Proposed Huntington budget story

*Other means all the categories of revenue on the budget list with the exception of the top five sources of revenue.


*Other means all the categories of expenditures on the budget list with the exception of the top five sources of expenditures.

The recommended budget for fiscal year 2011 was introduced by Huntington Mayor Kim Wolfe as $39.54 million. It's a reduction of about $5 million from FY 2010’s budget of $44.61 million and is still less from the FY 2009 budget that was a little over $41 million. Delinquent property taxes have gone down a significant number from FY 2009 of $525,000 to about $418,000 for FY 2011. The biggest source of funding in business and occupation tax has gone down $2 million since FY 2009. The other major sources of revenue: Utility tax, city service fee, municipal service fees and property tax current have all gone down, with the exception of the city service fee and municipal service fees. Within these sources, revenue has dropped a little over $2 million since FY 2009.

At the same time, three major areas where the city’s money gets spent have increased. Fire, streets and insurance programs expenses have together gone up half of $1 million since FY 2009. However, police, and contributions and etc. have seen cuts of $486,291.

Wolfe rides on the support of partnerships in State of the City address

In the midst of beginning to feel the effects of the economic recession trickling down from the federal government, Huntington mayor Kim Wolfe focused on the partnerships that have continued to further city growth in his State of the City address on Feb. 13.

To emphasize his point about people working together, Wolfe started with a reform that probably took the most organizations collectively for it to succeed. A first major step to solving Pension Reform was put forth with new pension options.

“This was an issue that had been plaguing our city for 14-plus years,” Wolfe said.

One initiative that has been a part of most of the mayor’s accomplishments this year has been in partnership with the city’s citizens and the Huntington City Council.

The User Fee was increased by a dollar and with it new equipment was purchased for the Street and Traffic Engineering divisions, more than 800,000 worth of streets was paved and six more police officers were hired.

Much of the actions put into place because of the increase in the User Fee have been bolstered by other resources. In addition to the six police officers hired, the Huntington Police Department received 1.6 million in grant funding. This saw a 5.9 percent increase from last year with the number of responses to service calls and the sustainability of the Special Emphasis Unit and K-9 Unit.

To keep up with the work being done on the streets, the Weed and Seed program, in addition to increasing drug arrests and seeing an increase in criminal convictions, have improved the housing community with 21 first-time home buyers, five new homes built and the demolishment of 29 structures. The Technical Housing Unit has also contributed by averaging 129 inspections per month of unsafe structures.

These works and more are in conjunction with the goals of Wolfe’s administration to support a cleaner, safer and more responsive government.

For the upcoming months, the mayor said the task will be to make sure these improvements and others will not be jeopardized because of having to reduce the budget by about 5 million from last year.

“The goal is to ensure that service delivery is not significantly hampered to the citizens,” Wolfe said.

Plans in place to follow through on that statement are to eliminate only some jobs and have rolling 20-day furloughs for city employees. Within the police and fire departments, some civilian positions will be removed and this will cause the level of service from first responders to be affected. Also, vacant city positions will be left unfulfilled and retiring employees will not be replaced.

The mayor was upfront about these initiatives having an effect on the safety of Huntington’s citizens, but he plans on addressing those problems by using same thing he attributes his accomplishments to.

“I am confident in the ability and leadership of the Huntington City Council to work side by side with us to solve these challenges,” Wolfe said.

Stark gets citizens involved, makes for better politics overall

One of the main concerns for candidates in the primary elections in May is to be able to raise enough money to stay in the race.

Thomas Fredrick Stark is a Republican running for the U.S. House of Representatives in the Democratic leaning 1st District of West Virginia. Stark is unique in that he wants to get the average citizen involved in his campaign initiatives.

“Very seldom do you see candidates taking it to the people,” he said.

Stark’s idea is called Campaign for 20,000. He said he’s soliciting 20,000 citizens from the 1st District to submit any amount of money toward his campaign in hopes it gives the people invested interest in the elections. This way they might vote based on their principles instead of upon public opinion.

If people aren’t committed to the person they are voting for and just going with the flow then candidates are held to a lower standard and can abuse their power, Stark said.

Recently, the Supreme Court denied legislation for lawmakers to reinstate barriers on the amount of campaign spending by corporations and other third party groups.

Stark agreed with the decision because limiting the amount of money people could give to campaigns could hurt the candidate and it could restrict people’s freedom to express their opinion. The integrity of the candidate is the problem that needs to be addressed and when that is fixed, then it wouldn’t matter who was giving money or how much, he said.

In conjunction with his Campaign for 20,000, Stark said he has to rely on other forms of obtaining money because he can’t wait for citizens to take his offer and then it not happen.

So far he has incurred $4,306, which is $2,134 from himself and $2,171 from other individuals. His biggest donors are Steve Keiser, the executive of Christy and Associates who gave $1,000, Dave Harsh, manager from State Farm who gave $250 and Rick Sprigg, self-employed in insurance who gave $500.

