Editorial voices from elsewhere
Editorial voices from newspapers across the country:
Some support President Donald Trump’s plan to roll back a perceived regulatory assault on coal and affordable electricity.
But some federal initiatives on mining make sense.
One is a proposed $1 million study on the health effects of living near a surface mine. The Interior Department had planned to have the research conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
But now, officials at the National Academies are being told to shelve the study. Budget considerations have been cited.
Indeed, the government needs to stop spending money like a drunken sailor. But this could be an important study – and it is not one commissioned in an attempt to harm the coal industry. It was actually requested by West Virginia officials in 2015.
A scientific, objective study could balance claims by some that people living near any coal mine are at risk. If not, we ought to know it. And if the claims have any basis in fact, we ought to know that, too.
Trump should allow the study to proceed. Getting at the truth is important.
Regulators don’t often decide to regulate less. Yet the state liquor commission is attempting to do just that. It wants to open competition in the liquor store industry, and that effort serves well consumers who have suffered under the monopolistic system now in place.
The Michigan Liquor Control Commission proposes to eliminate a rule that limits liquor stores from operating within half a mile of each other. It’s an archaic regulation that’s been in place since 1979, stifling competition and discouraging newcomers from entering the industry.
The commission argues that rescinding the half-mile rule once and for all will clear the muddy waters surrounding liquor license quotas and regulations on distance parameters, which should have been straightened out by a 2016 law governing beer and wine sales at gas stations, but apparently wasn’t.
Why the state government needs to be this involved in the allocation of liquor in the first place is a subject worthy of debate.
Other states are more market driven. But the liquor lobby in Michigan is powerful, and tight state control serves the interests of those who already hold licenses.
The government shouldn’t be crowding out new businesses in the name of protecting the profits of existing business owners. The market will prove an effective regulator of the density of liquor stores. New business owners aren’t going to open up where there aren’t enough available customers to sustain them.
If a community is opposed to more liquor licenses or stores opening within its borders, that’s a matter for local government to sort out. The state doesn’t need a one-size-fits-all approach to controlling where every bottle of liquor is sold.
Brighter prospects for West Virginia are growing from the gigantic supply of Marcellus Shale natural gas in northern counties.
U.S. Methanol just held a ceremony to mark the establishment of an Institute plant promising 300 temporary construction jobs, followed by 50 permanent jobs, turning gas into feedstock for chemicals. Production is projected to start by the middle of next year. It’s a boost for the Kanawha Valley.
Meanwhile, researchers at West Virginia University are pushing an Appalachian Storage Hub that would save vast amounts of gas in vacant underground cavities, to be extracted for chemical manufacturing or fuel.
And thousands of jobs can be gained in building pipelines to carry West Virginia gas to East Coast markets.
Doddridge County Assessor David Sponaugle said gas drilling mostly caused his county’s assessed property valuation to triple from $457 million in 2010 to nearly $1.4 billion in 2017.
West Virginia needs all the new jobs and prosperity it can find.