need to partner,” he says. “If we do that, all of our respective health care organizations will thrive and, more importantly, our patients will benefit.” wvctn.org

If I were queen of West Virginia for a day, I would Ensure all students live and learn in environments where they are loved, nurtured, valued, nourished, warm, and safe Give an iPad and home Internet access to every student and teacher Courtesy of Gail Adams

Benefits of a Network

Make every day Teacher Appreciation Day Begin every school day with a Jazzercise class!

Focus wvfocus.com

Politics

Open Season

With Manchin out of the way, West Virginia’s 2016 governor’s race is getting interesting.

Written by Zack Harold

or as long as there’s been talk about the 2016 governor’s race, much of that talk has centered around one very interesting rumor—that former governor and current U.S. Senator Joe Manchin would attempt to leave Capitol Hill and reclaim his old job. Manchin did his part to stoke rumors of his return, mentioning to several reporters he was seriously considering another gubernatorial campaign. But he ultimately quashed the speculation with an April 19 appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, where he told host Bob Schieffer he would not run for governor next year. In a conference call with West Virginia reporters the next day, Manchin said it was a “tough decision” but he ultimately decided he could help West

Focus May/June 2015

Virginia more from his seat in Congress. “We live in a challenged world and we live in a divided country,” he said. “It’s going to take people in the middle. And I think I’m squarely planted in the middle. People like myself are in demand to fix things.” Manchin’s decision might have helped the state in more ways than one. With him out of the picture, the 2016 governor’s race is now wide open—and things are getting interesting. “There’s probably any number of people who might consider entering the race. Senator Manchin was a heavyweight candidate and might have scared certain people out,” says Chris Regan, vice chairman of the West Virginia Democratic Party. As this magazine goes to print, State Senate Minority Leader Jeff Kessler is the only candidate that has taken steps toward a gubernatorial campaign. Although Kessler says he has not made a final decision about whether or not to run, he filed pre-candidacy papers in late March to begin fundraising. There are plenty of other potential candidates, too. Among Democrats, Greenbrier owner Jim Justice told reporters in April he was considering a campaign. Wheeling attorney Ralph Baxter is another rumored candidate, as is West Virginia Agriculture Commissioner Walt Helmick. But there’s one name that comes up in almost every conversation about the 2016 governor’s race: U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin. Goodwin has become a darling of the

party after tackling political corruption in Mingo County, going after drug traffickers, and, late last year, indicting former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship for charges related to the 2010 Upper Big Branch disaster. Goodwin has not spoken publicly about his future political intentions, however—he isn’t allowed. According to the U.S. Hatch Act, federal employees are forbidden from running in partisan elections. If Goodwin were to run for office, he would have to leave his job. “This is an office that has to remain above the fray. I can’t delve into politics,” he says. “People have approached me about it. It’s not an option. I can’t run for political office from this job.” On the Republican side, three names keep coming up: U.S. Representative David McKinley, State Senate President Bill Cole, and West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey. “There are paths to victory for any of those gentlemen,” says state Republican Party Chairman Conrad Lucas. McKinley has repeatedly said he is “considering” a run for governor, but that’s as specific as he will get at this point. Cole and Morrisey are still making up their minds, too. All three men are up for re-election next year—Kessler is, too—so they must choose between trying to keep their current jobs or getting a new one. “No fall back. No free run,” Cole says. The senate president says he is giving the governor’s race “very serious consideration” but must decide how a campaign would affect his family and his business, as well as his work in the upper chamber. “Public service is an interesting thing. The deeper I’ve gotten into it, the more it tends to consume (me),” Cole says. Morrisey says he is waiting to see who else might jump into the governor’s race before making a decision. “If there is another candidate out there that supports the same ideas I do, I would get behind that person,” he says. “We’ve put some of the infrastructure in place to prepare for a statewide race, whatever that race might be.” He has plenty of time to figure it out. Candidates won’t be able to file for the May 2016 primary election until next January. And by then, who knows what the ballot will look like?

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Yes, there’s executive housing in West Virginia. But you may want to book in advance.

Written by Pam Kasey

ou’ve gotten into a situation where you need a place. For a while. Maybe you’re an engineer on a distant, several-month project, or you’re working intensely on a political campaign away from home, or you can’t get into that new house as soon as expected. A hotel room could cost you $4,000, even $6,000 a month. What you need goes by names like “executive housing,” “corporate lease,” and “flexible lease”—the property management

Focus May/June 2015

industry hasn’t settled on what to call this niche of its market. Essentially, though, it’s a short-term lease on a higher-end property: a furnished place with utilities and services included, and maybe a housekeeping package available on request. A no-fuss home away from home. “People don’t necessarily want to live out of a hotel when they have to be in town for a while, even an extended stay hotel—it’s not private,” says Melanie Goode, marketing specialist for AB Contracting, developer of Eagle View

Luxury Apartments and Executive lease Townhomes in Charleston. living spaces are homey at Triple “We had someone who Scott Holdings’ was here for the legislative Windsor Estates in Morgantown. session. We had a federal agent from Los Angeles who was relocating here. Companies have their sales reps stay here,” Goode says. It’s a service that’s in surprisingly high demand. Since Eagle View started offering executive housing in December 2014, its 10 units devoted to that have been 90-plus percent occupied. Eagle View currently offers single- and multiplebedroom units with high-end fixtures and furnishings about five miles from downtown. Amenities in the pet-friendly community include a 24/7 fitness center, two heated pools and a hot tub, walking trails, a playground, and a gazebo grilling area with fire pits. A basketball court is on the way. Leases at Eagle View are month-to-month, with some shorter-term availability for special circumstances. Also in Charleston, property managers for Terrace Park East and the high-rise Imperial Tower have offered flexible leases since the units converted to condominiums

courtesy of Triple Scott Holdings

Crash Pad Meets Comfort Real estate

in 1980 and 1995, respectively. These units are furnished and all-inclusive, with pools at both properties and a fitness center at Terrace Park. Guests like the experience. “Our business is mainly relationships and word-of-mouth now,” says property manager Wilma Ellis. The shortest leases are three months, she says, because they’re usually close to full. Property managers offering executive-style housing in Morgantown and Parkersburg are similarly booked. “We’re full almost all the time,” says Julia Durham, director of marketing and housing services for Triple Scott Holdings. Leases at its 20 or so executive-lease units at five properties in the Suncrest and Cheat Lake areas of Morgantown run three months and up. “People come in and say, ‘I’m buying a house, I’ll be here for 90 days’—that means to me at least six months, because it’s a competitive housing market here,” Durham says. The oil and natural gas industry has been especially good for business. “Some people started on a 90-day lease and have stayed with us for five years,” she says. Full units are good, says Michael Castle at Phoenix Group in Morgantown and Parkersburg, but he recognizes it’s best to have some vacancies, too. “When corporate housing or a relocation company calls you, you want to be able to service them. Having extra properties and furnishings on backup is advantageous,” Castle says. He manages about 40 corporate lease units across five diverse properties and likes the ability to offer price points ranging up to very high end, at the top of Waterfront Place Hotel in Morgantown. “Those residences are the nicest in the state of West Virginia for temporary housing: pool, health club, room service, you name it,” he says. Flexible-lease units across the state range from about $1,000 to $3,000 per month for one bedroom. “It’s definitely more affordable than a hotel,” Durham says. “And there’s something to be said about being able to cook your own meals and eat dinner at a table. You’re bringing your suitcase, but you feel like you’re in your home.” Focus wvfocus.com

Philanthropy

Access the Parks Community support gives all kids in Ohio County access to world-class recreation. Written by Katie Griffith

Focus May/June 2015

Last year, Janelsins says, 2,000 Ohio County children participated in Access to the Parks, recording 20,000 park uses. “We at the St. John’s Home for Children, as well as our local community, have been extremely fortunate to have such great parks as Oglebay and Wheeling parks,” says Terry McCormick, executive director of the boys’ home in Wheeling. “Whether it is swimming, using the playgrounds, going pedal boating, ice skating in the winter, attending fairs and firework shows, or enjoying the botanical gardens, our kids get life experiences they might not otherwise get.” It takes about $4 million each year to keep the self-sustaining park system running. “We raise about $600,000 a year to take care of the kids’ programs,” says Randy Worls, chairman of the Oglebay Foundation. Access to the parks alone costs well over $200,000 a year. “When we started the program in 1999, 27 percent of kids in Ohio County qualified. Today 56 percent qualify,” he says. Worls started Access to the Parks when he was CEO of the Wheeling parks system. “Most park systems have free days or special events, but we wanted something good for every day. I’m not aware of another

program of this type. We have more facilities in our parks here than any other community our size in the U.S. by far.” The philanthropic spirit has animated Wheeling’s park system for decades, beginning with the founding of Wheeling Park in 1924 and the creation of the Parks System Trust Fund in 1945. After Wheeling Park opened its doors, industry baron Earl Oglebay donated his summer estate to the city to create Oglebay Park. In the 1950s, when the park system saw its peak use, a group of businessmen sponsored a trolley service, picking kids up at playgrounds across town to take them to the parks. It was one of the city’s first active parks programs and it’s still sponsored today. In other programs, givers have covered recreation league dues for children who can’t afford soccer or hockey team fees or endowed a golf course to maintain it in perpetuity. “Philanthropy is a matter of asking and asking for the right thing,” Worls says. “Not everyone will write a check for Access to the Parks, but this is one of our most popular (programs) because people realize there’s always a challenge for kids in a community and certain communities have more challenges.”

Courtesy of the Oglebay Foundation

glebay Park sits on a mountain above the rusting smoke stacks and vacant properties of Wheeling, a former industrial giant and West Virginia capital. Its manicured lawns roll into golf courses and tennis courts, lined by forests that hide lodges and deer. Atop the acreage sit a ski slope, a zoo, pools, museums, and a stunning mansion from an era of American industrial wealth. But Oglebay Park isn’t the home of an industrial billionaire, though it once was. Oglebay and its sister Wheeling Park are part of one of the most intriguing park systems in the country. In winter the ski slope is full of children frolicking in the snow after school; in summer, the pools, tennis courts, and lawns buzz with families enjoying the outdoors. Best of all, hundreds of the kids pay next to nothing to use the extensive facilities. “A number of years ago our leadership team recognized the types of programs we offer youth and wanted to make sure every child in Ohio County had access to the programs,” says Eriks Janelsins, president and CEO of the Oglebay Foundation, the nonprofit fundraising arm for Oglebay and Wheeling parks. The foundation’s signature program is Access to the Parks, providing almost-free admission to the zoo, lakes, swimming pools, tennis courts, golf courses, and museums for every Ohio County child on the state’s free or reduced lunch program. They pay $1, a token that makes the program a good deal rather than welfare some might be too proud to use.

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Waking Wardensville COMMUNITY

One tiny West Virginia city is in the midst of a renewal as entrepreneurs fill Main Street.

Written by Laura Wilcox Rote | Photographed by Carla Witt Ford

he dogwood trees are planted, LED lights are going up on storefronts, and new business opportunities seem to arise every day. Wardensville may be a city of less than 300 people, but this small Hardy County community is thriving. “This town has been ignored for so long, but the bones are here,” says Paul Yandura, chair of Wardensville Main Street and co-owner of Lost River Trading Post—an inviting store complete with art gallery and coffee shop on the main thoroughfare through town.

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Created in 2014, Wardensville Main Street was working to become an official nonprofit in April. Yandura and colleagues hope the group will eventually become a recognized member of the Main Street West Virginia program, which would connect Wardensville to more grant opportunities. “We’ve been on their radar,” he says. They also expect to be part of Main Street’s ON TRAC (Organization, Training, Revitalization and Capacity) program by year’s end. “Everything we think about, we’re thinking, ‘In the next five years, what can we do to make this a destination?’” Yandura

says. Locals are prepar- Weekends in Wardensville are busy, ing for the inevitable as shops on Main completion of Corridor Street attract locals and tourists alike. H, which will eventually allow traffic to bypass the small town when traveling from the D.C. area into West Virginia. Currently a two-lane road takes vehicles right through Wardensville, past businesses like the newer Lost River Trading Post and Lost River Brewing Company as well as the longtime Star Mercantile, a beloved storefront that’s part diner, part gift shop. That route is how Yandura, who lived 100 miles away in D.C. for years before moving to Wardensville, fell in love with the area. He says some West Virginia towns have struggled with the development of the major highway, while others, like Thomas and Davis, thrive as they’ve already made names for themselves. He says completing the highway around Wardensville could take anywhere from six to 15 years, but either way, officials are preparing. “We’ve set five to six years as an emergency point,” Yandura says. “So people already know how amazing it is here—so it’s not like, ‘Should we stop in Wardensville?’ They already know.” The city, the Main Street initiative, and even the Eastern West Virginia

opportunities exist for all business owners regardless of their means. It’s also an opportunity for us as the New Biz Launchpad to come up with creative ways to start a business.” The college is part of a consortium of community colleges focused on developing entrepreneurship in the Potomac Highlands. As part of its mission, Kapp says the college tests different business models to see what works. It also benefits new business owners, as they can tap into the resources of the community college network—from mentoring to finances. The Mansion on Main is another recent success story. Mariah Arant started in the cubicles of the Launchpad but was able to quickly get her own art gallery downtown up and running. Now the Mansion on Main is open in the evenings and continues to evolve. “One of the nice things about being part of the Launchpad is they’re not just providing you with space and resources. There is ongoing coaching,” Arant says. “It’s been incredibly helpful. I would not be able to open an art gallery, which has always been something I would love to do but never thought possible.” In April the Launchpad was also home to a veteran-run green technology solar company—Lost River Green Tech—and Redwood & Co., a home sundries and soap business. “Our goal is to take a backseat and allow these wonderful people who are entrepreneurs or who want to be entrepreneurs to try their business models,” Kapp says. While the Launchpad reduces the risk by offering a low-cost space, it’s also a place to bounce ideas off experts. Yandura says people often ask him and his partner, Donald Hitchcock, how they’ve been able to be so successful at their store. “The truth of the matter is, a lot of it was just happenstance.” Like Kapp, he says savvy entrepreneurs know they can’t be too rigid in their business plans. Sometimes plans change. “You just have to figure it out,” he says. “People say, ‘You’re brilliant.’ The real truth is we were terrified. We had no idea what we were doing. The key was it was an affordable loss. It’s easy to start a business here and it’s cheaper than anywhere else.” Lost River Brewing Company is a downtown anchor.

Community & Technical College in neighboring Moorefield are taking steps to make sure the charming area is not forgotten. Yandura calls their plan of action “the stop, the stay, and the live,” in that order. “First of all we have to have enough for people to do here to stop,” he says. “If we can’t get them to stop, they’re never going to stay and then live here.” The “stop” part of the plan has been in action for some time, as businesses like Star Mercantile and the Kac-Ka-Pon Restaurant have long been popular. More recently, the brewing company and Yandura’s store have helped shine an even brighter light on Wardensville. Then, in early 2015, Eastern West Virginia Community & Technical College kicked off the New Biz Launchpad venture. Already, multiple businesses have tested out the space on Main Street and been successful. Creations Galore, a florist’s shop now running out of its own space down the street, was the first to come out of the Launchpad. Owner Carolyn Sager Conard has always lived in Hardy County and worked in two flower shops in town years ago. She raised two kids in Wardensville, and family on their father’s side also have a long history of entrepreneurship in the

area. After her sons moved out, she decided it was time to give the flower shop—a dream she shared with her late mother—a real shot. She ran the business from her home at first. After a year business picked up, yet living nine miles outside town and making several deliveries a day was taking its toll. But breaking out on your own is hard. “She needed a place where she could try it out and take on minimum risks,” says Joe Kapp, entrepreneur-in-residence at Eastern West Virginia Community & Technical College. “Knowing I would be in the market for purchasing a place in town for my business come fall, Joe decided he would do a sixmonth lease agreement instead of the usual one or two years,” Conard says. “Even though I knew Eastern’s building really did not provide me with the size space I needed, it did give me the best location, with it being right across from the funeral home.” Kapp says Conard is the perfect example of what can be done, as she quickly set up shop, made the space her own, and realized she could run a business by herself in a bigger space down the street. Not only does she have her own store, she’s revitalized a property that was previously vacant. “That’s an exciting development for her and the community,” Kapp says. “It shows that

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Revitalization

Plying a New Trade

Growing need in the state and a love of detail led Sarel Venter to develop techniques in plaster restoration.

or some jobs, competence is all you need. Your drywall finisher, for example, should get the job done neatly and quickly. But when it comes to decorative plaster, nothing but perfection will do. Sarel Venter and his company Adventures in Elegance have that covered. Raised in South Africa, Venter took up carpentry, then moved to the United States as a young adult. He lived in Maryland, then Florida, then settled on West Virginia in 1992 for the quality of life. Having grown up in a subtropical environment, he was driven indoors by the region’s colder months, and particularly to drywall finishing. He admits to bringing a character flaw to that work: He was unnecessarily consumed with the details. “When you take on a project, you need to get it done and paid for. I found it hard to let it go—I had to keep at it until it was just perfect. It was a detriment.” But that attention to detail quickly made him aware of a shortage of expertise in the state for caring for plaster in old buildings. “Interiors in South Africa get plastered,” he says. “I grew up with it and used it in the construction industry and it was natural to me.” He started Adventures in Elegance in Grafton in 1996 to develop and promote his expertise. In the two decades since, Venter has applied his perfectionist streak to the

Focus May/June 2015

restoration of plaster in historic homes, theaters, churches, and other beloved structures across the state.

