Life After Coal

By Allen Best

On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump promised to restore coal-mining jobs. "We're going to put those miners back to work," he vowed at a rally in Charleston, West Virginia. Returning to Appalachia as president in 2017, he took credit for a resurgence. "We have ended the war on clean, beautiful coal," he boasted.

But in the West Virginia offices I visited several months later, nobody was betting on a permanent resurgence. "Fine, but who's going to use it and for what?" said Robin Gomez, city manager of Fairmont, a city of 18,700, the state's seventh largest.

In Beckley, a city of 17,000 and a service center for West Virginia's southern coalfields, officials see a long-term decline. Jeff Raines, administrator for Raleigh County, a place of 60 current and abandoned coal mines, describes the coal economy as one of peaks and valleys. Each peak is lower than the past. "We are not going to see anything close to what we saw even 10 years ago," he says of the increased U.S. production in 2017.

That five percent increase in production in 2017 was, for reasons far beyond Trump's control, primarily increased overseas demand, analysts say. Domestic consumption actually declined. And long-term prospects remain dim. This shift poses an existential challenge for Central Appalachia. West Virginia and adjoining areas of Kentucky and Virginia provide 24. 6 percent of the nation's production but have 56 percent of the nation's coal jobs.

Jobs have been ebbing for a long time, mostly due to mechanization. Employment in coal peaked at 140,000 jobs in West Virginia in 1940, or about a third of the state's total workforce. As of 2017, there were just below 14,000 coal-mining jobs, according to Brian Lego, research assistant professor at West Virginia University's Bureau of Business and Economics. Those, jobs, however, pay well in a region of depressed incomes: $86,000 a year, with no college diploma needed.

Coal has been losing ground nationally. It has slipped from 50 percent of all power production a decade ago to 30 percent in 2017. Natural gas, but increasingly renewables, have taken its place.

Plants have shuttered in droves, three alone on June 1, 2017, the day Trump announced theU. S. exit from the Paris climate agreement. Tennessee's Johnsonville coal plant, closed on New Year's Eve, was the 200th plant shuttered since 2010. More powerful has been the idling of coal plants that are still operational, which have been undercut by lower priced natural gas, according to a 2017 report by M.J. Bradley & Associates, an energy consultancy. Improved energy efficiency and falling prices of renewables have also dented demand for coal, according to analysis by Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy.

"We want to be sure that we are not compromising the environment ... just to increase our employment rolls. One of our best assets in West Virginia is the natural environment."
—Sandra Scaffidi, Fairmont's Director of Planning and Development

Along the Monongahela River in the shadow of the Robert H. Mollohan-Jefferson Street Bridge (also known as the Million Dollar Bridge), Fairmont's redevelopment plan has resulted in new docks for kayaking, boat launches for bass fishing, and the continued expansion of a rails-to-trails system. Photo by Sandra Scaffidi.

Coal's legacy

Coal is the official state rock in West Virginia. But to Jim Estep and others, it holds the state down and behind. Estep is chief executive of the High Technology Foundation, one of West Virginia's economic bright spots. It's located along Interstate 79 in Fairmont. Pittsburgh is 90 minutes north; Charleston, the state capitol, two hours south.

Federal funding aided creation of the technology park in the early 1990s. NASA opened a division responsible for software verification; it now has 270 employees. More recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration installed a high-speed computer. In the push to decentralize federal agencies after 9/11, the FBI arrived with a new office. Four hours from Washington D.C., Fairmont is just far enough away without being too far.

Fairmont was — and still is — a mining center for northern West Virginia. You can sense that history in the downtown, stately and now refreshed. But, notes Estep, residents of communities like his generally have not shared in the wealth and benefits of coal. "The economic metrics demonstrate that for all the billions and billions of dollars that have been made on the coal industry, it hasn't made West Virginia one of the great places in the country to live," he says.

Statistical pockets of opioid abuse overlap the counties where coal is extracted. Raleigh County, where Beckley is located, averaged 53.2 opioid-related deaths per 100,000 population from 1993 to 2013; McDowell County had 100.5. Kentucky's Clay County had the nation's highest death rate: 115.1 deaths. The national average was 5.6.

The 2016 presidential election showed massive dissatisfaction in coal country. Trump's widest vote margin, 69 percent, was in West Virginia, the nation's number-two coal-producing state, followed closely by Wyoming, number one. In this, coal-heavy states aligned closely with Rust Belt states.