Stark currently has $1,932 on hand because he has disbursed $2,373 in travel mileage during October, November and December, all of which he has paid himself. In comparison to his challengers’ finances, Stark is somewhere in the middle. Incumbent Alan Mollohan is a Democrat and has held his seat for 27 years. His debt is $130,000 with $285,552 in disbursements and $64,599 on hand. Republican David McKinley has $100,250 on hand. Another Republican, Mac Warner, has $38,403 on hand and $4,139 in disbursements. The other candidates, Republican Cindy Hall, Republican Patricia VanGilder Levenson and Republican Sarah Minear have $0 in campaign funds so far.

Stark said it’s not exactly a disadvantage to have less money, but it just changes the emphasis of where he is looking to get it. It makes him put more effort in gathering funds compared to candidates who already have a lot. He said raising money takes up about half of his campaign and he does it mostly with personal contacts, mailing letters and following up.

The primary election date for the 1st District is May 11.

Update on candidate article

I will be following Republican candidate Thomas Fredrick Stark who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives. I have called the West Virginia Secretary of State to confirm that he is still in the running for office.

So far I have found out his career and education background and his views on main topics such as the economy, health care, marriage and government waste. I have visited Stark's personal Web site and the Federal Election Commission Web site to obtain information.

I have found out he has seven people running against him. Five of those people are Republican and two are Democratic. For some of those candidates I have the amount of their disbursements and receipts and who their contributors are. I also have that information about Stark.

I still have to call Stark and interview him about raising money for his campaign and whether there are conflict of interest issues involving the people who give him money. I also want to ask him about his Campaign for 20,000 idea. This is a unique concept in that Stark is asking for 20,000 individual citizens from the first district to donate to his campaign. Stark is doing this to get the average citizen involved in politics.

Proposal for imaginative investigative news story

To: Professor Morris
From: Emily Ayres

Re: Story Outline: Health South rehabilitation hospital in Huntington, W.Va.

Subject: I want to write an investigative story about the care patients receive in the hospital because it is important to make sure they are clean and healthy, and their families are paying money to have that service.

Scope: I have interviewed student nurses from Marshall University and nurses on staff at the hospital. I have also surveyed some of the patients on the care they have received.

Need: The investigative story is needed because the hospital has a lot of patients and is a successful business. We need to make sure the hospital is providing the service back to the people who are paying it money. HealthSouth also has 25 other locations across the nation, so if there are problems found in Huntington, then there may be other problems elsewhere, and that affects many people.

Methods: I am conducting research using formal face-face interviews with nurses and taking surveys of patients. I will also need to find documents to use as proof in my arguments. They will most likely be expense reports to find out how much the hospital is spending on nursing staff, care products, water and electricity. I would also like to get numbers on the ratio between patients and nurses to see if the hospital is understaffed or overbooked in patients, which are problems that could lead to poor patient care.

Sources: Former and current patients, current nursing staff and Marshall nursing students, plus documents.

Presentation: This investigative story will be going on my blog, but it also has the potential to be going into Marshall University’s school newspaper, The Parthenon.

Follow-up: This story has the potential to lead to a bigger story because HealthSouth has 25 other locations across the U.S. If patients aren’t receiving enough care in Huntington, a bigger investigation may need to be started to check the other places’ level of credibility.

Chapter 1, Class Assignment 1

I chose an investigative story written by a CBS reporter. It's about how representatives from the House and Senate, along with their family members, a doctor and a photographer traveled to the Copenhagen Climate Summit in Denmark. They totaled up a bill that cost in the millions in hotel room prices, food and luxury jets. The bad part of it is, tax payers are paying for all that. At the same time, too, no global deal was reached.

My story is investigative because it reveals information that people would not have known unless they read the congressional expense reports and did their own digging. The story also provided information that people were trying to keep hidden, as seen by the sources being difficult about giving information about it. The story also exposes a waste of tax money.

The reporter gives the target of the investigation a chance to state what happened when Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., is interviewed. He went to the summit last year, too, so he is a pretty knowledgeable source from the other side. He is quoted in paragraph five. Also, house speaker Nancy Pelosi was given a chance to defend herself but refused. Her office gave a statement, though, which was written in paragraph seven.

The reporter uses the congressional expense reports recently filed for a key document.

A graphic of the report of expenditures for official foreign travel,two videos and a list of all attendees, accompany the article. They aid the reader by letting them see just how many people went to the summit and used tax payers' money to do that.

The representatives used tax payer money to go to the summit so any tax payer of the U.S. would be interested to read this story.

The article and the headlines are very concise. They are not shrill or frantic. One headline is, Congress went to Denmark, you got the bill.

The reporter probably got the idea from the recent summit event or just a planned project idea to check up on congressional spending.

link to the story is:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/01/25/cbsnews_investigates/main6140406.shtml?tag=latest