A Completely New Trade

Installers of new plaster apply their materials to fresh surfaces. Restorationists, on the other hand, deal with water damage and stress cracks. They have to remove paint and wallpaper of all kinds and match historical shapes and textures. Venter considers it a completely new trade, and his work has

come to address sev- Perfectionism at work: The plaster ornameneral basic problems. tation in St. Patrick’s “If you went to Church in Weston was in a serious state of the old plasterers deterioration before and asked them the restoration conducted in 2012-13 by to restore plaster, they’d tear it down,” Adventures in Elegance. Venter says. That usually exposes underlying problems, increasing costs unpredictably. Consider a cracked plaster ceiling in an old house. “The most costly and intrusive alternative is to

Courtesy of Sarel Venter

written by Pam Kasey

“It used to be, ‘Good god, there’s plaster involved—we don’t know what we’re going to get into,’” Venter says. “Now you can with confidence predict to the cent what you’re going to spend.” And the cost savings can be project-altering. The Metropolitan Theatre in Morgantown saved so much on plaster that it was unexpectedly able to do the decorative painting at the same time, he says. To grow the pool of expertise, Venter is working to advance this new trade at both the amateur and professional levels. “It’s impossible for us to provide every homeowner with a solution. We love to show them the techniques so they can do as much as they can themselves. We teach at every opportunity.” That includes, for example, a workshop for the Ohio Valley Young Preservationists in Wheeling in April. It also includes teaching new artisans. At Belmont College in Ohio, just across the river from Wheeling, Venter teaches courses toward the college’s associate degree in building preservation and restoration. He takes students in for summer apprenticeships and hires the college’s graduates. In March 2015 he moved his company from Grafton to Wheeling to strengthen that relationship.

Courtesy of Sarel Venter; Carla Witt Ford

Before and after in the theater in Wheeling’s Scottish Rite Cathedral.

tear the plaster down,” he says. “You find that the ceiling joists aren’t straight and aligned—the plaster is what made it flat.” Replastering from scratch is expensive, but installing drywall instead requires an intermediate step of leveling the subsurface— and, ultimately, forsakes the more textured historic character. Venter has pioneered techniques that keep historical material in place and, at the same time, minimize cost. He covers the old plaster on the ceiling with a modern synthetic basecoat and a sheet of fiberglass mesh. He sinks screws up into the joists to stretch the mesh taut. The basecoat and mesh are flexible enough to move with any new cracks in the underlayer, and a topcoat of smooth, white plaster restores the ceiling to its original character. Venter used this method to restore the earthquakedamaged walls and ceiling of the Hulihe′e Palace in Kona, Hawaii, in 2008, a place that experiences tremors weekly. In 2014 the restoration was holding up perfectly. “With this method, you can be sure you’ve got that surface covered for the next 25 years without any trouble,” he says. Techniques like this turn jobs that were once intimidating into manageable projects.

Tourism and Heritage

Heritage tourism is growing, Venter says, and it’s most successful when visitors can see the buildings involved. “You can point all day long to an empty lot and say who slept here and how they waved or threw rocks at the troops passing by, but if you can’t show the building, you’ve lost that history,” he says. “Our physical heritage is important because of that, and we need to be sure the heritage is available to the next generation.” John Sandor, an architectural historian with the National Park Service, is heartened to hear of an artisan with Venter’s level of skill working in West Virginia. Sandor, a Grafton native, worked for six years for the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office. When the agency made grants for preservation projects, he says, “It was really hard to find people that had the skills you’d need for a rehabilitation project in, say, rural Monroe County. And the cost to bring

someone from Washington or Pittsburgh or Cincinnati wasn’t feasible.” When it comes to historic structures and heritage tourism, Sandor says it’s important to “have a level of authenticity in this work to be fair to the public that’s going to see these structures.” Here’s a more archaeological side benefit of restoration: a new appreciation for the unsung artisans of the past. “The Price House in Morgantown”—that’s 270 Walnut Street, home today of the Appalachian Gallery— “has an intricate plaster design that was put on basically with a cake decorating bag, around 1906,” Venter says. “I’ve restored three areas there, and just completed a project at a Baptist church in Sistersville that used the same artist. There’s a big search on the way to figure out who he was.”

The Future

Adventures in Elegance has expanded from plasterwork to full-service restorations, like the complete overhaul—replastering, repainting, decorative painting, sculpture restoration, flooring, and stained glass—it did for St. Patrick’s Church in Weston in 2012 and 2013. For clients, it’s a matter of efficiency. “Every 50 years or so these buildings—churches, theaters, state capitols—have to go through a whole restoration process. You’re taking everything down that’s not going to last 50 years. If you have to have a separate contractor for every phase, the building could be out of use for a very long time. We took a total of five months to redo St. Patrick’s Church completely.” Adventures in Elegance maintains around six employees in the winter months and 12 in the summer. In addition to a monument restoration in Weston, the company has projects all over this summer, including interior plaster restoration on a Baptist church in Buckhannon, exterior work on an addition to a historic bed-and-breakfast outside Lewisburg, and a restoration of the textured stucco on the exterior of the state’s first capitol, in Wheeling. A look at Adventures in Elegance’s Facebook page sums up Venter’s view of his work: Many of his posts end with “I love my job!” But underlying that is a sense of urgency. “Our decorative buildings, the ones built up through the 1920s,” he says, “they’re getting restored now or they’re lost.” Focus wvfocus.com

Founders

work you’re in there are a lot of different personalities to work with, and you have to understand people and know how to work with them.”

Courtesy of Allegheny Science & Technology

“No matter what line of

Arria Hines Founders

CE O and Co -founder , A llegheny S cience & T echnology Corporation I nterv iewed by Shay M AU N Z

Arria Hines is the president, CEO, and co-founder of Allegheny Science & Technology Corporation, a Bridgeport technology company that contracts with government agencies. The company’s areas of expertise include program management, software engineering, e-learning, and business intelligence. Hines founded the company in 2009 with just one other employee and a NASA contract. It has since grown to more than 70 employees, with plans to double in size within the year. We sat down with her recently to talk about her business, her life, and her fondness for flip-flops.

»» I come from a family that was entrepreneurial. My

dad had his own little business doing weather wells and septic systems, and if you grow up in a mom and pop business, you see the feast and the famine. I saw all the hard work my parents did, but I also saw the rewards they achieved.

»» I’m a risk taker. And I’m not afraid of failure, because trust me—not everything has been successful. I started a company called Windows by Arria years ago when I lived in northern Virginia, and then I had my own consulting company. So this is the third business I’ve started, and this third business is the one that has been the most successful.

retire and have this little boutique and have the option to wear flip-flops to work whenever I want. I don’t really see myself saying I’m going to retire and then golf all the time.

»» My husband truly understands that the company

is part of our lives. I try to integrate my family with my work.

»» The success of any company is really based on the employees. I really see myself as more of a facilitator. I make connections, but the teams that I have are the boots on the ground doing the work. They’re the ones who make the company grow.

»» I like all aspects of getting a company off the ground. »» People skills are critical to business, I think. No matIt’s not just the project management work that I like to do—I like the financial end of it, the human resources end of it.

»» There are some people who aren’t really structured to be entrepreneurs. They like the 9 to 5, and they like coming home and turning everything off for the evening. But I wouldn’t change anything for the world. »» I don’t think this will be the last company I start—I think there will be others. My dream is like everyone else’s, to retire someday. But my joke is that I want to

ter what line of work you’re in there are a lot of different personalities to work with, and you have to understand people and know how to work with them. And I think a large part of that has to do with a person’s personality.

»» I have a clear idea about what I’m trying to develop. At AST our corporate culture is high energy and fast paced, but we’re also a very family focused company. People come first because happy employees are productive employees. I stress to everyone that you can’t sacrifice your personal life and your family and you can’t work all the time. Focus wvfocus.com

Talking Shop Artpreneur

At Kin Ship Goods in Charleston, business, creativity, and coziness intersect.

Written by Shay Maunz | Photographed by KATEY SHELTON

he motto at Kin Ship Goods is “stay cozy,” and it suits them. On a sunny but cold Tuesday this spring the store’s owners, Dan Davis and Hillary Harrison, opened up the store so we could talk about their business and their art. Kin Ship, a little shop tucked into the nook between two much taller buildings in downtown Charleston, is normally only open to customers Thursday through Saturday, so it was empty and quiet. Davis pulled a chair out of the back room, where they keep the screen-printing studio, into the front, the shop’s retail space. Harrison sat on the shop’s red plaid couch with their dog, Hazel, a graying beagle they adopted

Focus May/June 2015

two years ago. She snored from time to time—Hazel, that is, not Harrison. We were surrounded by Kin Ship’s wares: stacks of tees, sweatshirts, and mugs printed with simple images and quippy phrases. One demands that you “Ask Me About My Cat.” Another tells you to “Stay Cozy.” There’s a mug that says “Silence is Golden” and another that says to “Take a Nip and Sip.” “Our aesthetic is one where the shirt is supposed to feel like, even if your life is completely in the gutter, you can put this shirt on and it will make your life feel a little better,” Davis says. Don’t be thrown off by the laid-back vibe, though. Kin Ship is a successful business. It got its start back in 2009, when

Davis and Harrison started screen printing greeting cards in a little art gallery they’d started in the back of a shop in Louisville, Kentucky. Davis was in a band and had a background in screen printing. Harrison had a photography degree and had founded an arts magazine—they’re both always interested in new creative pursuits. “We started making greeting cards and had fun doing that, so then in 2011 we started doing some shirts,” Davis says. “That’s when we opened an Etsy store.” Etsy is an online marketplace for artists and craftspeople—think of it as Amazon’s funkier, more personable cousin. The site launched in 2005 and, by 2011, had 10 million members. In certain circles of artists and makers it was, and remains, a very big deal. So it was also a big deal when, not long after Davis and Harrison launched Kin Ship, Etsy chose to feature the shop on its front page. From there, the good press just kept coming. Davis and Harrison were featured in magazines like Country Living and on blogs like Apartment Therapy and Design Sponge. The retail website ModCloth became a customer, and comedian and

Tips from Kin Ship Just do it already. “My biggest advice is just to do the thing instead of talking about it forever and ever,” Harrison says. “It’s so frustrating to hear from people about what they want to do, and then five years later they haven’t actually taken any steps to make it happen.”

Don’t be afraid to mess up. “I think that’s a really sad reason people don’t try anything,” Harrison says. “And we’ve messed up so many things—just like the name of our company. We changed it three times.” Davis agrees. “I’ve messed up thousands of dollars of shirts because there was ink on my thumb,” he says. “But it was fine.”

Figure out what you want to do—and then do it. “Figure out what you actually want out of the project and then just stick to that,” Davis says. “Don’t go into it and say, ‘I’m going to make art and take over everything.’ Be more realistic.”

television star Mindy Kaling wore Kin Ship’s sweatshirts on TV. Twice. The company grew with all that attention, but not as drastically as you might think. Davis and Harrison are really risk averse for small business owners—they’re in this business more because it lets them be creative in their day jobs, and less for the entrepreneurial thrill. “I think what really benefits us is that we’re not that into money,” Davis says. “If Hazel has food, the cats have food, and we can drink coffee together and pay the rent, we’re fine. And I don’t have to sell that many shirts to be able to drink coffee and feed Hazel.” For years they kept at least one day job between them—one person would go to work all day while the other worked on the business, and then they’d work on Kin Ship together all evening and on the weekends. They didn’t invest in a studio for more than four years after they started Kin Ship. Even after ModCloth started purchasing huge orders of shirts every few months, they were still printing them all in the spare bedroom in their apartment. “We could print in there, so we did,” Davis says. “It was super tight, but we could do it.” They

can only now afford to keep stock on the shelves. Before, everything was made to order because they couldn’t afford to buy blank shirts to print on until someone had already paid for the finished product. Thanks to all that careful use of their resources, Davis and Harrison were able to start a business and operate it for almost six years, all without credit. Aside from a $1,000 loan from a friend to buy their first printing press, they’ve paid for everything up front. “That was really hard, but that’s what we wanted to do,” Harrison says. “And in a lot of ways it made us make smarter choices, where if we’d had that money in the beginning we’d have just bought whatever we thought of, instead of being thoughtful about all of our decisions.” Last year, Davis and Harrison decided to relocate from Louisville to Charleston. Harrison’s from Sissonville, and even though she left town as soon as she could after high school graduation, she always knew she wanted to come back someday to be closer to her family. “And from a business perspective, it’s easier for us to make an impact here than in Louisville,” Davis says. “Somewhere like Louisville,

everyone’s just over everything, because they’ve seen it all before. Here we have people walking in and just saying, ‘Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,’ and then they start touching everything. You can do things here that you couldn’t do anywhere else because it will just be met with blind enthusiasm.” At first they were just looking for studio space where they could print their stuff and sell it online, but when they found a downtown location with room for a retail space out front, they decided to give it a shot. “We had a big talk about wanting to be able to do something for Charleston,” Harrison says. “I want it to just be a cool place to go. It’s more about having a space where people can come hang out and look at cool things than selling things.” Davis chimes in. “Kin Ship wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t gone to some place at some point and seen something that blew my mind, or bought a record that changed my mind,” he says. “Not that Kin Ship is changing minds, but maybe some kid will see something that isn’t like anything they’ve seen before. Maybe they’ll be like, ‘I could make something, too.’” Focus wvfocus.com

Charleston’s Best Kept Secret Leonoro’s Spaghetti House celebrates 100 years in the Capital City.

“L

Written and photographed by Katie Griffith

ike always, we start the sauce out every morning. That’s our bread and butter,” says Albert Leonoro early on a Wednesday morning from the kitchen of Leonoro’s Spaghetti House

Focus May/June 2015

in Charleston. It’s been 100 years since Leonoro’s opened its doors in Charleston, first as a confectionary and then as a spaghetti house. The business is on its third generation of owners—fourth if, like Al Leonoro, you consider the age gap between his uncles, the founders, and his father.

Leonoro’s Spaghetti The Leonoros House celebrates immigrated to the 100 years in business United States in the in 2015, a century of serving pasta across two early 1900s, settling locations in Charleston. around Cabin Creek, where Al’s father, Umberto, was born. But soon after his birth, the labor feuds of the southern coalfields erupted into war. “My grandmother got scared,” Al says. She took little Umberto and, with her husband, went back to Italy, while Umberto’s adult brothers, Frank and Joe, stayed behind to open a confectionary on Broad Street in Charleston in 1915. Leonoro’s got its start there, first selling sweets before switching to pasta in the 1930s. As a young man Umberto would later return to the United States, trying to escape the rise of Mussolini and a looming second world war, to work for his brothers on Broad Street. For decades the family endured wars and

Historical Photos Courtesy of Alicia Pinney

Centenarian

depressions and European dictators, serving lunches to hefty crowds of Broad Street workers until 1973 when the construction of Today Al and Joe the city’s interstate Leonoro continue to serve large Italian system forced a meals in Charleston’s move to Charleston’s East End. East End where the restaurant sits now. The business’s ability to hold out through the ups and downs of economy and culture, Al says, comes from its size. It’s a small enterprise in every possible sense. “You just get through it. I remember Dad said during the Depression, the wars, you couldn’t raise prices. You couldn’t get products. You do what you have to do,” Al says. “When you’re small you can weather the storm a lot easier Leonoro’s opened first as a confectionary on Broad Street in Charleston, where Umberto (pictured) learned what would become the family trade from his uncles.

than when you get real big, expense-wise. I have seven people, but we can run it with three if we have to. All the family will get in here. We’ve done it before.” They still do it. Al and his brother, another Joe, are in the restaurant every morning by 7:30 where they bring Leonoro’s famous sauces to a simmer, hand roll meatballs, and ready the store for the day’s business. Their children, Alicia Pinney and Michael Leonoro, are right by their sides. The business has supported the whole family since Frank and the original Joe began sending money home to the old country from the confectionary. But running a tight ship doesn’t mean cutting corners. Those sauces come straight from the annals of southern Italy, always made with fresh plum tomatoes and sprinkled with the sharp saltiness of goat’s milk Romano cheese. “Our main thing is our spaghetti,” Al says. “My

dad used to put on our checks ‘The Best Spaghetti in Town.’ We can always hang onto our sauce and that’s why we put so much emphasis on it.” Visit and you’ll see what he means. The menu is small. The plates are simple, adorned only with the tawny strands of freshly boiled pasta and the deep red of a finely seasoned marinara and finished with a meatball—or two—on top. The staff, as loyal as the restaurant’s customers, will tie a plastic bib around the necks of diners to save their crisp business attire from the inevitable drippings of twirling pasta. “Charleston’s been good to us. We appreciate the courtesy of our customers. I call them friends,” Al says. “People have eaten here 50 to 60 years. Some came from Broad Street. That’s a long time ago.” leonorosspaghettihouse.com, 304.343.1851 Focus wvfocus.com

A Sweet Lifestyle AGRIPRENEUR

West Virginia may be thawing to its maple syrup potential.

written by Pam Kasey | photographed by Carla Witt Ford

Focus May/June 2015

hat happens just under the bark of a maple tree on a warm spring day is a botanical gift to brunch-goers. Water in the sapwood thaws, dissolving the previous growing season’s sugars. Carbon dioxide bubbles expand and push the sweet sap upward to feed new shoots and buds. When freezing nights shrink the bubbles again, the empty space sucks water up through the roots, replenishing the sap for the next thaw. The cycle, unique to maples in its high sugar content, continues until freezing is done, usually in April. Most of us in this mapled northeast quadrant of the U.S. pay no attention to the spring sap run. But a small number live by it. “I can’t predict when I’m going to be doing stuff,” says John Dalen, owner of Dry Fork Maple Works in Randolph County,

Woods crewman Jason Brooks demonstrates hammering a spile into a tree. The narrow droplines, mid-sized branchlines, and large mainlines stand out in the sunlight.

Translucent blue mainlines carry sap downhill to the sugar house. Mainlines end in vacuum-conserving sap extractors, and sap drops from there into the large vat below.

likely the largest maple syrup producer ever in West Virginia. “A batch can take anywhere from a couple to maybe four days. I’ve got to do it whenever Mother Nature allows me to.”

Pulling Sap Downhill

On a warm March morning, woods crew member Jason Brooks wriggles a tube off a tree’s spile—a spout a crew member installed over the winter. Drip. Drip. Drip. Every two seconds. “This is a healthy tree with a strong crown,” says Brooks, a confident outdoorsman. “It’s just waking up, so that’s a good, steady drip.” Checking taps makes for pleasant work in the sun. But zoom out: That tree stands on a hillside covered in trees—a hillside that’s steep in places and deep in snow during the January-February tapping period. “It gets pretty treacherous. We’ve all taken some

rolls downhill,” Brooks says with a game grin. The crew tapped 19,000 trees under those conditions in 2015, 600 to a man on a good day, 200 on a rough one. They finished just before a frigid snap in late February. Workers hung the intricate sap collection system in 2013. A network of high-tensile wire suspends a luminous blue web of polyethylene tubing at around chest height—5/16-inch droplines at the trees and ¾-inch branchlines along the slopes, all gathering into 10 sturdy 1½-inch mainlines. The translucent blue minimizes sun-warming while letting workers see flow and leaks. Dry Fork put up 54 miles of tubing before tapping the trees for the 2014 thaw. But now it’s mid-March 2015. The trees are tapped. The sap is flowing. And a vacuum pump is gently pulling the sap from two networks on the north and south hillsides

above the creek through the droplines, branchlines, and mainlines into the sugar shack in the valley.