For West Virginia, Estep wants a strategy that makes the state more appealing to knowledge-sector companies such as those found at Fairmont's technology park. Far too many of the state's residents have fled to places that do have jobs. The state's leaders, he argues, have failed.

Pride and progress

If Estep can see West Virginia's deep dysfunctions, he also praises it with superlatives. You hear that a lot. There is deep pride in the rugged geography and the people it has produced. These are not the giant mountains found in the West. They're short, steep, and endlessly rumpled. Get off the four-lane highways lined with the corporate franchises found across America, and roads narrow and curve, swelling up and down, American flags seemingly hoisted from every other porch. Neighbors know one another in these parts, and their connections run deep.

Sandra Scaffidi, Fairmont's director of planning and development, has been in West Virginia for 12 years. She married into a long-time Fairmont coal-mining family. Scaffidi sees the century-old tightknit bonds of rural West Virginia being both a strength and, at times, a weakness. "That can be a good thing, something you might not get in a bigger city like Pittsburgh or New York. But on the other hand, if it's not working out, it might hold some communities back as well," she says.

In Fairmont, Scaffidi's efforts have focused on providing a place where people will want to live. One of those strategies is to take advantage of the amenity of the Monongahela River. Working with county authorities, Scaffidi pushed for redevelopment that resulted in new docks for kayaking, boat launches for bass fishing, and the continued expansion of a rails-to-trails system. Redevelopment of the riverfront has been identified in both a Renaissance Plan and in comprehensive plans.

There is also a connectivity plan, created with the aid of Main Street Fairmont, and the city also established several programs to encourage use of historic buildings and reward owners through building and occupancy tax credits.

"We don't just want any jobs. We want to bring quality jobs into our city," says Scaffidi. "We also want to be sure that we are not compromising the environment or our community just to increase our employment rolls. I think one of our best assets in West Virginia is the natural environment."

Christopher Fletcher, AICP, is the director of development services in Morgantown, home to West Virginia University, and the president of the West Virginia chapter of APA. He is a native West Virginian and fiercely proud of it. "I don't think you will find more people in this country that care more about their neighbors," he says. But he readily concedes that the coal industry has not reinvested into West Virginia to the betterment of the state.

To move forward, Fletcher would like to see comprehensive community planning. The state, he says, is still struggling to catch up. Planning authority originally adopted in 1959 was based on the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1924.

"When West Virginia got into the planning game, we were already 30 years behind," he says. That dated document remained relatively untouched until 2004, when the West Virginia Legislature revised the enabling legislation after a multiyear coalition-building and lobbying effort spearheaded by APA West Virginia and the West Virginia Municipal League.

Even now, most local government jurisdictions in the state do not have formal planners. Community planning usually meets resistance. "We don't like to be told what to do, particularly with our land," Fletcher explains.

This is particularly true of coal communities. "Most, if not all, transitional coal communities and their respective counties have not viewed or employed land-use planning and management strategies, locally or regionally, as a means to an envisioned future," says Fletcher.

Fletcher would like to see extraterritorial land-use authority for municipalities to plan for and manage unincorporated areas along the fringes of their jurisdictional boundaries, particularly within counties that have not undertaken land-use and development policy work.

Also lacking in West Virginia's planning toolkit, according to Fletcher, are urban growth boundaries, limiting water, sewer, and other infrastructure investments to curb sprawling development patterns, as well as impact fees. He also sees a need for both performance-based and form-based zoning and more flexible local tax and fee revenues.

Main Street Fairmont encourages new development and historic restoration in its downtown, which boasts the gold-domed Marion County Courthouse, completed in 1900. Although limited coal mining continues, the town is rebranding itself as part of the I-79 High Technology Corridor. Photo by Allen Best.

A focus on quality of place

Several hours south of Morgantown is Beckley, county seat of Raleigh County and home to about 80,000 people. The New River Gorge, renowned for its whitewater rafting and rock climbing, is nearby.

A trek west from Beckley along winding, difficult roads will lead you to West Virginia's most active mines. For decades, coal companies have been beheading mountaintops, now more than 500, using a technique called contour mining. Gulches have been filled up to 600 feet deep. It's a flattened landscape and, some say, a poisoned one.

