Off Blog Post - A Lament for Morgantown WV
19th March 2008
Melanie and I moved to West Virginia and Morgantown in 1985. She hired on as an assistant professor and I as a doctoral research assistant in the Department of Communication Studies at WVU. While WVU had big time Division I sports in football and basketball, it was in other respects a nice little university and Morgantown was a nice little university town. While the geography of the mountains and hills makes travel slower and more difficult compared to, say, Lawrence, Kansas, you could easily get around town in just a few minutes. It was a great little place.
But, some people couldn’t keep the secret.
We started showing up on those damn surveys as being among the most “livable” small cities in America. (Here’s a recent WVU press release describing this.) And, then our senior Senator, Robert Byrd became the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations committee. Money and people came pouring into our most livable little city and have destroyed it.
Two recent crime stories illustrate. A women has been indicted on Federal charges for running a large prostitution ring in Morgantown and several men connected with a drug operation in a local student bar have also been indicted in Federal court.
Now, I’m not arguing that before the world found out about Morgantown things like prostitution and drugs were unheard of. Of course not. This is 21st century America. Illegal sex and drugs occur everwhere. The big deal here is that the crimes have become Federal rather than local or state crimes. There’s enough money here now that truly evil people want to come here.
It grows worse with density and crowding every day. And, it’s affecting peoples’ judgment. Our Board of County Commissioners devised one of the craziest government plans for handling traffic congestion in Morgantown that required a 30 year “service fee” of approximately $100 a year for fulltime workers in the county. The tax would have raised literally hundreds of millions of dollars with no serious project plan for controlling the spending. It was small government run amok. Our governor, Mr. Joe Manchin, did PSAs for TV extolling the virtues of this service fee. All the smart people, including a lot of new folks at WVU talked it up.
It got voted down with nearly 80% rejecting the proposed fee. That’s not a typo. Nearly 80% of the voters voted against the fee in one of the worst electoral beatings I’ve heard of in my lifetime.
I want to believe that this is the beginning of the end of the stupid growth in my great little university town. The big test will occur when Mr. Byrd is no longer on the Appropriations Committee. Right now, the growth in this town is largely driven by public tax dollars and not by private capital in the free market. In other words, it is a supply driven economy rather than a demand driven economy. When that public money goes away, will there be enough infrastructure to keep growing?
In the meantime, growth continues for the foreseeable future changing what once was a nice little town into a crowded, overhyped, sprawl of people.