Becoming a Sugarmaker

One might be forgiven for seeing John Dalen, with his white head and rugged Scandinavian frame, as a bit of a wizard. It’s a fitting image for a man who turns sap to syrup at an industrial scale four miles from any paved road. After the Civil War, Dalen’s great-greatuncle John McClure of nearby Franklin—the Cattle King of West Virginia—amassed some 15,000 acres. Dalen’s daughters inherited 1,200 of those on Dry Fork. Amish friends persuaded Dalen that sugaring there could make a sustainable income, but he’d only ever cooked a little sap down in a soup pot on a woodstove. He picked the brains of Mike Rechlin, dean of the Future Focus wvfocus.com

Generations graduate school in Franklin and longtime teacher of sustainable forestry. He befriended a Cornell University maple specialist. He toured operations in top-producing Vermont. And then he designed a modern, $500,000 operation. A now and again carpenter and boilermaker, Dalen built his sugar shack from timber he felled and milled on the property. It’s far off the grid, so he uses propane for cooking and diesel generators for electricity.

Chemistry in the Woods

Sap gushes into two truck-sized vats in the sugar shack. They can hold 18,000 gallons, a good fraction of the more than 225,000

Focus May/June 2015

gallons Dry Fork processed in 2014. Dalen works long hours at the height of the sap run to get his product from tree to barrel in under 24 hours. “The warmer the sap gets, the more bacteria and yeast start to affect it.” A faintly metallic-resinous waft rises from the vats—nothing like maple syrup. He filters raw sap through reverse osmosis. “We’re essentially squeezing the water out—going from a percent-and-ahalf or two percent (sugar content) up to 12 or 13 percent,” Dalen says. “I’m saving 60 or 70 percent of the propane.” But the evaporator is where the alchemy happens. The room fills with a rich maple savor as sugar concentrations step up in three

Dalen explains the use stages: to 17 perof reverse osmosis in cent, the low 30s, sugarmaking. Finished and finally, in a syrup flows at a steaming 200-plus degrees into a roiling 200-plussmall vat, then it's piped to degree churn, filtration. Filtered syrup is pumped into barrels, and 60 to 61 percent. grading is done using a Dalen filters the color comparison. finished syrup and pumps it into OPPOSITE: John Dalen with wife Mel, who handles the barrels he seals business end at Dry Fork. so hot, it’s days before they cool off completely. Also a former high school science teacher, this sugarmaker is a chemist by nature. He talks animatedly about measuring sugar concentrations and filtering

particulates. But he’s equal part woodsman. Keeping an eye on the evaporator, he tells a story about life in these woods. “The other day we caught a cub bear,” he starts out. The dogs started barking and a worker spotted the cub hobbling up from the creek, slow and sickly. “I picked him up by the scruff and put him in a toolbox,” he says. A game warden he called told him he couldn’t keep a bear, so he put it in the outhouse with dog food and water and left the door ajar. The next day officials took the cub to the State Wildlife Center at French Creek. “Cute little rascal,” he chuckles. “You gotta be ready for anything out here.” Dry Fork sold 5,000 gallons of syrup in 2014, packaged in 125 40-gallon barrels. A later, shorter sap run made for 115 barrels in 2015. A buyer backs a tractor trailer in and weighs and grades each barrel—golden/delicate, amber/rich, dark/robust—from bottled samples. Most of it is marketed through Bascom Maple Farms in New Hampshire.

Tapping WV

West Virginians, like Vermonters, may one day enjoy real maple syrup on their diner pancakes. Observers believe the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimate of 1,341 gallons of syrup produced in West Virginia in 2012 is low. Even if it’s correct, Dry Fork Maple Works alone has increased that to more than 6,000 gallons. “Others, like Frostmore Farm and Family Roots Farm, have invested in infrastructure in the past five years,” says the West Virginia Department of Agriculture’s Cindy Martel. “And operations like Cedar Run Farm are actively adding taps and increasing efficiencies.” While Connecticut held the bottom spot in the USDA’s top 10 in 2014 with 16,000 gallons, West Virginia has far more maples and could top that. National and global markets for maple syrup are growing, Dalen says. He expects his operation to pay for itself in five years and plans to double his taps. Many more producers could earn a good living in the highlands, in his opinion. Plus, there’s the lifestyle. “It’s kind of like a fantasy: living in the woods, wool pants, tough-soled boots, hatchets and axes, being outside when it’s 15 below,” he says. “It’s pretty neat. It’s really neat.” Focus wvfocus.com

Recreation

Safe at Home

n April 10, Morgantown marked the opening of the brand new Monongalia County Ballpark with West Virginia Universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 6-5 win over Butler University. Starting in June, the field also will be home to the West Virginia Black Bears, a new single-A minor league team. Monongalia County built the park using a tax increment financing (TIF) district, which allows city and county governments to cap their property and sales tax revenues at a certain level, then use additional tax revenues above that cap to fund development projects. WVU will eventually purchase the park from the county using revenues from the facility. That is expected to take about a decade.

Focus May/June 2015

Courtesy of WVU Athletic Communications; Carla Witt Ford

Monongalia County uses a special tax district to fund its new baseball park.

CHEERS & JEERS Huntington’s revitalization continues with the award of a $200,000 EPA grant to clean up the city’s former industrial sites, making space for a new polymer center. The city was one of 20 communities around the country to receive the grant. #WrappedInPlastic #It'sFantastic

U.S. Senators Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito secured $5 million in federal funding to repair state highways and roads damaged by winter weather. #EveryLittleBitCounts? #OurRoadsAreTheWorst

The raw milk bill passed by both houses of the state legislature was vetoed by Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, citing health risks, while the bill blocking Tesla Motors from opening stores in West Virginia was passed. #WhoSwappedTheStamps? #MyCarMyMoneyMyDecision #MyCowMyMilkMyHealth #ImmooovableImpass? #What

The Endless Wall Trail of the New River Gorge National River was chosen by USA Today readers as the best national park hike in the country. #NumberOne #OurGorgeIsBetterThanYours

Congrats to Liz Adams, a Wirt County High School senior, for winning the West Virginia Statewide High School Business Plan Competition and a $10,000 college scholarship. #GirlYou’reGoingPlaces

Whatever West Virginia’s reasons are for Googling racial slurs, we’re sure they can’t be good. And now parts of the state have been lumped in with America’s most racist places according to a study of Google search data published in the online journal PLOS ONE. #BigotsAmongUsBringingUsDown Focus wvfocus.com

Legislators make the state’s liquor distribution system more palatable to small distillers.

Written by Zack Harold

est Virginia’s secret government warehouse isn’t quite what I thought it would be. It was easily visible from the interstate, although I suppose that could be part of a hiding-in-plainsight strategy. Driving past on a two-lane road, I could see two sides of the warehouse are lined with large bay doors. Some had white unmarked tractor trailers parked in front.

Focus May/June 2015

There is a tall chain link fence, but it is not a threatening-looking fence. The gate stood wide open, without security guards or anything. I still didn’t go in. A government spokesman declined my multiple requests to tour this 153,000-square-foot facility, citing security concerns. The government can’t have reporters crawling around a building filled with such highly valued assets. The secret warehouse isn’t filled with gold bars, or weapons, or former

Shutterstock

Happy Hour Bottom Drawer

Guantanamo Bay detainees. Instead, the brightly lit corridors are stacked to the ceiling with hundreds of thousands of dollars of booze. The facility’s low profile wasn’t enough to avoid the attention of the state legislature earlier this year, however. But lawmakers were not concerned with what the warehouse contained—they were more worried about what wasn’t inside. Although Gary Robinson, spokesman for the West Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control Administration, did not arrange a tour of the warehouse, he was more than happy to explain what goes on there. West Virginia is one of 17 alcohol “control” states in the country. While we do not have state-run liquor stores like Pennsylvania, Alabama, or Mississippi—West Virginia got out of the retail business in 1990—the state still controls alcohol distribution at a wholesale level. “Alcohol is a unique product. It’s not soap. There are things that need to be done to protect the public,” Robinson says. That means every drop of whiskey, vodka, bourbon, scotch, gin, tequila, and rum sold in West Virginia passes through this big, brown, unmarked building in the Kanawha Valley. This is known as a "bailment" system. I’m not going to divulge the location, but if you’re any good with Google searches, you can find the exact address in just a few clicks. Manufacturers deliver their products to the warehouse’s bay doors, where a staff of 19 employees meticulously organizes the hooch in long rows. Robinson showed me a picture—it reminded me of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. “Your top products are in the first aisle,” Robinson says. That’s where the Crown Royal, Smirnoff, and other popular brands live. “Those are stacked to the ceiling.” But that’s only a fraction of what the warehouse holds. There are currently around 2,000 different products in stock at the WVABCA facility, and each has its own numbered spot. The agency has another 1,000 products available for special order. When West Virginia’s 178 liquor stores need to restock their shelves, they log onto a special password-protected WVABCA website and place their orders. Warehouse workers “pick” the order the next day,

“

We had no idea how successful an agritourism destination we’d become, and how painful these costs would be.” Rob Losey, co-owner, Bloomery Plantation Distillery

gathering up all the different cases, stacking them on pallets, and shrink-wrapping everything for shipment. The booze leaves the warehouse the day after, in the back of an unmarked tractor trailer. Just under 700,000 cases of liquor worth $91.6 million passed through the bailment system in fiscal year 2014. “It’s a pretty big operation,” Robinson says. Each case that passes through the facility is subject to a 28-percent markup fee, plus an 80 cent per case “bailment” fee, and a $2.30 per case delivery fee. Those fees generated about $15.6 million for West Virginia’s general revenue fund in fiscal year 2014. Retailers also pay West Virginia’s 6 percent sales tax and a 5 percent excise tax, and are required by law to further mark up the liquor by at least 10 percent. But the state also collected thousands of dollars for distributing alcohol it never touched. That’s because state law requires West Virginia-based distilleries that sell their products on-site to pay the same fees as major manufacturers and retailers, even if their products never pass through the bailment process. “These are service fees for services we’re not receiving,” says Rob Losey, co-owner of Bloomery Plantation Distillery. While the company distributes its flavored liqueur “SweetShine” to stores around the state through the WVABCA warehouse, Losey says many of his company’s sales happen in the distillery’s Charles Town tasting room. And because of the way state law is written,

Bloomery still had to pay all those taxes and fees on products sold in the tasting room, even though the bottles never left the door before being sold. Be warned, this gets a little confusing. If Bloomery Plantation wants to sell a case of its product in the tasting room, it first has to “sell” the liquor to the state—which doesn’t actually own the booze, but just holds it in consignment. Once the state “receives” the liquor—which has not physically left the factory—it cuts a check to the distillery. Bloomery then buys back its own liquor by writing a check to the state for the cost of the product, plus a 28 percent markup, 80 cent per case bailment fee, $2.30 per case shipping and handling fee, and a 10 percent “market zone fee,” which is distributed to other liquor stores in the county. The distillery must go through this process for every case of liquor sold in its tasting room, and must wait until this paper trail is complete before consumers can purchase the bottles in question. Losey says the taxes and fees were not a major concern when the company opened in 2011, but sales in the tasting room have dramatically increased in recent years as more and more tourists visit Bloomery Plantation. “We had no idea how successful an agritourism destination we’d become, and how painful these costs would be,” he says. Last year, Losey says the WVABCA taxes and fees cost his company about $200,000. “As we started to analyze our business a

little more, the thing we do really well is what’s costing the most.” When he and his business partners crunched the numbers, it became clear they could not afford to keep the tasting room open with those fees in place. On February 10, 2015, Losey and his partners closed Bloomery Plantation’s tasting room, laying off most of its 17 employees—the distillery’s manufacturing side remained open with only a few workers. News of Bloomery’s closure spread quickly across the state. Outraged fans sent more than 1,000 letters to state lawmakers and collected more than 1,000 signatures with an online petition. A bipartisan team of legislators soon began crafting a bill that would lower fees for on-site sales at West Virginia distilleries. The resulting legislation dropped the required markup from 28 percent to 5 percent for on-site sales, eliminated the handling fee, and reduced market zone payments from 10 percent to 2 percent, which were capped at $15,000 per year. The bill passed unanimously in the state Senate, and the House of Delegates approved it with a 91-8 vote. Governor Earl Ray Tomblin signed the legislation into law on March 31. “I celebrated with an unsweet tea,” Losey says. Although the bill does not go into effect until June 12, Bloomery Plantation reopened its tasting room the first weekend in April, bringing back all 17 employees. The new law will not change the confusing check-writing process between distilleries and the state, but Losey said it would boost his company’s bottom line. “That will bring our tasting room to a profitable position,” he says. Robinson at the WVABCA says the change in the law probably will not affect state liquor revenues much—since only about 60 of the 3,000 products in the agency’s ordering system are made by in-state distilleries. Losey predicts the bill will eventually bring even more revenue into the state, however, since it will encourage other distilleries to set up shop in the Mountain State and draw more tourists from across state lines. “That collateral revenue is way bigger than what the state’s giving up,” he says. “It’s way cheaper for the state to agree with me than it is to lose me.” Focus wvfocus.com

Average Rankings 2008-2014

2014 Rankings

1. Hawaii 2. Colorado 3. Minnesota 4. Utah 5. Montana 6. Alaska 7. North Dakota 8. Nebraska 9. South Dakota 10. Vermont 11. Wyoming 12. New Hampshire 13. Massachusetts 14. Iowa 15. Washington 16. California 17. Maryland 18. Kansas 19. Virginia 20. Connecticut 21. Idaho 22. Maine 23. Wisconsin 24. New Mexico 25. Arizona 26. Texas 27. Oregon 28. New Jersey 29. Georgia 30. Illinois 31. North Carolina 32. Pennsylvania 33. New York 34. Florida 35. South Carolina 36. Rhode Island 37. Delaware 38. Michigan 39. Nevada 40. Oklahoma 41. Missouri 42. Louisiana 43. Indiana 44. Tennessee 45. Alabama 46. Arkansas 47. Ohio 48. Mississippi 49. Kentucky

1. Alaska 2. Hawaii 3. South Dakota 4. Wyoming 5. Montana 6. Colorado 7. Nebraska 8. Utah 9. New Mexico 10. Texas 11. Minnesota 12. California 13. Vermont 14. Virginia 15. Maine 16. Iowa 17. Massachusetts 18. Wisconsin 19. North Carolina 20. Arizona 21. New Hampshire 22. South Carolina 23. North Dakota 24. Connecticut 25. Idaho 26. Florida 27. Oregon 28. Washington 29. Maryland 30. Georgia 31. Nevada 32. Kansas 33. New York 34. New Jersey 35. Pennsylvania 36. Illinois 37. Rhode Island 38. Delaware 39. Oklahoma 40. Louisiana 41. Missouri 42. Michigan 43. Arkansas 44. Tennessee 45. Alabama 46. Mississippi 47. Ohio 48. Indiana 49. Kentucky

50. West Virginia

DASHBOARD

How Do We Get Out of This? What Are We Doing Wrong? West Virginia ranked last among states in the seventh annual Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index released in February— for the sixth time in a row. It’s tempting to dismiss the Well-Being Index as meaningless. It’s not. The poll questions are grounded in peer-reviewed research, and the results are based on hundreds of thousands of phone interviews conducted nationwide throughout the year, with samples matched to national demographics for gender, age, race, ethnicity, and location, among other characteristics. The GallupHealthways partnership calls the Well-Being Index “the most proven, mature, and comprehensive measure of well-being in the world.” Based on recent research, the index was updated in 2014 to a new set of five measures.

WV WBI 2014

rank

community relationships

financial security

social relationships

physical health

sense of purpose

Measuring well-being, they say, is vital to improving it. So, knowing this—how do we improve it?

Focus May/June 2015

A Tunnel of Terror big idea

Take a look inside West Virginia’s Disneyland for first responders. Written by Shay Maunz | Photographed by Nikki Bowman

t’s dark and cold. There’s dirt underfoot, rock overhead, and walls on either side. A few yards away there’s a group of about a dozen young men and women wearing camouflage military fatigues and red hard hats. They’re not rushing, exactly, but they’re not relaxing, either—they clearly have somewhere to be, something to do, some task at hand. Just seeing them like that tugs at a little internal alarm—what’s happening? Where’s the emergency? Is everything going to be OK? You can relax though, because this isn’t a natural disaster or terrorist attack. This is the Center for National Response, a training facility for first responders inside Memorial Tunnel just outside of Charleston. When Focus wvfocus.com

it was built in 1954 the tunnel carried the West Virginia Turnpike through Paint Creek Mountain—many locals still remember the yellow tiles on the walls from road trips years ago. Then, in 1987, that road was upgraded to bypass the tunnel, which was closed to traffic. In the 1990s it was used to test new ventilation methods that could be used in tunnel fires. For a while the West Virginia Turnpike just used it for storage. But by the late 1990s the world— and the United States Congress—was feeling increasingly threatened by terrorism. At the urging of Senator Robert C. Byrd, Congress appropriated some $8 million to turn the tunnel into a training center for first responders. The first training exercise was held nine months before September 11, 2001. These days, the tunnel is used to train military personnel and civilian first responders from all over the country

Focus May/June 2015

and around the world—more than 223,000 people have trained in the tunnel since it opened, with 2,100 people receiving training in 2014 alone. On this spring day around 50 members of the Army National Guard were at the tunnel for a basic extraction course. They were learning how to rescue people from a collapsed building, mudslide, or any number of disastrous situations that might leave a civilian stranded or trapped by rubble. The weeklong course started with lectures and bookwork in classrooms down the road, then ended with a hands-on training session at Memorial Tunnel. The students assembled near an elaboratelooking series of concrete tubes and took turns entering on one end and working their way through until they emerged on the other end—once with their headlamps on, then again in the dark. “We make them

Major General James Hoyer, utilize the search adjutant general of the West patterns we Virginia National Guard. teach them using First responders often their hands, and use the tunnel to practice they go through disasters where the public blind,” says Major is at risk, using manikins or live actors to stand in Tom Poling, as civilians. who works at A lab for making methamthe tunnel with phetamine is filled with hazthe National ardous, potentially explosive Guard. Think chemicals. of it as a really grown-up obstacle course, with real-world applications. Later, the soldiers undergo a stress test, crawling through a series of progressively smaller tubes—the smallest just 15 inches wide. “You have to just put your arms out in front of you, lay down flat, and do the worm all the way through,” says Lt. Josh Marcum, one of the West Virginia National Guard’s two full-time training

“master planners.” The test is designed to help identify soldiers who panic when they’re in tight spaces; It’s not unusual for at least one person to break down in tears. Managed by the National Guard, Memorial Tunnel is often jokingly called “Disneyland for first responders” for how realistically its training scenarios mimic real life. “It’s helpful to create artificial stress,” says Lt. Colonel Bill Annie, the Center for National Response’s administrative officer. “I can create the smell, set the wind direction. I can make it so you don’t hear. I can make it noon. I can make it midnight. And that helps to stress your senses so that when you get to the real world you have some practice with that.” In essence, the tunnel is a blank slate for whatever grisly situation the master planners can dream up—scenarios far more extreme than the extraction class with its

concrete tubes. Want to show a unit how to inspect a bunker in the Middle East for bombs? You’ve come to the right place. The tunnel is outfitted with an eerily realistic approximation of an Al Qaeda cave in Afghanistan, complete with the makings for an explosive device. Need to prepare for a terrorist attack or terrible accident in a major American city? There’s an entire subway car in there, too. Or what if you want your crew to practice dealing with a chemical weapon that’s being used in, say, a busy restaurant? There’s a whole building that looks like a diner, complete with a sign advertising 79 cent sausage biscuits. Poling spent nine years on active duty in the Army before he became an exercise planner and joined the National Guard. He says the experience was a jarring one— until then, he didn’t realize how little he understood the enemies he was up against.

