State ethics rules seldom prevent lawmakers from proposing or voting on legislation that affects industries they work for.
by Ken Ward Jr. and Kate Mishkin, The Charleston Gazette-Mail
This article was produced in partnership with the Charleston Gazette-Mail, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.
Toward the end of this year’s legislative session, a little-noticed bill
was moving through the West Virginia House of Delegates to limit legal
challenges that had slowed new natural gas-fired power plants in the
state.
Delegate Roger Hanshaw, a Republican lawyer from Clay County who was
serving as vice chairman of the Judiciary Committee, took to the floor
to explain the legislation.
“This bill is a little inside baseball to practitioners of
environmental law in West Virginia,” explained Hanshaw, a supporter of
the bill.
It wasn’t the first time that Hanshaw engaged in some pretty effective legislative inside baseball on energy bills.
Last year, Hanshaw engineered passage of a bill
that gave natural gas companies a broad exemption from chemical tank
safety standards that West Virginia put in place after a 2014 spill that
contaminated drinking water for 300,000 people.
Hanshaw was elected speaker in late August, succeeding Tim Armstead, who is now a justice on the West Virginia Supreme Court. Hanshaw is expected to be re-elected
speaker in January. In the position, Hanshaw wields significant control
over which bills are called up for votes and which are sent to
committees to effectively die.
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Source: ProPublica
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