CHARLESTON, WV (WOWK) — Thousands of bills have been introduced this legislative session at the West Virginia State Capitol.
But which ones actually help people in the Mountain State? Minority leader Sean Hornbuckle says, “not many.”
“What we’ve seen thus far is what I call inefficiency in time management,” said Hornbuckle, who represents Cabell County. “We hope that the next 30 days will bring better legislation before us so we can go back to our districts and help people.”
Friday morning, delegates passed five House bills, including one that requires public school classroom sizes to be split as evenly as possible to have a better teacher to student ratio.
While Governor Morrisey has only signed three bills so far, and two more are waiting for his signature.
One bill is a ban on ranked choice voting. The other bill passed the Senate Friday and bans seven food dyes that are currently used in certain products sold in school meals and grocery stores.
Lawmakers plan to take on a couple more issues next week.
“We’re getting ready to take on child welfare reform. We know we can’t fix everything overnight but it’s important that we pass some incremental steps,” said Republican Del. Evan Worrell of Cabell County. “We have a lot of bills that are coming out of our health committee that will do that. At the end of 60 days, we’re going to say, ‘These are the things we’ve done to fix our child welfare and foster care crisis that’s going on.’ Additionally, we’re going to look at some outside of the box issues as well. We need to look at our drinking water quality standards in the state. As the House health chair, I want to focus on making West Virginia healthy. We need to look at drinking water. We’ve got a huge issue in the southern part of our state. We’re going to focus on some efforts there the rest of session as well.”
The last day to introduce new bills is Tuesday.