A simulated enemy cave “I had to start in Afghanistan, where soldiers thinking like may find the makings for an a bad guy, like improvised explosive device. a true bad guy Everyday commercial who wanted to buildings are open to any cause harm to number of natural disasters or terrorist attacks. Americans,” he says. “I’m At some disaster scenes it’s not immediately obvious what not wired that happened. First responders way—it’s not have to piece it together as in my DNA. I they go. struggled with it.” That tension is precisely the reason Memorial Tunnel is so important. “It provides a realistic training venue where units can come together to prepare for real-world emergencies,” Annie says. “If a disaster does happen, the first time they’re encountering a lot of this stuff shouldn’t be at the disaster site. It’s extraordinarily important that we have this resource.” Focus wvfocus.com

Top Issues

Your Drinking Water Primer Have you lost track of the conversation about keeping West Virginia’s drinking water safe? We can’t blame you. To help, here’s our primer on the state’s new water protections. Written by Shay Maunz

But I thought we took care of this already… Well yeah, we did. The 2014 legislative session opened on January 8; the next day Freedom Industries leaked several thousand gallons of crude 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol into the Elk River, leaving 300,000 people in the Kanawha Valley without potable water for days. Lawmakers spent the next two months working on legislation meant to make West Virginia’s drinking water safer, with constituents hanging on every word. What they came up with, Senate Bill 373, made a lot of changes. It required that most public water systems create or update plans to protect source water. It required that all aboveground storage tanks be registered with the state—it’s estimated there are 50,000 tanks in West Virginia, and the Legislature decided regulators should know more about them

Focus May/June 2015

than they knew about the tanks at Freedom Industries. And it required that those tanks be inspected regularly. In the end, everyone congratulated themselves on a job well done.

Yeah, so why are we still talking about this? Some people didn’t like the law the way it was. Specifically, a lot of people who own aboveground storage tanks thought they shouldn’t be regulated—that there are tanks that are too far from rivers to leak into the public’s drinking water, and tanks with contents so innocuous that they couldn’t cause problems even if the chemicals leaked out. Some tank owners also said the new disaster plans were going to be too costly to develop and the timeline for implementing a lot of these provisions was unrealistic. By the time the 2015 legislative session rolled around, it was pretty obvious that lawmakers would take a second look at West Virginia’s drinking water protections.

OK, OK, what did they come up with this time around? You know how we said before that nearly all 50,000 aboveground storage tanks in West Virginia had to be registered and inspected?

Yeah… Well, that’s not the case anymore. This time around lawmakers came up with a two-tiered system for regulating storage tanks. The strictest rules only apply to tanks that contain hazardous substances, can store more than 50,000 gallons, or sit within a zone of critical concern—meaning that they sit along a river and within five hours’ travel time to a drinking water intake. That’s around 5,000 tanks across the state. The second tier would cover another 7,000 tanks within a 10-hour range of a drinking water intake. In case you didn’t already do that math, that’s around 12,000 tanks that are regulated under the new bill, compared with 50,000 in the old bill. Just as importantly, the owners of those 12,000 tanks can request exemptions so they can just be regulated by permits and plans they already have in place to satisfy

other regulations instead. Not all tanks are eligible, but many are. Even Freedom Industries could have applied for such a waiver. There were other changes, too: In the 2014 bill, tanks within that zone of critical concern—remember that’s five hours from an intake—had to undergo inspections by the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) every year. In the new bill it’s every three years. The old bill required “self inspections” every year for all tanks. In the new bill lawmakers changed the language to say “evaluations.” And the old bill required tank owners to create plans to prevent spills and deal with them if spills occur. The new bill says that if you have an existing plan that covers some of the same stuff, that’s good enough—and unlike before, you don’t have to send it to the DEP for approval, you just have to tell the state your plan exists.

So are we better off, or worse off, or what? That depends on who you ask, and what you’re comparing. Evan Hansen, an environmental consultant with the Morgantown firm Downstream Strategies, sees no victories in the 2015 water bill. But there were a lot of wins for water protections in the legislation that passed in 2014, and we didn’t lose all of those. “We still have stronger protections on the books even after what happened this session,” Hansen says. “However, I think that they’re less protective than they were.” On other side of the coin there’s Charlie Burd, the executive director of the Independent Oil and Gas Association of West Virginia, who sees the 2015 legislation as a necessary corrective to some rash governing last year. He thinks lawmakers were so shocked by the chemical spill in the Kanawha Valley that they made the resulting legislation too stringent. “Instead of becoming an indictment on how to better inspect and regulate tanks, it became an indictment on every owner of every tank in the state,” he says. “This new piece of legislation better addresses the economic conditions of people who own tanks. It addresses regulating tanks, but doesn’t regulate them to the point where you’re putting people out of business for not being able to comply.”

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In Evidence

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Marshall University students gather clues to a murder at the Forensic Science Centerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s crime scene house.

fter a West Virginia woman’s son died an untimely death in 2010, she made a brave decision: She finally reported the incestuous assault that created that child three decades earlier. All along, she’d kept her secret about who the father was, “but she knew,” McDowell County Prosecuting Attorney Ed Kornish later told the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. “She basically dealt with her own pain to protect her son.” A decades-old accusation of assault could be a long shot—but the Marshall University Forensic Science Center had this victim’s back. The center’s DNA paternity test showed that the child she conceived in 1982, when she was 16, was fathered by her then-21year-old uncle. On the strength of that evidence, it took a jury just 13 minutes to find David Miller guilty of incest and sexual assault. He was sentenced in November 2014 to seven to 20 years in prison. “Now he can carry the guilt and the burden and the shame of his sins himself,” the woman said. With advances in forensic science, families are getting closure in ever more difficult situations. And while it might seem an unlikely specialty for a state most closely identified with coal and chemicals, West Virginia is at the forensic forefront. Whether it’s analysis of evidence for the West Virginia State Police, training of forensics professionals nationwide, or breakthroughs in crime-solving methods, Marshall and West Virginia University are on the case.

Steve Shaluta (2)

Marshall University: Forensics in Service to the State Refrigerators and freezers hum in the 10-by-20-foot evidence locker room at the Marshall University Forensic Science Center’s (MUFSC’s) Forensic DNA Laboratory. The room is climate-controlled and secure in every way. “If you lift up these acoustic tiles, you can see there’s chicken wire to the ceiling so someone can’t climb up above the door and gain access,” says Jason Chute, technical leader for the lab. “A special membrane on the roof prevents any leaks from coming down and destroying evidence.” Vials of blood drawn from convicted criminals await analysis here, part of the MUFSC’s original and core work as the state’s designated Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) laboratory. “If you’ve committed a felony or some misdemeanors, your blood is drawn when you go to prison and they send that here,” Chute explains. The lab develops a DNA profile for entry into CODIS, which is linked along with other state databases to the FBI’s National DNA Index System (NDIS). “So if someone leaves DNA at a crime scene in Florida and they were a convicted offender in West Virginia at some point, that can be connected up through NDIS.” Marshall got its start in forensics when MUFSC Director Terry Fenger set up a continuing education program there for West Virginia State Police crime lab staff in the early 1990s. Right place, right time: By 1995 Fenger saw the state’s criminal offender DNA registry lab established at Marshall, along with a master’s program in forensic sciences—among the first in the nation.

Marshall University forensics students learn to document evidence such as drugs, blood spatter, and tire tread impressions.

Improving the Nation’s Forensics Over the past decade and more, the National Institute of Justice has supported the MUFSC in providing DNA analysis, Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner, crime scene investigation, and other in-depth training to more than 2,500 law enforcement professionals and nurses nationwide.

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An intern assists Corporal Robert Boggs in extracting digital evidence from a seized computer at a West Virginia State Police Digital Forensics Unit at the MUFSC.

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behind at property crimes. “Is it worth spending $1,000 to profile a DNA sample when a $200 bike is stolen? The knee-jerk reaction is ‘No,’” Chute says. But when MUFSC scientists profiled DNA left behind at a sampling of property crimes in Miami-Dade County, Florida, Charleston, South Carolina, and Huntington and entered the results into CODIS, they revealed criminal behavior patterns. “For one thing, it shows recidivism, where someone starts with breaking and entering and later moves up to more serious crimes,” Chute says. Catching criminals at the stage of property crime could slow or stop that escalation.

Digital Forensics In an adjacent MUFSC facility, state police conduct digital forensics for the state’s southern counties and consult on cases around the country. The lab mainly extracts evidence from personal electronic devices. “If it holds ones and zeros there’s a good chance we can recover it,” says Corporal Robert Boggs, analyst in charge of the Digital Forensic Unit. Every day police deliver laptops, cell phones, thumb drives, and other seized devices to a room lined with every kind of cable and with forensic computer decks that can read any data drive. Extracting evidence is an ever-expanding job. “A lot of households these days have three, four, five computers plus their mobile devices, and the hard drives can be very, very large.” Boggs says.

Alex Wilson

In the DNA lab, samples begin at the evidence locker room at one end of the building and proceed in a straight line down the hall through labs where the DNA is processed, prepared, replicated, and finally profiled. Much of the process is conducted through state-of-the-art automation that minimizes human error. The result is a case-solving “DNA fingerprint.” That’s a list of genetic markers on 16 regions of the genome that, taken as a full set, comprise a very nearly unique profile. “Say we have a blood stain from a crime scene. The police get a suspect, and we run the stain and the suspect’s blood through,” Chute says. “If it’s a 100 percent match, I’d tell the jury the chances of having the same profile is one in—usually it would hit a quintillion— non-related individuals. The jury would then have to decide: Are they two different people, with that one-in-a-quintillion chance, or is it the same person?” That’s an example of the forensic casework the DNA lab has added to its original CODIS work over the decades. The testing can connect suspects with blood, saliva, and other DNA evidence left behind at crime scenes, as Chute explained. It can indicate paternity in cases of rape and incest, as in the case of David Miller. It can help identify human remains. And it can rule out suspects and even exculpate the unjustly convicted. DNA lab staff do research, too. The lab has worked on several projects assessing the longer-term value of profiling DNA left

Raising the Standards for Rape Kits When a sexual assault victim is examined, the forensic professional collects evidence into a “rape kit” for later analysis. The Marshall University Forensic Science Center plays a role nationally in advancing the proper and timely management of this evidence. Nationwide, there’s a backlog of some 400,000 rape kits that haven’t been analyzed. The MUFSC has helped Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Detroit by getting DNA profiles from tens of thousands of accumulated kits into the national criminal DNA database. In West Virginia, kits for victims who did not immediately choose to press charges used to languish on hospital shelves under unregulated storage conditions, breaking the clean chain of evidence. The MUFSC began storing those kits in its evidence locker room in 2008 in case victims change their minds about legal action. Improper collection of evidence into a rape kit can both further traumatize the victim and break the case. The MUFSC has offered Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner training to more than 400 nurses nationwide over the past decade. Trainees learn to recognize, collect, and preserve evidence, interview victims, and refer them to community resources for follow-up. The center has received state and national awards for this work.

“Fortunately we have some pretty powerful machines that can parse through that quickly and efficiently.” Offsetting the difficulty is a widespread lack of electronic guile on the parts of criminals. “Everybody’s taking pictures of their dope and their guns and posing with it,” he says, shaking his head. The lab uncovers evidence of drug deals and murders, but perhaps half of the work involves the abuse of children—cases that carry special urgency because children may still be in harm’s way. Boggs recounts one case in which a laptop was pawned with child pornography on its hard drive. Investigators identified two suspects and, on seizing and analyzing their cell phones, tracked ongoing abuse. They stopped the perpetrators, saving the children from harm. Out of thousands of cases the lab has contributed to over the past decade, Boggs says, only one lost in court. “Most of the time the evidence is so incriminating, the case doesn’t even make it to trial,” he says.

Tops in Academics The MUFSC has turned out hundreds of master’s-level graduates in forensic science trained on state-of-the-art equipment by current practitioners. Training facilities include DNA and digital forensics laboratories that mirror the working labs, a separate forensic chemistry lab, and a dedicated crime scene house.

The academic program is both scientifically rigorous and grounded in the legal system. Students present evidence at mock trials and learn about the interplay between technology and law. “When a cell phone is part of a crime scene, can a law enforcement officer just start going through the data?” Fenger asks by way of example. “What if there are exigent circumstances—say, a child has been abducted? Can law enforcement then go into the cell phone to find information that will save that child? Questions like these are embedded in what we do here.” Students also complete summer research internships, most at crime labs nationally and internationally. Marshall’s forensics master’s degree program is one of only about 20 programs in North America accredited by the Forensic Science Education Programs Accreditation Commission and was the first program accredited in digital forensics. MUFSC students take top spots every year in American Board of Criminalistics exams—contributing to a reputation that draws 90 percent of the program’s students from beyond West Virginia’s borders—and 97 percent of graduates have jobs within a year. Fenger only expects the program to grow from the 20 students it currently graduates each year, due in part to the expansion of digital evidence. “Every day we see something hacked and other types of computer crimes perpetrated. Someone has to investigate that,” he says. “I think digital forensics is going to explode.”

West Virginia University: Advancing Forensic Science Inside the screen door of a modest 1950s brick house, chaos: Liquids from overturned glasses lie sticky on the kitchen floor. Furniture tumbles in disarray in the den. Blood has dripped and coagulated on the wall of the wooden staircase and, in the master bedroom upstairs, a body sprawls across a blood-soaked bedspread. Several people stand peering at the body, notebooks in hand. This is not the horror it appears to be—it’s a class in crime scene investigation at WVU’s crime scene training complex. Both Marshall’s and WVU’s forensics programs offer students hands-on experience in crime-house settings. Both turn out well prepared graduates in crime scene investigation and laboratory analysis. Beyond that, while Marshall distinguishes itself with real-world casework in DNA and digital forensics, WVU addresses the techniques of forensic science. “Our faculty are practicing in the field and they’re developing the technologies of the future,” says Gerald Lang, chairman of WVU’s Department of Forensic and Investigative Science (FIS).

Game-changing Research Better hair analysis could transform the field of forensics, says WVU Ming Hsieh Distinguished Professor Glen Jackson. “Currently hair microscopists look at the appearance: the width, length, color, damage,” Jackson says. His lab looks deeper. Enjoying what is possibly the only North American installation of a powerful mass spectrometer, Jackson and his students can learn what part of the world a person has been living in based on the specific ratio of lighter to heavier carbon isotopes. “We can also determine a person’s body mass index, age, and dietary things like how much meat and dairy they eat,” he enthuses. Hair stores a chronological personal profile. “If it’s left behind at a crime scene, that information is stored there for all time. It could provide an investigative lead: ‘We’re looking for someone who’s Focus wvfocus.com

Student Allyce McWhorter cuts a swatch from a blood-stained pillowcase for DNA analysis. She came from Maryland specifically for WVU's forensics program.

WVU's crime house campus includes space for outdoor stagings.

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Grounded in Practice All of the department’s 11 permanent faculty conduct research. But education at FIS is also informed deeply by the practice of forensic investigation: Six faculty have more than a half-century of crime lab experience between them, and four adjuncts are working in the field now, at the FBI or in the court system. Instructors make sure students have hands-on experience and are familiar with the tools of the trade. “A shortcoming in crime labs is, people cannot do troubleshooting and constantly need to bug somebody else to fix their equipment. Part of our training is for them to know the instrument before focusing on the evidence,” says Casper Venter, director of forensic facilities and a 22-year crime lab veteran. “In an exam we will change settings on all the microscopes and say, ‘Here you go. You first have to do troubleshooting before you can identify your samples.’” Students learn to improvise. And Venter teaches them tricks, like using a common oven-bake bag to create a sealed environment for isolating accelerants in arson investigations. “I force the students not to always just use the newest technology and equipment but take them back to old-school as well.” They’re also taught to be discerning at a crime scene, because everything an examiner sends back to the lab has to be analyzed. “Someone might come in and say, ‘We can do a virtual 360 of the crime scene and you can take that all back to the lab,’” Venter says. “But if it’s a high-volume crime lab, there’s no time to analyze all that.”

courtesy of wvu; Elizabeth roth

severely obese’ or ‘someone who’s over the age of 45.’” Another of Jackson’s projects may make even smeared latent fingerprints useful for crime-solving. His lab is developing a practical method of analyzing the unique profiles of lipids in the residue that makes up a fingerprint. Real application may be 15 years away, “but the whole goal is to show what’s possible,” he says. “If we can get other people excited about it, the manufacturers can make it commercially.” The carbon composition of maggots may soon help determine time of death, based on work in progress at FIS. Fibers dropped from wigs used by criminals could provide viable clues. And tears, nicks, and other wear damage on shoe outsoles could link crime scene footwear impressions with single suspects. Still other research goes beyond crime-solving: measuring the penetration of toxic meth-lab byproducts into the surfaces of a home, for example, to determine what remediation is needed before people can safely live there again. “Most forensic science programs are focused on undergraduate education and very few of them have a core faculty that are really pushing the boundaries of the science,” Jackson says. “We have faculty who serve on national commissions, communicating oneon-one with leaders in the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Science Foundation as well as the FBI and major funding agencies, so we’re very much pushing the front lines of the discipline. That really helps us put the education in context when we talk to our students. We know where the future’s going.”

