CHARLESTON, WV — Gov. Jim Justice issued the following statement on May 21st, after the conclusion of a special session in which the West Virginia Legislature passed all 15 bills listed on his call.

“I have been extremely disappointed in the behavior of a few of our legislators over the last few days. 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. 

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. At the end of the day, again, we won for all our kids in this Great State.

From Roads to Prosperity, to all the tax cuts we’ve been able to get done–including the largest reduction in the personal income tax in history–to ensuring our counties have the funding they need for local services, to all the businesses we’ve been able to locate here, we as West Virginians have won again and again.

I’ve only got a short time left as your Governor, and we’ve got to make sure we stop the rhetoric that can absolutely destroy the good that we’ve already achieved.

If the rhetoric from a few members wasn’t bad enough, the special interests and the lobbyists came in and tried to hijack things that could have truly hurt our people. I will always stand rock solid with all the people that need the Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities Waiver–I was the Governor that cleared the waitlist. And I’ll go on record now and say that we need even more funding for our most vulnerable. 

My proposed budget–what we were fighting for and what we’ve won–stood up for kids, veterans, and the elderly. We’ve minded the store since day one, we’ve brought economic development projects all over the State, and that’s what I recommend our future governors should do, as well.”