10th Senate district candidate Q&A: Jack Woodrum responds to Nicholas County resident’s questions

When we visited Nicholas County, we heard from many residents that their local schools need to be rebuilt and the area needs community centers and addiction treatment facilities.

As part of Mountain State Spotlight’s “Citizens Agenda” approach to covering this year’s elections, we asked the candidate for the 10th Senate District questions about these issues. Republican Jack Woodrum , a former Hinton funeral director and Summers County Commissioner, is running in an uncontested race for his second term.

Find out which Senate district you live in here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Question: Nicholas County residents spoke about the need to build and rebuild important community institutions, especially for teenagers and young adults. Currently, construction is still underway to replace Nicholas County’s schools after they were damaged in the 2016 flood, and it’s not expected to be completed for at least another year. What will you do to support building back Nicholas County Schools?

Jack Woodrum

WV State Senator District 10 Republican Party Incumbent

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Woodrum: Well, I can support it. I mean, we don’t have a lot of influence on that directly from the Legislature. There were problems, that school should have already been built. And I really hate that it’s taken this long to get started. But hopefully everything is on course. If there’s any financial problems, we may be able to help with that to a degree. But most of the educational piece goes through state education [Department of Education] and the School Building Authority.

Question: One Summersville resident talked about how some of the places he and his friends would go as teenagers no longer exist. What could you do to help bring activities for teenagers back to the county?

Woodrum: Those things are typically done at the local level, not the state. We end up helping with some of the funding for those things. Those initiatives are usually done by either the municipality or the county. And if they might be looking for resources, they would come to me to help fund it.

But I like those types of projects. You know, Nicholas County, Fayette, it may not be the exact things that those folks do when they were younger, but a lot of new opportunities have opened up.

Our focus has been more on creating jobs and allowing people to stay here, and then creating the tax revenue to allow local governments to build out those types of projects. My personal way is finding a way to fund counties better. We ask a whole lot of our county commissions, and they’re not necessarily funded at the level they need to be in order to fulfill their mission as county government.

Question: Other county residents talked about the need for more housing to replace old, dilapidated homes. What has the Legislature done to improve housing in counties like Nicholas County, and what can it do in the future?

Woodrum: The Legislature has done stuff to create new housing, especially in areas that are growing that need some additional housing. There’s always been mechanisms for low- to mid-income housing, primarily lower-income housing, that has been out there for a while. I’ve worked on a couple of those projects in Summers County. We just built out some housing in a block that most of it burned down. So we just redid that with some senior living.

So there is money, and there are programs out there to do that. But that’s a conversation that’s not just in our part of the state. It’s statewide.

Interest rate pay [has] a whole lot to do with that, because you can’t hardly afford the loan on a new house. And cost of real estate in West Virginia has increased. Still lower than most of the country, I think, but still increased for us quite a bit. Especially around places like Nicholas County and Fayette County, where you’ve got this influx of people coming in. A lot of those older houses have been turned into Airbnbs, things like that to cater to the tourists. And that makes it more difficult for somebody that’s lived here and wants to buy a house.

[Airbnbs are] regulated, but it’s a tourist area that depends on tourists. It’s the kind of growth they need. But some of those areas, I know in Fayetteville, they’re building out some additional housing.

Question: Some residents who work to address or have lived experience with addiction spoke about the lack of treatment centers and sober living homes in Nicholas County. What has the Legislature done to help improve access to addiction services in places like Nicholas County, and what can you do in the future?

Woodrum: I don’t know that there’s any guarantee of having those types of homes in every county. There are a lot of them around the state, but there’s not enough to go around.

Some communities are actually trying to slow those site facilities down, because they’ve got a business model that tends to exploit people with addiction. So part of what we’ve done is to try to get rid of the bad actors and keep the facilities that are actually doing what they’re supposed to do — that have a high success rate of getting people off drugs, keeping them off drugs.

10th Senate district candidate Q&A: Jack Woodrum responds to Nicholas County resident’s questions appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight , West Virginia's civic newsroom.