West Virginia passes 15 bills, health and highway funding in special session
(The Center Square) – West Virginia’s Legislature finished a special session after passing all 15 bills brought by a special session call from Gov. Jim Justice.
A key portion of the call was restoring $183 million in funding for the West Virginia Department of Human Services along with Hope Scholarship and highway maintenance funding.
“I have been extremely disappointed in the behavior of a few of our legislators over the last few days,” Justice said in a statement. “For months now, I have demanded that we need to restore the budgets of our Department of Health and our Department of Human Services, so that hundreds and hundreds of our doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers won’t face rate cuts and to ensure that tens of thousands of our people won’t see reductions in needed services.
“At the end of the day, we won for the people of West Virginia.”
More than $89 million of the DoHS funding will go toward a Medicaid shortfall, according to DoHS Cabinet Secretary Cynthia Persily.
“We heard legislators’ concerns about the need for transparency in the spending of funds they have appropriated and the need for essential services to be funded,” Persily said. “The Department is committed to providing this transparency and continuing to analyze reimbursement rates for all providers of services.”
The Legislature also approved more than $80 million to help students with Federal Free Application for Federal Student Aid funding issues. Justice called a state of emergency in April temporarily suspend the requirement for students to complete FAFSA in order to qualify for the state’s largest financial aid programs.
“When the federal government put our higher education system into crisis with their mishandling of the FAFSA, I demanded that we pass funding so our kids don’t miss their opportunity to go to college,” Justice said. “At the end of the day, again, we won for all our kids in this Great State.”
The Legislature also approved $150 million for highway maintenance and equipment.
