Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Debts dogging gubernatorial candidate
W.Va. businessman owes millions as counties struggle
HINDMAN, Ky. — Jim Justice, a coal billionaire running for West Virginia governor, owes millions in back taxes to some of Appalachia’s most impoverished counties, including one in Kentucky that is struggling to pay the debt on a new rec center and has turned the lights off in its parks and reduced hot meals for senior citizens.
Many of these counties have been devastated by the collapse of the coal industry over the past few years, and their financial struggles are not all Justice’s fault.
But county officials say things would be a lot easier if he paid up.
“It’s just absurd that a billionaire wouldn’t pay his taxes,” fellow Democrat Zach Weinberg, the top elected official in Kentucky’s Knott County, said as he thumbed through a folder of Justice’s debts.
Justice, who is leading in the polls, makes no apologies for the debt owed by some of his coal companies, saying he is doing everything he can to keep his businesses running and workers employed.
One of the biggest chunks of money owed is in Knott County, where Justice has unpaid taxes of $2.3 million dating to tax year 2014. That’s a substantial hole, given the county government’s $10 million budget and its separate $23 million school budget.
Justice has other unpaid tax bills scattered across the hills and hollows of eastern Kentucky: $1.2 million in Pike County, $500,000 in Floyd County, $228,300 in Magoffin County and $167,600 in Harlan County, according to county officials.
A recent National Public Radio report compiled a list of Justice company debts, including back taxes and mine safety fines totaling $15 million.
At the same time, Justice — the richest man in West Virginia, with a fortune estimated at $1.56 billion by Forbes magazine — has spent almost $2.6 million of his own money on his campaign.
His opponent, Republican Bill Cole, has made an issue of Justice’s bills, saying the businessman is putting counties at risk. “They don’t need the money in a year or two years from now,” Cole said during a recent debate. “They need it right now.”
Justice has cast his efforts to keep his mines open in heroic terms.
“I didn’t declare bankruptcy, did I?” he said when asked about his unpaid debts at the debate. “You saw every great coal company in the world belly up. They stiffed everybody. I just kept digging.”
As recently as five years ago, Knott County had about 1,000 miners producing some 5 million tons of coal a year and could count on $8 million to $9 million per year in mining-related taxes.
In those heady times, the county built a 66,000square-foot sports and activity center on top of a former mine.
Now, the county doesn’t have a single working mine, unemployment is around 10 percent — more than twice the national average — and the county still owes $6 million on the sportsplex.
“We’re trying to do everything we can to keep the doors open, to provide services to keep the roads up, to keep the jail going, to keep the dogs off the road,” said Weinberg, the county’s judge executive.
In the meantime, the county is trying to save money by shutting off the lights at 10 parks and substituting cheaper cold meals once a week for senior citizens who depend on food deliveries.