WVU’s Forensic and Investigative Science Program WVU is one of just seven institutions nationwide accredited for both Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in forensics. It’s the only one with three accredited undergraduate tracks—forensic biology, forensic chemistry and toxicology, and forensic examiner—allowing students to find their own best fit. Every student undergoes a rigorous summer internship at such locations as the United States Secret Service and U.S. and international forensic laboratories. The department turns out about 50 undergraduates and six graduate students a year. Most work in crime labs or crime scene units; some complete further academic studies and enter pathology or the pharmaceutical industry. Beginning fall 2015, the university will also offer a one-year master of laws program in forensic justice, the first accepted by the American Bar Association.

Elizabeth roth

The Latest Tech

A student uses a comparison microscope. If the markings on two bullets are the same on a split screen, the bullets were likely fired from the same gun.

FIS occupies three floors in historic Oglebay Hall on WVU’s downtown campus: 18,000 square feet of prep, instrumentation, and classroom space. Props for mock crime scenes include shovels and bones. Gifts from California entrepreneur Ming Hsieh and his biometric company Cogent Inc.—now part of 3M—created two named professorships and a state-of-the-art identification laboratory. “His gifts have led to really a strong foundation in our faculty and in the technology for our students,” Lang says. Students get hands-on experience with the latest technology. They conduct chemical analysis on gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers and non-destructive sample analysis on a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer; they compare inks and watermarks on a video spectral comparator. “The equipment here is second to none,” says senior Joshua Davis, who chose WVU for its forensics program and is pursuing a double major in chemistry and forensic chemistry. “It’s better than other schools I visited, and other students here say the same thing. It’s better than a lot of actual crime labs.” Students learn the wide range of techniques for lifting prints. “We’ve got household glasses here, plates, tins, plastic bottles, and we’ll send students out to bring in any type of object they can think of to lift prints from,” Venter says. “You’ve got one shot at it so you need to employ the right method.”

The 24 stations in the computer laboratory are outfitted with two systems used widely in law enforcement. One is a 1.8-million-fingerprint dataset from the FBI, including the fingerprints of faculty and graduate students. “We’re able to leave our fingerprints in the fingerprint lab or crime houses for students to collect, scan into the system, and see if they can find them in the database,” Venter says. The other is the Integrated Ballistics Identification System used across the U.S. to track information on guns fired during crimes. That system is also part of an extensive research project under way at FIS: comparison from the first shot to the last of 1,000 rounds shot from each of 25 new firearms. And back to those crime houses. “The idea was to use a home to create a crime scene that was realistic for students to work in,” Lang says. FIS has a complex of four residential buildings. In the two furnished for staged crime scenes, students spend two semesters collecting and preserving evidence, anything from a spiked drink up to multiple murders with blood spatter, controlled substances, and maybe a vindictive comment written on the wall in blood—Venter draws liberally from his own crime scene experience. In the garage, students process crimes involving vehicles. And they get a semester in the photography house. “In court, a picture tells a thousand words. But I’ve seen so many photos that are blurred or too dark,” Venter says. “We teach them how to use the right light sources, or what settings to use for a given lighting environment.” The academic settings at both Marshall and WVU—state-ofthe-art facilities along with faculty who conduct law enforcementdriven research and also work in the field—create quality graduates who hit the ground running. Ultimately, their work broadens justice. “Every aspect of society is influenced in some way by all types of crime,” Marshall’s Fenger says. “We’re trying to address the current as well as the future needs of our citizens—essentially, we’re fighting crime.” Focus wvfocus.com

To the Dogs Lawmakers consider folding on West Virginiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greyhound industry. Written by Zack Harold

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Courtesy of Mardi Gras Casino and Resort

hen Sam Burdette first visited the TriState Greyhound Park in Cross Lanes in the mid-1980s, he didn’t even know how to read the program. The sheets of paper were filled with an overwhelming array of fractions and decimals, arranged in almost indecipherable rows and columns. A buddy had to help him navigate—the strange figures were statistics for each dog in a race, detailing the animal’s weight, past race times, total number of races, and odds of winning, along with the names of the dog’s owner, kennel, and trainer. Burdette caught on quick. He won $600 on a $60 bet that first night and started mulling a strategy to make some real money. He would use the race standings to figure out which kennels had the most successful dogs, and then bet only on dogs from those kennels. Burdette was a civil engineer, comfortable with crunching numbers. He started keeping a notebook, making hypothetical bets on races based on the handicapping numbers in the program. “Each day I’d tally it up and see if I was ahead or behind. I was approaching it from an analytical standpoint.” The experiment ran for three months. By the end Burdette realized if he had used real money, he would be $200 behind. “I

said, well, you can’t buy groceries with that. My object was to take money away from the racetrack, not leave it there,” he says. “To this day, I don’t bet.” Instead, Burdette made what he considered a safer wager. After years of hopping from state to state with his job, he moved back home to West Virginia in 1997 to take care of his ailing mother and father. He retired from engineering and decided to start raising greyhounds. He had learned a lot about the industry during his brief stint as a pretend professional gambler, and he fell in love with the dogs. It was more than the dogs, however. In 1990 the state legislature took a portion of greyhound wagering money and created the West Virginia Greyhound Breeding Development Fund. In addition to the purse money breeders received when their dogs placed in races, they would now get monthly checks from the state Racing Commission. The payout was determined by the amount of money in the fund and the number of points an owner’s dogs earned during races that month. The more dogs a breeder raised and raced, and the better those dogs performed, the larger the checks would be. Successful breeders were soon receiving thousands of dollars each month from the fund. As a result, those breeders began Focus wvfocus.com

Greyhound racing, once the state’s main gambling attraction, has been eclipsed by slot machines and table games.

doubling down on their investments. They started raising more dogs and taking out loans to expand their kennels. Out-of-state breeders began moving to West Virginia, even though they were required to live here for four years before receiving any money from the fund. “That’s when I decided to start raising dogs,” says kennel operator Harvey Maupin. He grew up in Colorado, where his father raised and raced greyhounds. As he got older, Maupin began training dogs, and he came to West Virginia in 1988 to work as a dog trainer. He whelped his first few litters around 1995, raising the dogs in the backyard of his Cross Lanes home. He later purchased a farm in Red House in 2000. As his operation grew, he spent $140,000 to get a kennel at Tri-State, and about $100,000 for a partnership in a kennel at the Wheeling Island greyhound track. At one point, Maupin had 15 employees. “Times were booming,” says Burdette, who is now president of the West Virginia Greyhound Owners and Breeders Association. “The Legislature had done something that actually worked. We had created a greyhound breeding industry. Wheeling was the number-one track in the United States. People were making a living at greyhound racing.” But then the industry’s luck began to change. Nationwide interest in greyhound racing started declining. In 2001 there were greyhound tracks in 15 states around the country. West Virginia is now one of only seven states that continue to race dogs, and the sport has grown increasingly unpopular in this state as well.

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A few things are to blame for this downturn in interest. Greyhound racing has faced increased scrutiny by animal rights groups like Grey2K, a Massachusetts-based organization that tracks reports of racing-related injuries and abuse. The group’s findings often gain media attention, which has helped turn many animal lovers away from the sport. But animal welfare concerns are not the biggest threat to the greyhound industry. The major declines in attendance and revenues have come from an enemy familiar to most industries—competition. In early 1994 the West Virginia Legislature legalized video lottery terminals—better known as slot machines—at state greyhound tracks. By September the machines were up and running at both greyhound tracks. It seemed like a mutually beneficial move for racetracks and the racing industry. Tracks gained an additional revenue stream and, because of the way legislators crafted the law, greyhound breeders and kennel operators would be allowed to continue racing while also taking a 15 percent cut of video lottery money, which was added to race purses and the breeding development fund. But over time, the slot machines that were supposed to help the greyhound industry began to overtake it. “People switched over from racing to slot machines. They and sit there in a trance and push that button,” Burdette says. He likes to joke—not incorrectly— that it used to take all night to lose $50 at the dog track. With a slot machine, it can take just a few minutes. Competition only increased after the legislature legalized table games like blackjack, roulette, and craps in 2007. The

racetracks began rebranding themselves accordingly. In 2008 both Wheeling Island Racetrack and Gaming Center and Tri-State Racetrack and Gaming Center changed their names. They are now Wheeling Island Hotel-Casino-Racetrack and Mardi Gras Casino and Resort. Live racing had gone from the main attraction to just one more way to gamble and was losing customers in droves to the one-armed bandits. In addition to the troubles at the racetrack, the greyhound industry has also faced repeated challenges from the statehouse. Every few years, it seems lawmakers take a look at the millions of dollars in subsidies dedicated to greyhound racing and usually decide that money could be better spent elsewhere. In 2001 the legislature put a cap on video lottery subsidies to greyhound racing, with revenues over that cap flowing into the state’s general revenue fund. In 2005 state lawmakers took another chunk of greyhound purse supplements to create the Workers Compensation Debt Reduction Fund. Then, last year, lawmakers again cut greyhound subsidies with the passage of a so-called “haircut bill,” which reduced money for purses and the development fund by 10 percent.

The Spectrum Report

(excludes simulcast bets)

$35 million

$30 million

$25 million

$20 million

$15 million

$10 million

$5 million

Although it was clear the greyhound racing was suffering, no one had collected the evidence to prove it. So in 2014 the legislature ordered a $68,000 comprehensive study of the industry. The West Virginia Department of Revenue hired the New Jersey-based Spectrum Gaming Group to conduct the study, and the completed report was presented to lawmakers in January 2015. The findings were discouraging. Although West Virginia does not track attendance figures at greyhound tracks, the Spectrum report found live wagering on races fell by 55 percent between 2004 and 2013, from $35 million to $15.8 million. Researchers also found the greyhound industry now largely relies on video lottery and table games revenues for its purse awards. When purse supplements were first put in place at Mardi Gras in 1995, subsidies from slot machine revenues made up 49 percent of total purse awards. Four years later, slot machine subsidies made up 75 percent of purses. Now more than 95 percent of total purses come from video lottery and table games like blackjack and roulette. The additional revenue still wasn’t enough to stem the decline in purses, however. As greyhound wagering has declined, slot machine and table game revenues have also fallen as new out-of-state casinos steal gamblers away from West Virginia. As a result, greyhound purse awards declined from $30 million in 2004 to about $18 million in 2013. Without the subsidies, last year’s purses would have been only about $900,000. Most of that purse money also goes to out-of-state greyhound owners. Only $2.6 million of the $11.7 million in purse awards paid at Wheeling Island in 2013 went to West Virginia owners, according to the Spectrum report.

Total in-person wagers on greyhound races

Source: West Virginia Racing Commission

Analysis of Purse Awards by state of residence both tracks combined, 2013

37% 63%

West Virginia residence Out of state residence

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Decoupling Shutting down greyhound racing is not as easy as it sounds. Back when West Virginia legalized slot machines and table games, legislators included language in the bills requiring greyhound racing to continue alongside those other activities. Casinos never loved that idea. Adkins compares it to the government telling Ford Motor Company, “you can continue to build all the F-150s you want to build, as long as you build the Model T.” But that’s the law. If racing stopped tomorrow, so would all other forms of gambling at the casinos, unless the legislature passed another law to decouple the activities. If and when that occurs, it will be very important for lawmakers to get the legislation absolutely right. West Virginia uses gambling revenues to fund lots of programs, from the PROMISE scholarship to senior centers, and also uses the money to pay off bonds for projects like the Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences in Charleston and Pullman Square in Huntington. Credit rating agencies would get pretty anxious if the state compromised one of its major revenue streams. About a month into this year’s legislative session, state Senator Ron Stollings of Boone County introduced a bill crafted by the West Virginia Greyhound Owners and Breeders Association to create a “greyhound racing cessation program.”

Focus May/June 2015

The bill would have put an end to greyhound racing in West Virginia by July 1, 2015—while also taking $37.5 million from the breeder development fund to bankroll a three-year-long buyout of the industry. The breeders association previously put forward a bill in the House of Delegates to create a $75 million buyout, but that number didn’t sit well with lawmakers. The state Senate version was more conservative and included $1 million to cover administrative costs and handle adoptions of the greyhounds. The remaining $36.5 million would be distributed among greyhound owners in the state. Payouts would be determined by how many years an individual participated in the breeding development fund, how much money the breeder received from the fund, and how many greyhounds the breeder raised. Breeders who also operated racetrack kennels would be eligible for additional compensation. Stollings, a Democratic member of the Senate Finance Committee, says he knows very little about greyhounds and did not expect the to bill pass, but he hoped it would spark conversations among his fellow lawmakers. “The writing’s on the wall. Obviously the profitability has gone south,” he says. “The idea was, let’s see if there is some way to have a graceful exit.” The bill was ultimately shoved to the side while lawmakers worked on more pressing issues, however. For the first time in more than 80 years, Republicans were the majority party in the statehouse this session. To celebrate, the caucus took on an ambitious agenda. Senate Finance Chairman Mike Hall, a Republican from Putnam County, said his committee had more than 200 bills to consider over the 60-day session while also preparing the state’s 2016 budget. Hall says his committee tried to look into the greyhound buyout but there was not enough time to adequately research the issue.

Courtesy of Mardi Gras Casino and Resort

As surprising as some of the findings were, the report only confirmed what many people—lawmakers, greyhound breeders, and track officials—already knew. “It’s not only decreasing in popularity, it’s dead,” says Danny Adkins, vice president of Mardi Gras’ parent company, Hartman & Tyner, Inc. And so, for the first time since greyhound racing came to West Virginia in 1976, lawmakers have started looking in earnest for a way out of the dog racing business.

“

The lottery statute is very complicated and intertwined. The unintended consequences of trying to unwind it in the last two weeks were massive.” Mike Hall, Senate Finance Chairman

“The lottery statute is very complicated and intertwined,” he says. “The unintended consequences of trying to unwind it in the last two weeks were massive.” As the clock struck midnight on March 14, bringing the 2015 regular legislative session to an end, the buyout bill was still stuck in committee. Members of the Senate Finance Committee along with their counterparts in the House of Delegates will continue to examine the issue over the next year during legislative interim meetings. “I suspect by next legislative year, we’ll be somewhere with these decisions,” Hall says. Burdette says members of his organization are well aware of the state of their industry. “As times change, as technology changes, they have to change their business model. If it’s no longer beneficial to have greyhound racing, fine.” But he is adamant a buyout should be included in the phase-out plan. The way Burdette and many members of his organization see it, all those purse subsidies and development fund money were a business agreement between breeders and the state. Breeders agreed to raise dogs and invest money in the industry while the state, through legislation, agreed it would make sure the dogs kept running. “We reinvested with the belief things were going to continue,” he says. If the state should break its side of that perceived bargain, Burdette believes breeders deserve something in return. He says breeders need the cash to pay off loans and transition into other livelihoods. Maupin says the breeders association has discussed taking legal action against the state if racing ends without a buyout. “This is not a natural death. This is not just, ‘You’re a bad businessman,’” Maupin says. “They’re breaking their promise.” But outside of the West Virginia Greyhound Owners and Breeders Association, there does not seem to be much support

for a buyout. Adkins at Mardi Gras Casino calls the idea “absurd.” Hall says while Stollings’ bill became a “vehicle” for discussing the issue, the bill would never have passed as written. He says there’s not much appetite among Republicans for a buyout. “People took on a business risk when they got into this,” he says. While state subsidies might have enticed breeders to get into the business, Hall does not believe the state has a responsibility to help them get out. “A legislature in the past cannot bind a future legislature,” he says. There is even a group of greyhound owners who do not believe a buyout is the correct course of action. Despite what lawmakers, track officials, and the breeders association say, the West Virginia Kennel Owners Association insists greyhound racing is still a moneymaking business and should be allowed to continue. “There are plenty of breeders—a lot of big breeders in West Virginia—who are profitable,” says board member Steve Sarras. Sarras admits the industry isn’t what it used to be. In addition to racing at West Virginia tracks, he stays afloat by sending dogs to Oklahoma, Kansas, and Florida to race. He has also tightened his belt at his kennel in Wheeling, eliminating some bonuses and limiting his six employees’ overtime pay. But Sarras says greyhound racing remains a viable enterprise. “Have our profits gone down? Yes. Can we still sustain as a business?” Sarras thinks so. He says breeders who are pushing for a buyout are just looking for an easy way out of the business—a government-funded retirement plan. “In my opinion, they were just trying to get a handout at the expense of state taxpayers,” he says. Naturally, Burdette and Maupin disagree. They allege breeders like Sarras and other members of his organization are only able to make money because they are the biggest fish in an evershrinking pond. “They want to keep it going because they’re the ones making the last little bit,” Maupin says. But Burdette admits some smaller breeders—members of his own organization—also do not want to give up on racing just yet. They hope things will eventually get better, that wagering trends will turn around and the legislature will restore cuts to subsidies. “They hope against hope,” he says. Maupin doesn’t want to stop racing, but says a buyout is better than a “starve out.” Times have gotten tight for him. He no longer raises greyhounds—the kennel on his big farm is empty. He let the kennel in Wheeling go in November 2013 and now leases dogs from a breeder in Wheeling to fill his kennel at Mardi Gras. When he couldn’t afford his trainer anymore, Maupin went back to training the dogs himself. Instead of 15 employees, he’s down to two. His 27-year-old stepson keeps asking to join the family business, but he refuses. “He keeps wanting to be in it and I’m like, ‘No. This is not going to last.’ I keep pushing him away.” Instead of raising dogs, Burdette now spends most days substitute teaching for Kanawha County Schools. “After I got up to my neck, I stopped wading out,” he says. He has seven greyhounds left but is working to find them homes. Except one, Hickory. Burdette plans to keep him. Hickory only ran about 30 races before being forced into retirement by an ankle injury, but during that time earned more than $50,000. “He was a good running dog—and I just like him.” Focus wvfocus.com

he road to Lawrence County High School in eastern Kentucky winds through the Appalachian Mountains, past strip malls and scenic overlooks and a few coal processing plants. It feels like—well, a lot like southern West Virginia. The high school is a lot like a high school in rural West Virginia, too: It’s the only one in the county, with 605 students, 68 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch. Last year about half of the juniors who took the ACT met the state’s benchmark in English, a score of 18. About a quarter made the benchmark in math. And at first glance Michael Geneve, who taught math at Lawrence County High this past year, seems just like any other young high school teacher. He’s somehow both bright-eyed and tired looking and, in the classroom at least, his demeanor alternates rapidly between that of a harried head coach and a cheerful camp counselor. Sometimes he’ll kneel down beside a student like a cool kid. “Hey man, you’ve gotta subtract.” Or, if he’s feeling less affable, he’ll call them “ma’am” and “sir.” As in, “Sir, you’ve got nothing written on your piece of paper, let’s get on that.” He moves around the classroom constantly, checking students’ progress, answering questions, and generally keeping things running smoothly. When a cluster of freshman boys starts chatting a little bit too loudly he quickly swoops in, leaning over their desks to see how they’re doing. “Creeped right

up on you, didn’t I?” he says. “Can you tell me how you solved number 10?” There is one big difference between Geneve and the other teachers at Lawrence County High, though: Geneve doesn’t have a degree in education. His bachelor’s is in graphic design, his master’s in community development, and his formal training for the classroom was limited to a few months during the summer before he started teaching. He came to Lawrence County via a controversial program called Teach For America, which places teachers—usually recent college graduates who don’t have backgrounds in education—in low-performing schools, and bills itself as part of the answer to education inequity in America. “Coming in I thought, I know how to do math. I want to work in eastern Kentucky. I want to work with young people. It seemed like a win/win/win to me,” Geneve says. Until recently, Geneve’s background in education—or, rather, his lack of a background—would have made it impossible for him to get a regular teaching job in West Virginia. He could work as a substitute, but state laws regarding teacher certification were just too strict to allow someone like him to make his way into the classroom full time. Programs like Teach for America were barred from operating here. But during the 2015 legislative session, lawmakers passed a bill expanding alternate certification methods for teachers, loosening up those rules. There are more routes to becoming a teacher in West Virginia now, and TFA might soon be one of them.