State officials had hoped that one 12,000-acre former mine site, now called the Rock Creek Development Park, would become a place for housing, offices, and other multiuse development. It's been slow to get traction, though. Other places, with less semilevel land, have had to focus on cleaning up and adapting small-scale industrial sites.

Joseph Brouse's job is to help this part of West Virginia reinvent itself. "It's not a radical shift, not a fundamental shift, but it's a necessary shift," says Brouse, a former banker who now directs business retention and expansion for the New River Gorge Regional Development Authority, the largest economic development authority in the state.

While warning against overgeneralization, he admits that West Virginia has fallen behind. "What we have to realize is that in terms of entrepreneurship, in terms of business culture, we have to do better, because we know we are behind in terms of investment." Tourism has provided some growth, and Brouse hopes to see a broader theme taking root in the region: "quality of place."

Making communities attractive places to live as a strategy for diversification was a theme among speakers at a conference in Denver last year devoted to coal communities in transition.

Erik Pages, of EntreWorks Consulting, advised reasonable expectations, not "Hail Mary" strategies. "Hit for singles, not home runs," he says. Even high-tech centers worry about diversification, he says. Cupertino, California, home to Apple, the technology company, has been thinking about what would happen if something happened to Apple.

Retraining the workforce is only a small, small part of how a community needs to react to its lack of economic diversity. Every community is going to be different, he says.

Broadband always comes up in conversations about diversification of coal communities. West Virginia's geography poses a challenge. The local-food movement is also mentioned.

The Coalfield Development Corp. is one bright spot of aspirational economic redevelopment in West Virginia. It claims to combine the compassion of the nonprofit sector with the efficiency of the for-profit sector as it seeks to rebuild the Appalachia economy from the ground up.

Guided by Brandon Dennison, it has identified five markets to cultivate: sustainable agriculture, green-collar construction (including rehabilitation and energy efficiency), solar, mine-land reclamation, and entrepreneurship in arts and culture.

"We envision a revitalized people thriving in a renewed, more prosperous economy that is grounded in Appalachian values," says the organization's website. As of January, it had claimed credit for creating more than 60 new jobs, six new businesses, and revitalizing more than 175,000 square feet of abandoned property in the coalfields of southern West Virginia.

Ronald Eller, author of Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since1945, sees a "burned-out shell of a once verdant place and a once proud people" in the wake of 150 years of coal extraction. "Repowering will require a fundamental change in our deepest assumptions," he writes in the afterward of the 2013 paperback edition. He challenges the assumption that economic growth equals progress — an assumption that extends far beyond Appalachia. He contends that Appalachia's problems are America's problems, only seen in starker relief.

"Extractive economies tend to produce social and economic inequality, environmental destruction, and short-term growth rather than sustainable income and lifestyles," he writes. "How we use the land affects how we see ourselves, how we relate to each other, the values that we pass on to our children, and the meanings that we give to life. Rich, vibrant landscapes can give us hope and confidence for tomorrow; desolate landscapes limit future possibilities and can leave us constrained by hopelessness and despair. Preserving the Appalachian biosystem is at the very core of preserving an Appalachian identity for our children."

Central Appalachia is both shining success and darkness, civic devotion and political dysfunction. A case in point: a 2010 mining tragedy claimed 29 lives, and the mining company's chief executive was found guilty of conspiring to willfully violate safety standards. That alone would be an automatic disqualification in most places for public life. Yet the executive, Don Blankenship, sought the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. He came in third in the May 8 primary.

Still, despite the problems, some feel called to return to West Virginia. One of them was Kate Greene. "I missed the warm summer nights, the trees and their changing colors and the horseshoe curves of the roads. I missed all that so much," she says.

Greene grew up in Fairmont but adventured in her youth to Montana, raising a family near the west entrance to Yellowstone National Park. After her husband died, she returned, and now she is the development programs manager at the Northern West Virginia Brownfields Assistance Center. She oversees downtown redevelopment projects and initiatives.

In that capacity, she works most commonly with grassroots groups, of which there are many. "It's all about asset-based development," she says. "There is opportunity in West Virginia, there really is."

Allen Best writes about energy, water, and transportation from Denver.

Resources

The West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey has an interactive map of underground and surface mines. http://bit.ly/2rjQ9Jd