A Plan to Fix Education

Teach For America got its start in 1989 when its founder, Wendy Kopp, was still a student at Princeton University and wrote her senior thesis on inequity within America’s public education system. Low-income kids weren’t performing nearly as well as their richer peers, she wrote, and educators couldn’t figure out how to make up for the deeply entrenched economic and social barriers holding them back. Plus, there was a nationwide teacher shortage at hand. We needed a plan. The solution Kopp pitched was simple but revolutionary— that is, bold, rebellious, and destined for controversy. She would recruit top college graduates to teach for two years in needy school districts, forming a corps of smart young teachers with a passion for ending education inequality. The schools would have more teachers available for hire, the college graduates would get an indepth look at the plight within America’s education system, and the students would get to be taught by top-notch college graduates. She called her new project Teach For America, called her bright young teachers “corps members,” and launched TFA in 1990 with 384 recruits. Since then Teach For America has doubled in size again and again and spread throughout the country. Today there are more than 10,000 corps members teaching in more than 3,000 schools across 36 states. It’s the largest and most prominent program that funnels alternatively certified teachers into classrooms. The organization is

still relatively new to this region—TFA-Appalachia launched in 2011, and today has around 40 corps members in classrooms around the state. Here’s how it works: Every year, TFA recruiters fan out to the top colleges in the country to talk to students about the program. “They’re just so persistent and their campus presence is so pervasive,” says Luke Glaser, University of Kentucky graduate and secondyear TFA teacher in Hazard, Kentucky. “By the time you graduate from college, the chances are you either told them no, or you’re going to go be a teacher.” The program is really selective—last year only 15 percent of applicants were accepted—and the application process is long and tough. “This is where TFA’s approach is radically different from many colleges of education,” says Will Nash, TFA-Appalachia’s executive director. “For the past 25 years we’ve studied what makes our most successful teachers successful, and then we try to create a selection process geared to that specific thing.” Technically TFA has identified nine characteristics that make a good teacher, but the gist is that they’re looking for smart people who have great interpersonal skills and are good leaders. “We’re recruiting the top students,” Nash says. “And instead of them going to work on Wall Street or for a consulting company or the Peace Corps, we’re directing their energy towards schools, and specifically low-performing schools.” But here’s where TFA diverges dramatically from the path most teachers take toward becoming a teacher: The traditional path to certification involves four years working toward an education Focus wvfocus.com

Michael Geneve, a Teach For America corps member, leads a math class at Lawrence County High School in Louisa, Kentucky.

degree at an accredited university. Students take classes on human growth and development, educational psychology and learning, and educational theories, as well as classes for whatever their specialization is—and they spend time in the classroom with students and veteran teachers. At West Virginia State University, for example, students get around 245 hours of field experience plus 15 weeks student teaching. TFA corps members, by contrast, get somewhere between seven and nine weeks of training in the summer before their job starts. “They’re spending half of their day learning how to teach, and the other half of the day they’re actually teaching summer school, tag-teaming with two or three other corps members,” Nash says. Here’s one more difference between traditional teachers and TFA teachers: They only commit to teach for two years. A 2015 study found 87 percent of TFA teachers say they don’t plan to be teachers for the rest of their careers, compared to just 26 percent of teachers who didn’t come through TFA. On the other hand, Nash says TFA’s internal data shows two-thirds of TFA’s alumni say they plan to stay in the field of education after they finish teaching—signalling that many go on to work in other areas of education like reform projects, or they get involved in shaping policy. “Staying in education is a broad concept,” Glaser says. “Do I think I will be a classroom teacher for the rest of my life? I can’t say. But I will be involved in the discussion about education equity for sure. I think most of us will stay in the conversation.” Still, TFA has been criticized for putting ill-equipped and

Focus May/June 2015

underprepared teachers in classrooms with the country’s neediest students, the very students who could most benefit from consistency and experience. It’s been knocked for creating a transient population of teachers instead of forming a culture of stability in needy schools, and for contributing to the impression that teaching shouldn’t be treated as a profession. “If there were an organization called Doctors for America that credentialed surgeons after only 18 hours of practice, there would be a huge outcry against that,” says T. Jameson Brewer, a TFA alumnus who has since spoken out against the organization. “No one would allow Lawyers for America to defend anybody, let alone people who need it the most. The same has to be true for students.” So does TFA work, or not? Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer. A March 2015 study from Mathematica Policy Research compared the test scores of students of TFA teachers with students of other teachers in the same schools, teaching under similar conditions. The results: It’s a wash. Both sets of teachers got roughly the same results. Of course, you read that differently depending on how you feel about TFA. Either it’s, “Oh, so even after all this hullabaloo, those TFA people aren’t any better at teaching our kids than regular teachers are?” Or it’s, “Wait, so these newbies who didn’t even go to school for this stuff are just as good as our other teachers? What gives?” That same study showed the students of TFA corps members slightly outperformed their peers in one area. Pre-K through second grade students in TFA classrooms were better at

“

Coming in I thought, I know how to do math. I want to work in eastern Kentucky. I want to work with young people. It seemed like a win/ win/win to me.” Michael Geneve, Lawrence County High School

reading. TFA officials boast that this boost is equivalent to an additional 1.3 months of learning. But critics say the improvement is dwarfed by the gains students could see with the implementation of less controversial measures. Studies have shown that a smaller class size, for example, can provide larger gains in achievement more reliably.

Complex Issues

About three years ago, officials with TFA-Appalachia started looking at some school districts in southern West Virginia they thought might be ripe for an intervention from TFA. The schools had a critical need for more teachers, and students, especially poor students, weren’t performing well. “We started having conversations with districts and through that we realized that there was no good alternative certification path in West Virginia,” Nash says. “If you wanted to teach in West Virginia you had to have a four-year degree in education or 10 years of professional experience, and our teachers typically don’t come with that.” TFA officials started working with West Virginia lawmakers to solve that problem, and a piece of legislation freeing up the alternate certification rules for teachers was introduced during the 2013 legislative session. It failed. The teachers unions argued vehemently against the bill, saying that instead of bringing in a bunch of novice teachers, West Virginia should do a better job of recruiting and retaining the teachers it has—pay them more, give them more autonomy, have more faith in their expertise. A similar bill failed in 2014. It was only during the 2015 legislative session that the issue started to gain some traction in the legislature. “I think we spent the last few years trying to educate legislators about what alternate certification is and what TFA is— and those are two pretty complex issues,” Nash says. “Here in the third year, I think we finally felt like we had more supporters

than in the past.” Plus, in 2015, the new Republican majority in West Virginia’s Senate and House of Delegates meant the political landscape we’d all grown accustomed to over the last 80 years—the landscape that was favorable to labor unions and inhospitable to the idea of alternate certification—was slightly askew. Teachers unions did argue against the bill and got their way on a few details. One provision that was added says teachers with alternate certification can only fill positions that have already been posted twice and haven’t received applications from traditionally certified teachers. But they weren’t able to defeat the bill entirely. The law goes into effect in June 2015, and TFA could begin negotiating with West Virginia school districts as soon as the state Board of Education has completed a rulemaking process.

Staying to Help

For most of the time Luke Glaser, that second-year TFA teacher in Hazard, Kentucky, was in college at UK, he figured he’d go on to law school after graduation. “But law can be a fairly pretentious and egotistical field, and I can be a pretty pretentious and egotistical guy,” he jokes. “So I thought maybe that wasn’t the best match.” During his senior year, Luke decided to consider other options. “I started looking around for something else, to try to get a broader glimpse of how things work,” he says. “And the only thing that reached out to me was TFA.” He read up on the crisis in America’s public schools, watched some documentaries about education, and decided this was an area where he could make a difference. “As I learned about the problems with education in the country it really spurred me to action,” he says. “It really ticked me off, and I wanted to try to do something about it.” When Glaser told his friends he was moving to Hazard, they thought he was crazy—they were all getting shiny new jobs in the big city, and he was moving to the sticks. At first, he didn’t quite disagree with them, but when he moved to Hazard he was embraced so wholeheartedly by the community that he feels like he really became a part of it. “I’ve learned so much about this area that I always lived two hours away from but only visited once,” he says. “I knew it as a place where you volunteered to help build a house on spring break trips—but it’s so much more than that.” Recently, Glaser decided to stay on beyond his two-year commitment to do a third year in Hazard, and he’s thrilled about the decision. His principal is thrilled, too, and it’s worth noting here that 95 percent of principals who work with TFA teachers report that those teachers have a positive impact in their schools. “In my experience they’re good teachers, and they get results,” says Robbie Fletcher, the superintendent of Lawrence County Schools and a former principal who hired several teachers through TFA. “The quality of the program is so high that I just have a lot of faith in these teachers.” Most teachers who enter the profession through Teach for America are young, idealistic, and energetic. They’re in this to save the world and are willing to work tirelessly to make that happen, and they all have similar ideas about how to do that. Central to TFA’s philosophy is the idea that external factors— poverty, family life, access to food and healthcare—are not barriers to a student’s education. According to the TFA model, if teachers are good enough, they can overcome all that on their own. That’s a powerful idea, though not necessarily easy in practice. How do you identify the very best teachers? And if it’s that easy, then why didn’t that Mathematica study show greater gains in the students of TFA teachers? Focus wvfocus.com

“A Raw Deal”

Brewer, the TFA corps member turned TFA critic, joined the organization in 2010. He already had an education degree, but this was in the middle of the economic crisis. He figured TFA was a good way to get a job for a couple years, and was enticed by the group’s lofty ambitions. But during one of his first training sessions, he realized he didn’t see eye-to-eye with the organization. “They basically said that if we followed their steps, 100 percent of students would achieve 100 percent of the time,” he says. “They didn’t use the phrase ‘recipe for teaching’ but that was the messaging, and I just thought, ‘That’s a lie.’ It’s not that easy.” Amber Kim joined TFA in 2001. “I thought of it as a movement,” she says. “I wanted to be a part of it.” But as she worked in Atlanta’s public school system, she started to find the entire project arrogant. “I saw the disconnect between people of affluence and poor students,” she says. “You have people going in there that haven’t lived that experience and don’t have true empathy. What they kind of do is tell the victims to go solve their own problems rather than saying, ‘I’m here to partner with you to fight the oppression.’” In the last few years Brewer, Kim, and other TFA alumni, academics, parents, teachers, and students have come together to air these complaints about Teach for America, among many more. They’ve formed a movement that is critical of the organization, called simply Resist TFA. Resist TFA has a Facebook page, Twitter account, and mailing list. In July 2013 it had an assembly in Chicago, and in February 2014 a Twitter chat shot the hashtag

Focus May/June 2015

#ResistTFA to the top of the social network’s list of trending topics, where it remained for much of the night. “It can not be that as a society we look at our most disadvantaged students and say they’re receiving a raw deal, so let’s create a solution that gives them less experienced teachers,” Brewer says. “It would be a good thing if anybody looked back on the evidence or the research and did the things that worked and didn’t do the things that didn’t work. But that is almost never the case in general, but especially in education.”

Teaching Shortages

In McDowell County, deep in the southern coalfields, the school system was short 39 full-time teachers during the 2013-14 school year—that’s nearly 14 percent of the entire teaching force. Many positions are filled with a rotating cast of long-term substitutes. “It affects student achievement, and that’s what we’re here for,” says Carolyn Falin, McDowell’s assistant superintendent for elementary education. “I’ve had some classrooms that have had a rotation of four teachers in one year, and you build no consistency in instruction. My grandson, in two years his whole class had seven or eight different subs. And it’s just hard to recover from that.” It’s almost impossible to recruit new teachers to McDowell—the area is too remote, the people too poor, the infrastructure too broken. “And if we get people here, it’s not attractive enough for them to want to stay,” Falin says. “It’s not a place somebody comes and says, ‘I want to move my family here.’” Many teachers and

No Significant Differences in Achievement 100 90 80 Percentile

70 60 50 40 30

20 10 0

Math

Reading

TFA Teachers Comparison Teachers even some administrators commute to McDowell from neighboring counties, but as soon as they can find jobs closer to home they leave. Around 45 percent of teachers in McDowell have only one or two years of experience, and some schools have seen 40 percent of their staff turn over in a year. To Falin, the idea of resisting TFA is a luxury she—and the students of McDowell—cannot afford. “Ideally I would love to have all our classrooms filled with teachers who have five years’ experience, but it’s just not possible,” she says. “We struggle with this. We have a lot of unemployment here, a lot of kids from poverty. Our kids need the best teachers we can provide them with. We have to look at all available options to get them a teacher. If we get someone to come here and stay for two years, that’s good for us.” Like school systems across the country, McDowell has an especially hard time finding teachers for math and science positions—and nationwide, 46 percent of TFA’s corps members teach STEM subjects. McDowell County isn’t alone. Overall, the state was short 685 teachers for the 2013 school year. All but four counties in West Virginia are short at least one teacher, and nearly 30 percent of the state's school systems have shortages that total more than 5 percent of their total teaching force. And the problem is only going to get worse. About half of West Virginia’s teachers are eligible to retire in the next few years. Christine Campbell, president of the West Virginia branch of the American Federation of Teachers, says her union recognizes

Source: Mathematica Policy Research

the critical teacher shortages in places like McDowell County, and the need to fill those jobs. Campbell still isn’t throwing her support behind alternate certification programs or Teach for America. “This is a short-term solution that may or may not fill classroom positions,” she says. “We need to look at the system as a whole and how it’s structured and how we can support people so they go into the profession.”

Solving for the Unknown

It’s a Friday afternoon, fifth period, and Michael Geneve’s class is doing a worksheet, solving systems of equations. He’s circulating the room, quietly giving students some one-on-one time while they work. A hand goes up and a student asks him to work out a problem on the board. He looks at the worksheet and frowns. “I apologize because I did not intend to throw a question like this at you so early in the worksheet,” he says. “This is a very unique type of relationship between two lines.” There’s no easy way to do the problem. Instead, the class is looking at techniques that are more or less useful as they try to simplify the equation. Reduce all the numbers to their lowest common denominator. Multiply everything by two. Multiply the bottom line by a negative number. Who’s to say what the best way is? And even then, it turns out, you can’t solve for x. “So what is the answer here?” Geneve asks. He walks to the front of the room and writes two words on the whiteboard. “No solution.” Focus wvfocus.com

Lessons Learned

Marketing

What’s in a name? An awful lot, when it comes to small businesses.

How businesses avoid getting lost in the search engine shuffle.

PG. 69

PG. 76

Before You Click Send Tips for composing embarrassment-free emails.

It’s easy to fire off an email without giving much thought to what you’re saying. But Lyla Grandstaff, founder of Elements of Etiquette in Fairmont, says knowing how to compose a proper email is essential to creating and maintaining good business relationships. “Many times it’s the very first impression you’re making with someone. You want to make sure you have a positive first impression,” she says. Here are a few tips for getting the most from your messages.

Make your subject line concise, but specific. “You need to give them a reason to read your email,” Grandstaff says.

If you don’t know the person you are emailing, err on the side of formality. Use “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” or “Ms.”

Front-load your email. Since many people just skim their messages, put the most important information first.

Keep your tone friendly, but be careful with humor. Without the non-verbal cues of face-to-face conversation, your meaning could be misconstrued.

The closing should match the greeting “If you have a formal greeting, you don’t want to say ‘Later, dude.’ ‘Sincerely’ is always great.”

Signatures should contain necessary contact information, but keep it short.

Yo dude, I was taking my dog for a walk the other day when I got this unbelievable hankering for some donuts, so I walked down to my local donut shop and ordered a large cup of coffee and two Bavarian creams—you know, one for me and one for Poochie. So anyway, while I was sitting there, I remembered I never thanked you for that job interview last week. I know I haven’t heard anything from you guys yet, but I think we had a really good connection and I think I’d make a really good addition to your team. Also, I realized I left my blazer on one of the chairs in your conference room, so if at all possible I’d like to swing by and pick it up. Other interviews, you know. I swear I’m not some creepy stalker! ;-) Anyway, I hope to see/hear from you guys soon. Just give me a holler whenever. I stay up pretty late. Peace and love, Brad Cell: 555-2368 Home: 555-0113 “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” -- Jimmy Dean “Live long and prosper” – Spock RIP :-(

How We Did It

Leveraging

History In Malden a seventh-generation business draws on an ancient natural resource to please a modern palate.

ewis Payne, chief operating officer of J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works in Malden, is a practical man, one part professional in the resource management industry and one part entrepreneur. Still, he believes the story of his family’s business shows the hand of fate. How else could he and his sister Nancy Bruns manage the successful rebirth of their seventh-generation, family-owned salt refining business after decades of

Focus May/June 2015

stillness? How else could the operation evolve from a defunct mineral refining trade to a chef-acclaimed, hand-harvested gourmet salt company? “A lot of things had to go right, because a lot of things could have gone wrong,” he says. Whether it was fate or shrewd business sense, it all started hundreds of millions of years ago when the rising Appalachian Mountains swallowed up Iapetus, a vast briny ocean and ancestor of the Atlantic. The salty traces left over from Iapetus’

death would shape the economy of an entire region, not to mention the fortunes of several West Virginia families. Among them, Payne and Bruns’ ancestor William Dickinson, a 19th century economic pioneer from Virginia. Dickinson got hooked on the newly discovered Kanawha salt and, in 1813, invested in property along the river. The initial drilling was dangerous, backbreaking work. “The way they first drilled wells was very different,” Bruns says. “They took hollowed out sycamore trees and drove them into the ground. Then they put a man inside and he would dig and send back up buckets of muck.” By 1817 Dickinson was making white gold. His business became one of the largest and longest-operating salt producers in the area. Kanawha Valley pure white salt caught the attention of connoisseurs, winning best salt in the world at the 1851 London World’s Fair. Even after a flood in 1861 and the Civil War shuttered many regional salt makers, J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works didn’t stop production until 1945. Decades after its heyday, the salt works found a new champion in Bruns, who is now the company’s CEO. She and her husband

written by

had sold their restaurant in North Carolina, her husband was going back to school for a graduate degree in history, and something about his master’s thesis on the salt industry sparked her interest. She knew some of her family’s history and, being in the food business, she also knew of the recent resurgence in gourmet salt use and the growing interest in local and sustainable food production. Himalayan, black Cyprus, hand-raked crystals from salt ponds in France—minerals from around the world were being marketed as key flavors, each with a unique story behind its production. “Being in the food industry, we were devoting more and more of our pantry to different salts and it occurred to me that there was a market for it. We should be making salt,” she says. She called her brother. “At first I was taken aback. It seemed drastic,” Payne says. “But the more I thought about it the more it made sense. We had the history.” With Payne’s expertise in resource management

Siblings Lewis Payne and Nancy Bruns reimagined their family’s seventh-generaion salt-making business. Gourmet chefs and customers around the world now seek out its products for the unique flavor and history.

Mikenna Pierotti

and Bruns’ knowledge of the culinary arena, the brother/sister team approached their cousins, who now own the land and farm where the salt works once stood, and asked to lease some earth. With a full-service landscape design firm called TerraSalis already going strong on the property, complete with the greenhouses Bruns and Payne would need to dry the salt, it really did seem like fate. Working with Gaddy Engineering in Charleston and relying on historical documents they’d uncovered from family members across the country, Bruns and Payne chose a spot and started drilling their own well. At 350 feet they hit the salty spot. “Fortunately we hit saltwater right were we thought we would. We were lucky,” she says. At that depth the water was four to five percent sodium chloride. “About that of an ocean.” Then came quality control. “We knew we could make salt from this source but we didn’t really know what we’d get,” Bruns says. “So we played around with it for three or four months and experimented at different stages, and depths, and bed sizes, and harvest times.” Finally, “We

photographed by

Elizabeth Roth

got this amazingly beautiful salt and we tasted it. It brought tears to our eyes. I knew we could make salt. I didn’t know it would be this good.” With decades of regional history under their feet, Bruns and Payne pride themselves on working with local businesses for marketing and other services whenever possible. And they actively promote their businesses’ lack of carbon footprint. The salt is sundried, hand-harvested, and hand-packaged by a small team—Bruns and Payne regularly get their hands salty on harvest days. It’s about as sustainable as you can get. It's all just part of their story, they say, and it’s one reason why consumers are lining up at the many stores now selling their products. “We want to support local consumers and restaurants. That’s the reason we’re filling this niche. People want to know where their food is coming from. People are attracted to an authentic brand that has a good story,” Bruns says. “A lot of brands make up a look that appears authentic, but it’s all smoke and mirrors. Ours is true. It’s seven generations of history.” jqdsalt.com Focus wvfocus.com

Work-Life Balance

written by

Davey Coombs

Fire Yourself Business owners have to know when to let go.

hen you have a personal passion for your work, your enthusiasm can sometimes lead you to make business decisions based more on what you hope will happen than on what likely will happen. I know this firsthand, learning both the hard way and the lucky way as an independent magazine publisher with a deep passion for both motorcycle racing and my beloved home state. I grew up in the era of newsstands. My favorite after-school hangout was Semler’s Newsstand on the corner of High Street and Pleasant Street in Morgantown, where I paged through every motorsports magazine I could get my hands on. I remember hoping to one day be featured in those magazines for winning some big race, and later wondering how and where exactly those magazines were made. When my professional racing dreams didn’t quite work out, I went to West Virginia University to be either a lawyer or a schoolteacher, or maybe even a magazine editor. Not long after I graduated in 1989, Racer X Illustrated was born. It started out as a newspaper printed in Grafton, then later on at the Dominion Post. Then, with the help of desktop publishing, the Internet, and healthy doses of hard work, good luck, and fortunate timing, we grew it into a full-on magazine in February 1998, all while managing to keep it based here in Morgantown—though it was being put to press in the Midwest by that point. Seemingly overnight we were faced with difficult decisions. The motorsports industry was dealing with challenges such as land closures and rising costs, and printed media was soon being trampled down in the rush for everyone to get online. The old newsstand on High Street was long gone—it’s now the Chinese restaurant Great Wall—and I couldn’t bear to think that one day Racer X Illustrated might be shut down, too. That’s when I fired myself. It was apparent to me that, while I knew motorsports and magazines well, I didn’t understand new media. I didn’t understand its challenges or its opportunities. I was fortunate to have two younger fellow WVU grads who had been with me back when we were a newspaper, and both were much quicker to pick up on the sea changes. Bryan Stealey had basically built our first website on his own and Julie Kramer had a great eye for managing the details of our little street-level media machine. While both had built enthusiasm for our content, neither was the motorsports fanatic I am. They preferred to focus less on race results and motorcycle sales and more on the wellbeing of our own business.

Focus May/June 2015

Davey Coombs is a lifelong resident of West Virginia. He and his wife Shannon and their children Vance and Sloane live in Morgantown, where Filter Publications is based. He is also vice president of Racer Productions, which produces major off-road motorcycling events all over the country, including the Snowshoe GNCC every June.

That was a dozen years ago. In the time since Bryan became president of Filter Publications and Julie the vice president, we’ve faced such unforeseen challenges as the global economic meltdown and the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all things social media. Both the motorsports and magazine industries have struggled, yet we’ve somehow managed to find—and ride—the right waves and trends. We’ve made decisions based on proper amounts of passion (mine) and fiscal common sense (theirs), as well as having open minds to the suggestions of the rest of the staff. We’re still here in Morgantown and still publishing a monthly magazine and, while the newsstands may continue shrinking, we’re still somehow growing thanks to our virtual reach and digital editions. Had I not made the decision to elevate Bryan and Julie's roles in the company above mine as editor-in-chief, we might have gone the way of so many other printed publications— and Semler’s Newsstand.

Lessons Learned

written by

The

Name Game Naming your business is like naming your child. Get it right the first time.

The k oo B g i B of

ess n i s Bu es Nam

hat’s in a name? It’s an age-old question and, unless you’re talking about roses, names are pretty important. Naming a business is both one of the most fun aspects of starting a new venture and one of the most stressful. There’s a fine line between practical and boring, and a finer one between creative and off-the-wall. “When you have a really unusual name it takes a lot more marketing, which translates into a lot more dollars, to get the name out there,” says Sharon Stratton of the West Virginia Small Business Development Center. “People have to hear or see the name of the business three different times in three different ways to recognize it.” We asked some well-known and unusuallynamed businesses in the state for the story behind their names.

Ackenpucky Creative

Huntington “A lot of people’s grandparents might have said it. It’s a whatchamacallit type of

word,” says designer Jill LaFear, founder of Huntington-based interior design firm Ackenpucky Creative. “Ackenpucky is an Appalachian colloquialism. It has two different meanings. One is a stew of unknown ingredients like a goulash, and the other meaning is a gooey sticky substance like a caulking.” When LaFear was opening her business, she and her partner were looking to represent Appalachia and the region’s very specific type of beauty, often overlooked across the rest of the country. “There are a lot of truly amazing artisans and artists in Appalachia and we wanted to promote that,” she says. The name Ackenpucky fit because of its specificity to the region and its originality. “It’s been a good name because people ask about it, they’re interested. It gives them a story, and when you can create a story with your name it helps create a connection for people with your business—in a way that a ‘LaFear Design Company’ wouldn’t.” LaFear is in the process of getting the name trademarked.

Pies & Pints

Fayetteville, Charleston, Morgantown “We had the name before we had the business,” says Kimberly Shingledecker, cofounder of West Virginia pizza favorite Pies & Pints. “I met my business partner in Utah, and he already had that name. He grew up in the pizza business and when he and his friends were working at the pizza place he talked about how it would be cool to have a place that served really good pizza and beer and had good music, and he’d call it Pies and Pints.” Shingledecker brought that partner, David Bailey, back to Fayetteville where the two got started on their idea.

Katie Griffith

The name stuck, but the business model was still up in the air. “We weren’t sure the space we had was big enough for pizza.” At the time, in 2003, burritos were a hot item and the two thought about doing counter service. “But we didn’t do burritos—one of the reasons is that we couldn’t come up with a name. So we made pizza work.” It’s the alliteration that makes Pies & Pints work so well—it’s simple, not over-thought, and it rolls off the tongue. It fits so well that Shingledecker and her partner had an issue with another business vying for the same name—a Seattle-based Pies & Pints selling Australian meat pies. The Seattle company had already trademarked the name, though it was younger, which was a problem for our Fayetteville pizza place when it came time to start expanding. Negotiations to buy the trademark took almost a year, and nearly didn’t work out. During that time Shingledecker and her partner had to start thinking of other names. “There was one that we joked around with—‘Cups & Circles.’ We still joke about. It was always a variation on Pies & Pints but, to be honest nothing else fit.” And Pies & Pints lives on.

Pufferbelly’s

Fairmont It’s always been about trains, says Joe Staud, business manager at Pufferbelly’s Ice Cream Station in Fairmont. Long before his wife, Jennifer, decided to open a store at an old service station, Staud’s parents owned a restaurant in a trolley car called the Trolley Inn. “Then, as children, Jennifer and I could remember the nursery rhyme ‘Down by the station / Early in the morning / See the little pufferbellies / All in a row,’ and we gathered that into the theme of things, too.” Pufferbelly, by the way, is an old term for steam engine. Now at Pufferbelly’s everything from the building interior to the menu is train themed—right down to the Hobo Hoagie. One issue the couple later found after opening the store, however, is that they forgot a key word. “We should have put in ‘food.’ We made a mistake in the beginning and people didn’t know we have food here. It should be Pufferbelly’s Food and Ice Cream Station. Anything we do now advertisingwise, we add the food part,” he says, though they haven’t gotten around to changing things with the Secretary of State’s office yet. Focus wvfocus.com

Economy

Boom Times

Communities should plan now for the effects of future natural gas development.

he present debate on the shale gas boom usually focuses on the possible negative consequences of shale gas production and how local governments can prevent shale gas activity. But let’s sidestep that debate and instead focus on steps communities in West Virginia can take to maximize the positive economic impacts of shale gas production, while minimizing the negative impacts. If and when shale gas production comes to your community, economic benefits will likely follow. However, increased economic activity often brings challenges that threaten to change the character of the community. With shale gas production, existing roads often crumble under the weight of truck traffic the road system cannot handle. Traffic and traffic accidents increase. Housing demand also increases significantly, causing housing prices—both rent and sales prices—to increase dramatically. These housing challenges often force long-term residents to move out to accommodate oil and gas workers. “Man camps” spring up around the community, with workers often living in tents, trucks, or other temporary housing arrangements. Hotels and restaurants become overwhelmed and lack capacity to continue to serve the community well. Government records rooms become overcrowded. Deeds and other records become damaged and sometimes disappear. Emergency services such as fire departments and rescue squads also experience a surge in calls and may need additional training to deal with new types of situations that arise. Some communities in West Virginia already feel these negative effects. A few West Virginia communities have decided to take their future into their hands and plan for the impacts of the shale boom. What can communities do to anticipate and minimize the impacts of the shale gas boom? More importantly, how can West Virginians take advantage of this opportunity?

Create a Plan West Virginia law requires communities in West Virginia to have comprehensive land use plans if they wish to place any restrictions on development. These restrictions typically come in the form of zoning ordinance or subdivision regulation.

Focus May/June 2015

Jesse J. Richardson, Jr. is an associate professor and lead land use attorney at the West Virginia University College of Law’s Land Use and Sustainable Development Law Clinic. He previously was an associate professor at Virginia Tech, where he taught land use law, environmental law, urban growth management, and real estate.

The comprehensive plan represents the vision of the citizens of a community, looking 10 to 20 years into the future. The plan sets goals and establishes objectives and action steps to achieve these goals. Communities in West Virginia that lie in the path of the shale gas boom should ensure their plan considers the probable impacts of future boom activity and establishes actions the community will take to maintain its character while accommodating the influx of workers. A comprehensive plan can take a year or more to complete, and public participation plays a key role early and often in creating the plan. Citizens must take ownership of the plan and drive the goals and objectives. Today is a good time to start the process, if your community has not already done so. Plans should be adopted and updated at least every ten years to consider changes in and accomplishments by the community.

Where Will the Money Come From? An important part of the comprehensive plans deals with funding. Shale gas will bring increased revenues to the community. How should these revenues be spent? Should some be saved in a “rainy day” fund? Many comprehensive plans also contain capital improvement plans, laying out timetables for new infrastructure and building construction, with budgets to pay for the development. The plan should lay out an economic development strategy. The strategy in shale gas areas should focus on helping local businesses and workers compete for the new opportunities arising from shale gas development. In addition, communities should target businesses that will support shale gas development and the workers in the industry. The more dollars generated from the industry that are spent locally, the better. West Virginia law allows counties to levy impact fees on new development, including shale gas production in some circumstances. These fees, paid by the developers, pay for infrastructure such as roads, parks and recreational facilities, and water, wastewater, and stormwater facilities. Communities should consider impact fees to pay for the costs of capital

written by

Jesse J. Richardson

improvements required by shale gas development. All counties in the state can impose â&#x20AC;&#x153;county-wide service feesâ&#x20AC;? on persons who work within their counties to help pay for infrastructure. This fee should also be considered in a comprehensive plan.

Using What You Already Have Many communities in West Virginia suffer from an abundance of dilapidated buildings and abandoned properties. Some of these properties may be able to be rehabilitated or repurposed to support the economic activity and the citizens, providing housing and locations for businesses. If buildings must be demolished, what use at that site best serves the community? The comprehensive plan can provide the answers. The plan will also suggest tools to implement the goals and objectives. Zoning ordinances need not span dozens of pages, but can provide for the future use of neglected properties, designate areas in the community appropriate for certain commercial activities, and protect sensitive environmental areas as well as private property rights. Subdivision and land development ordinances ensure adequate infrastructure will be in place for the development in the area.

No Reason Not to Plan Even if your community does not face the possibility of a shale gas boom, it is probably facing other possible changes, both good and bad. A comprehensive plan is the starting point to ensure a bright and prosperous future for your community. The Land Use and Sustainable Development Law Clinic at West Virginia Universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s College of Law is working with several communities across the state to develop comprehensive plans and to deal with local land use issues, and we look forward to working with more communities to prepare for the future.

The Land Use and Sustainable Development Law Clinic

at West Virginia University's College of Law provides legal services to local governments, landowners and non-profit organizations to develop land conservation strategies and practices. Visit landuse.law.wvu.edu for more information. To contact the clinic, call 304.293.4633, send an email to Katherine.Garvey@mail.wvu.edu, or write 101 Law Center Drive, P.O. Box 6130 Morgantown, WV 26506. Focus wvfocus.com

5 Things

written by

Zack Harold

To Airbnb, or Not Three experienced hosts offer tips on renting your space online.

hether you’re looking to make a few extra bucks or fulfill your long-held Newhart fantasies, the space-sharing service Airbnb provides a simple way to open your home to paying guests. We’ve collected some tips from experienced hosts to help you get started.

Prepare for Commitment. Holly Clark first rented out her cozy, rustic Fayetteville barn in 2011 and has booked nearly 200 reservations since then. She’s happy with the success, but it requires a large commitment of both time and energy. “I can’t go anywhere in the summer,” Clark says. Airbnb allows hosts to rent their spaces as often as they like, so if you’re just starting out, consider blocking out just a few days each month.

Expect the Best, Prepare for the Worst. Although Clark says most guests are wonderful, she has had a few bad ones. “You run the risk of having your property damaged,” she says. If that happens, don’t expect your homeowner’s or renter’s insurance to cover the losses—many policies do not cover commercial subletting. Jones

Focus May/June 2015

talked to his insurance broker and added a special rider to his policy that will cover any Airbnb-related claims. “It actually doesn’t cost that much more,” he says.

Think Like a Hotel. Soon after Rebecca Browning and her husband began renting out their Morgantown guesthouse on Airbnb, they installed an electronic door lock on their rental home. “I program a door code in, give them the code before they arrive, and they can simply type their code in and get into the house,” she says. “It’s made it easier than trying to keep track of keys and worry about lost keys.” Browning just deletes the code once guests leave.

Work the System. Airbnb is designed to make it easy for guests to find a place to stay, but the service is also very helpful to hosts. In addition to providing guests with reviews of hosts, hosts can also see reviews of guests—allowing them to reject requests from bad renters. Also, money never changes hands between guests and hosts. It’s all funneled through Airbnb. If there’s a problem, guests and hosts can use Airbnb to sort it out. “I think what surprised me is how easy Airbnb makes it. It’s almost like eBay for vacation rentals,” Browning says. airbnb.com

Courtesy of Rebecca Browning

Be a Concierge. Washington, D.C., resident Kevin Jones got his apartment in Thomas because he fell in love with the small town and its local businesses. Now, when he rents the space on Airbnb, Jones provides guests with a folder containing information about local restaurants, shops, and music venues. “That’s business to the local community, which I think is great,” he says. Educate yourself about local culture and use that expertise to help guests get the most from their stay.

Health Care

written by

Anshu Jain

Close to Home

As cancer treatment improves, patients can often get top-notch care in their own communities.

had a patient unexpectedly pass away a few weeks ago. He had successfully completed his treatment and was cancer-free. I had spoken with him about our follow-up plan and about how we would see each other every few months for the next several years. I’d told him we would be good friends. When I received word from my staff that he passed away, I was in obvious shock. As an oncologist, you prepare yourself for the possibility that patients may eventually succumb to their disease. Yet, it hits harder when patients beat cancer only to fall victim to another illness. I took some time to reflect on his passing, and it challenged me to think about his care experience. I met with him frequently during his treatment and was always greeted by a beaming smile and a positive attitude. During our meetings, I got to know Fred and learned about the things that were important to him. If there was one aspect of his care experience that stood out, it was that he was home. He faced his cancer with a quiet confidence, and he beat it. Importantly, he beat it surrounded by his family, friends, and community. Cancer care is exceedingly complex. It is a continuum of careful evaluation and treatment, equal parts art and science, performed by numerous specialists. Patients are often hurtled through this spectrum of care, sometimes on faith alone. They can be far removed from their homes and communities during this time. When it comes to a diagnosis as serious as cancer, many patients are willing to travel far and wide for care they perceive as higher quality, compared to their local hospitals or clinics. For others, distance may make access to care prohibitive. Are these quality differences real? Is traveling long distances for care in the best interest of the patient? These are important questions

that are increasingly relevant for many patients and care providers, particularly in rural or underserved areas of West Virginia. The question of whether it is in the best interest of the patient is a complicated one. Indeed, in some situations it may very well be beneficial for the patient to travel for specialized services. But for the majority of cancer diagnoses and clinical scenarios, our approach is becoming more standardized. A number of organizations and care networks publish evidence-based consensus treatment guidelines that are specifically designed to eliminate major variation in our approach to cancer management. Combining this fact with our increasingly digital culture, most physicians have access to the most up-to-date treatment recommendations with a few swipes of a smartphone screen or clicks of a mouse. Oncologists are also getting better at treating cancer, and a cure is a real possibility for many of our patients. The focus of care is no longer just on treating the disease, but also on survivorship—the care patients need after their cancer is controlled or in remission. It is a combination of surveillance, side effect management, and psychosocial support necessary for patients to return to their normal lives, or to “new normal” lives as cancer survivors. The oncology community has historically been somewhat behind in identifying psychological stress and distress in patients both during and after cancer therapy. However, we are improving at recognizing this stress and we know that travel for care can contribute greatly to it. I am again reminded of my experience caring for Fred. He went through treatment about as well as anyone could. Yet he was quick to credit others for his success in becoming cancer-free. He put his faith in his doctors, but he put his heart into his family

Dr. Anshu Jain is a radiation oncologist at the Logan Regional Cancer Center. He received his medical degree at the University of Kentucky and his postdoctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital and New York Presbyterian Hospital. He also currently serves on the teaching faculty at Yale School of Medicine.

and community. He enjoyed the comfort of familiarity and drew strength from his surroundings as he needed it. Fred's cancer success story is not singular, but it highlights how he chose to receive his care. The increasingly longitudinal nature of cancer care demands that we do our best to provide elements of such care closer to home. For those of us in working in the continuum of oncology care, it is an exciting time. Medical research promises many new therapies and refinement of existing treatments. Even more exciting is the potential of saving lives of our medically underserved West Virginians through a renewed commitment to focusing not on the disease, but on the patients themselves and the communities from which they derive their proud identities. Focus wvfocus.com

Pitfalls

Bring Your Own Device, Bring Your Own Dilemma BYOD policies are becoming more and more popular—could one be right for your business?

working more than ever outside of business hours these days. You used to go home and not worry about your email until you came back the next day. But not anymore.” Sims and his team at Advanced Technical Solutions have worked with a lot of companies as they switch to BYOD. He’s seen it work out really well—but also not so well. “How well BYOD works, it depends on the company and the industry,” he says. Some companies deal with a lot of proprietary or privileged information, and have to be really careful about who sees it. Some companies get so bogged down purchasing special software for their employees’ personal devices that it would have been cheaper to just buy them all new smartphones. “When you’re looking at implementing one of these policies, you have a lot of things to look at,” Sims says. “You have things to worry about from a security perspective, from an access perspective, from an employee satisfaction perspective.” Here, we offer a guide to help you decide whether or not BYOD is right for your company.

uick, how many cell phones do you have on you right now? Two? Three? Even more? Then your company probably doesn’t have a BYOD policy. No, we’re not talking about a fraternity party. That’s BYOD for “bring your own device.” As smartphones have grown pervasive through all corners of American society—according to the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of American adults now own a smartphone, and 91 percent have some kind of mobile phone—BYOD policies are growing increasingly common in small

Focus May/June 2015

and large companies alike. The idea behind BYOD is to let employees use their personal devices—smartphones, tablets, laptops—for both work and pleasure. That way, the employee doesn’t have to worry about toting around multiple devices, and the company saves money because it doesn’t have to buy all that equipment. Plus, employees can be wired in all the time, not just during business hours. “The pace of business has changed,” says Brian Sims, co-founder and vice president of Advanced Technical Solutions, an IT consulting company based in Scott Depot. “People are

Do you have a computer usage policy? Are you sure about that?

“When you starting thinking about creating a BYOD policy, that brings up the matter of whether you even have an acceptable computer usage policy,” Sims says. “That policy is step one.” How do you know whether your policy passes muster? It needs to be detailed, comprehensive, and your employees need to actually know about it. “If you truly have a computer usage policy then that policy has been reviewed by the individual people and signed, and then there’s an annual review of that policy,” Sims says.

written by

Shay Maunz

What are you trying to get out of this?

Maybe you want to keep it simple—you might just want to let your employees access their email on their own device, for example. That’s pretty straightforward, and you probably don’t need to erect an elaborate technical infrastructure or write up a lengthy technology usage policy to manage it. But you probably still need some new rules for dealing with this new situation—and your policy is only going to get more complex as you allow people to bring in more devices. “When you start adding additional items to manage, you add additional complexity,” Sims says. “If all you’re doing is email, your email policy may dictate what happens, but say you want people to always lock their device. How are you going to know whether they do that? So then you might want an IT solution to help with that.” There is software on the market to let companies have more control over their employees’ personal devices, but you’ll need to factor that into your financial assessment.

Is your IT department up to the job?

“There has to be more coordination between the user and the IT department with BYOD,” Sims says. “What happens if the user goes out and gets a new device? What if they trade it in— is your information still on there? Maybe they give it to their kid. Do they have access to your information?”

Do your employees want BYOD?

“A lot of times employees want to use their own devices, and the company lets them, but then they keep hearing from people who are having a lot of problems,” Sims says. He recalls one company that kept hearing from a handful of employees whose devices were consistently disconnecting from the Internet. It was the IT department’s job to find a solution, but what once would have been a quick fix was now a complex issue. “Now they’re dealing with all these different devices,” Sims says. “It took a lot of troubleshooting to figure it out.”

Is it worth it?

Sims isn’t just an IT guy, he’s also business owner—he looks at BYOD through the eyes of someone who is making decisions with his own business in mind. So Sims suggests that you also ask yourself these last questions about your business to determine whether or not it’s BYOD-compatible: “Is it going to benefit the company? Is it going to make us more productive? Is it going to create cost? Is it going to make my employees happier? Or, if I decide not to do it, is it going to make them unhappy?” At Advanced Technical Solutions, the company supplies devices for everyone. Employees do not use their own. Sim and his team made that decision because it’s such a technologyoriented company, and because they expect employees to be on-call most of the time. “Because of our expectations we felt like we should provide devices,” he says. But that doesn’t mean a BYOD policy isn’t right for different companies with different needs and different expectations for their employees. “It’s all about what’s right for you,” Sims says. Focus wvfocus.com

Marketing

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Search is On

Getting yourself at the top of online search results takes time and thought.

t’s late on a summer day. You’re sitting in your office when a hankering for ice cream wallops whatever part of your brain manages self-control and productivity. This can’t be resisted, but you’re new in town and aren’t yet familiar with the local ice cream joints. You type “ice cream” into Google, press enter, and are suddenly faced with 260,000 results. A few chains pop up. No local shops. You run out to one of those corporate shops—you need that ice cream—but as you return to the office, your cone dripping onto your freshly laundered white shirt, a coworker slips in behind you carrying a mound of gourmet frozen creamy deliciousness from around the block. There are sprinkles and an adorable logo pressed into the homemade waffle bowl. The confection came from a local store specializing in premium ice cream in flavors Willy Wonka could only dream of. It looks heavenly. And it didn’t show up in your cursory Google search. The world of search engine results can be frustrating. What customers don’t know won’t really bother them, but their lack of knowledge can be devastating for business owners like our hypothetical ice cream

Focus May/June 2015

shop. More and more potential customers are turning to Internet search results to find everything from construction contractors to hotels to ice cream. The yellow pages are a thing of the past. Billboards can’t be seen by everyone everywhere. “What business owners need to understand is, if customers aren’t seeing your company, they’re seeing your competitors,” says Justin Seibert, president and founder of Direct Online Marketing, a West Virginia company specializing in getting businesses at the top of Google results. “They need to understand the amount of business they’re losing out on—that they won’t even know about—if they aren’t optimized well for the search engines.” But businesses owners do not have to sit helplessly as their website registers at the bottom of a search. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the retooling of a website to affect its visibility in a search engine’s unpaid results. The secret is understanding the way search engines work, what people search for, and how they use the services. “People won’t go to the third and fourth page of Google—not even the second page,” Seibert says. By adding relevant keywords and search terms to the wording of your content, adding new content, getting link-backs from reputable sources, or changing the coding of a website to remove barriers to search engine indexing, you can boost your site’s position in Google, Bing, and Yahoo searches. Online marketing is part of an overall marketing plan, and what search engine optimizers do to boost your site depends on your goals. “Most of our clients want to achieve more revenue or more awareness,” says Kristen Perko, digital marketing

Katie Griffith

SEO Tips to Consider Keywords: Getting your website’s keywords correct is a big deal. “If you don’t get the right keywords, you’re wasting time and money,” Seibert says. That means adding location information, services, goods, and other words key to your company’s identity. Think local: “It’s really important for local businesses trying to reach a local audience,” Seibert says. Going mobile: “Mobile is something we’ve seen become a major factor from Google in the last few years—focusing on whether your website is mobilefriendly. If not, in effect, you’re penalized, and your site won’t be ranked as highly in results,” Seibert says. Link building: “It’s like relationship building,” Seibert says. “Promoting your website is important, and having websites link back to you—it’s like a vote for your website.”

manager at Direct Online Marketing. “We look at the kinds of conversions we can get through the website to achieve those goals for the business.” Conversions are positive actions a visitor would take on your website—filling out forms, making a purchase, booking a service, clicking on a video, or reading an article. “We can test almost any element on a website,” Perko says. One of the most relevant options for small businesses is local optimization and making sure a business shows up in the map listings for not only their names, but the types of services and products they have. “The awareness around digital marketing is slowly coming around in West Virginia,” Seibert says. Both Seibert and Perko say now’s the time for businesses to get their web game on. “It’s a really exciting time for West Virginia businesses to get involved with search engine optimization,” Perko says. “It’s still an open playing field but in a few years it might not be. If a company is sitting on the fence they need to think about jumping in.”

B2B

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Missy Sheehan Photographed by Nikki Bowman

A Trove of Timeless Treasures

The BarsandBooths.com showroom in downtown Charles Town offers visitors a one-ofa-kind retro shopping experience.

visit to the BarsandBooths.com showroom in downtown Charles Town is like taking a step back in time, the black-and-white checkered floor and turquoise awning at the shop’s entrance signaling a return to a bygone era. Inside the spacious, 4,000-squarefoot store, you’ll find a vast array of retro furniture, accessories, and appliances as well as a unique collection of restored vintage vending machines, jukeboxes, kiddie rides, and more dating back to the 1940s through the ’70s. The company specializes in designing and building custom, retro-style bars, booths, tables, and cabinets, while its sister business, Back In Time Warehouse, restores vintage jukeboxes, soda and candy machines, kiddie rides, gas pumps, and other rare coin-operated machines. Between the two companies, G.W. Smith, who owns the businesses with his wife, Barbara, says he has customers all over the world. “We have customers in 48 states and have done restaurants in 48 countries, including a chain of restaurants in Paris called HD Diner,” he says. Smith says customers from as far as Japan, Australia, and New Zealand have come to Charles Town to see samples and prototypes of custom booths, bars, and other items in person before ordering. “Then they’ll get back on their planes, and we’ll build it and ship it to them anywhere in the world.” BarsandBooths.com’s work can be seen here in West Virginia, too. At Grandma’s Diner, across the street from the BarsandBooths. com showroom, custom light blue and charcoal black booths paired with white and gray-trimmed tables and sturdy black chairs add to the 1950s decor of the cozy eatery. Two bumpers from an old Ford Mustang and a Pontiac GTO that owner Luis Guzman bought from BarsandBooths.com and hung on the walls complete the look. “I wanted to give the place that extra-retro feel,” says Guzman, who owns the diner with his grandmother, Francisca Guzman. Smith founded BarsandBooths.com in 1997 after retiring

Focus May/June 2015

two years earlier from his former career as the owner of an encyclopedia company. He was inspired to enter the retro furniture and restoration industries during a visit to a diner after a stressful business meeting in 1989. “The song ‘Hello Stranger’ came on the jukebox, and all of a sudden I was reminded of when I was 14 or 15 years old, back in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina,” he says. “It took me back to a time where there was no stress, and life was easy. And my mind just took over.” Over the following few months, Smith bought some old diner booths, had them re-covered, and remodeled one of the rooms in his house in Great Falls, Virginia, as a retro-style diner. “I found I could go back there, get a beer out of my Coke machine, play a couple songs, and get away from the world,” he says. “I could take a back-in-time vacation right there.” It wasn’t long before friends and visitors started asking G.W. about his retro items and where they could buy them, leading him to open his own shop where he sold restored vintage items in an antique mall in Falls Church, Virginia. Once he outgrew that space, Smith moved on to found BarsandBooths.com and Back In Time Warehouse in Charles Town after driving through the town on his way to an antique mall. Today BarsandBooths.com and Back In Time Warehouse employ expert craftsmen and restoration specialists who are dedicated to creating high-quality and lasting retro and vintage pieces. All of BarsandBooths.com’s furniture is built exclusively for the company either at Dad’s Furniture in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, or at Upholstery Excellence in Martinsburg. Back In Time Warehouse’s restoration work takes place at the company’s workshop in Charles Town. “Our goal is to take the things we restore and make them heirlooms,” Smith says. “If it’s restored right and you use quality paints and materials—the way we do—it’ll still look the same in 30 years.” 304.728.0547, barsandbooths.com

Thomas Minney POWER POINTS

The new director of The Nature Conservancy in West Virginia talks conservation of land and culture. Written by Katie Griffith

» We are in such an extraordinary place.

There’s more spoken to the stereotypes in West Virginia than spoken to the fact that this is a damned important place. A lot of the places I traveled, England and Japan in particular, there’s been a high level of development over more than 1,000 years, compared to our 150 years or so in the United States. Those places where nature is down to some of its last remaining areas—people there are focused on how to maintain or recreate the beauty we have here. As we think about West Virginia, as we think about

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the new economies and the development we want to see—and should see—we have to think about how to hold onto those values that make us extraordinary and use them as drivers for the future. There are things you can’t recapture.

» West Virginia is at the top of the charts in the United States for biodiversity—even if you look globally we’re important. The high concentration of plant and animal species here is outstanding. From the science perspective that’s important to note, and from an ecological services perspective. The Central Appalachians supply drinking water to 22 million people in the Central Appalachians and the nearby metropolitan

areas, and West Virginia is at the heart of those river systems.

» I like looking at the big picture; looking at what we have now and to the future vision we want to develop—how we put the actions and partnerships together to get there. Setting a vision is important. Working with people is important, and getting your work to resonate with people—to make them feel like they’re a part of your work, to motivate people in West Virginia around these visions and to show that values like hunting, fishing, and gardening translate to the work we do as an environmental organization. If we work together, the outcomes will be very similar.

Courtesy of Katheryne Hawkins

His was the childhood of West Virginia lore—boyhood on a farm, surrounded by nature, afternoons spent hunting, fishing, gardening, and ramping. “It was a part of my family culture to value the land,” Thomas Minney says. “It’s part of my DNA to be in nature.” Though he valued those experiences growing up in a small hollow outside Glenville, Minney says it wasn’t until he left to travel the world that he appreciated the incredible natural wealth housed in our Appalachian hills. It’s that appreciation for the qualities that make West Virginia what it is, and West Virginians who they are, that Minney says he is ultimately trying to protect. In March the Gilmer County native was named director for The Nature Conservancy in West Virginia after fourteen years serving the organization in the Central Appalachians and in West Virginia. Throughout his career as a conservationist he’s spearheaded landscape restoration, protecting more than 6,500 acres of places such as Beury Mountain Wildlife Management Area along the New River, the Monongahela National Forest, and private lands at places like Smoke Hole. As state director, Minney says he hopes to continue protecting West Virginia’s iconic landscapes like Dolly Sods Wilderness and the Cheat Canyon—wild places West Virginians cherish and the type of places that, worldwide, are only disappearing.