MARTINSBURG, W.Va. — Berkeley County Commissioner John Hardy joined Metronews Talkline Tuesday and began with an update on SSgt. Andrew Wolfe, the injured national guardsman and Eastern Panhandle native.
“I thank everybody in the state, everybody across the country that’s been praying for the Wolfe family. Andrew is attached to the 167th Air Wing, which is here in Berkeley County. His father, Jason is a 19-year veteran of the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Department and also a lifelong friend of mine,” Hardy said, adding that he and Jason Wolfe have known each other since kindergarten.
Hardy gave the latest update available of that day which continues to demonstrate remarkable progress. “Jason just posted a little update this morning that said Andrew was actually up on his feet twice today with a little bit of assistance,” Hardy said.
“God is good. Thank you everyone for for reaching out.”
Hardy was asked about how Berkeley County officials are managing growth. He put into perspective how many new homes are built each year in the county.
“Well, you know, we’ve had such a huge influx in, in such a short period of time, we’ve been averaging somewhere between on a low side, 1,400 new homes a year, on the high side, 1600 new homes,” Hardy said.
“And that’s been going on for the past 10 years, maybe 12 years. So we’re just growing at such a rapid rate.”
“Our infrastructure is just pushed to the limit. I sit on about eight different boards in the county,” Hardy explained. “The water board, we just took one of our plants from 6,000,000 gallons a day to 10 million gallons a day. We’re constantly looking for capacity in sewer.
Hardy gave staffing numbers for emergency services.
“We have 84 paid EMS staff in the county with 12 advanced life support ambulances on the go all the time. We have 72 deputy sheriffs, 48 paid fire staff in five of our Volunteer Fire houses. So we use our Volunteer Fire houses, but we have paid County Fire staff in those houses and we have a 24-hour fully staffed 911 facility,” Hardy explained, adding, “Those pressures are real to make sure that we are serving the taxpayers of Berkeley County with the emergency services that are needed.”
Berkeley County is currently the state’s fastest growing county, with more than 136,000 residents.
As to what he believes is the county’s greatest challenge, Hardy said, “Where we’re really, really having problems is with our roads,” Hardy said. “The new governor has been good. We’ve got some projects that are in the works up here. We’ve had a lot of paving going on, but we are probably at least ten years behind on our infrastructure for roads, for turn lanes, de-acceleration lanes, roundabouts, lights.”
“What we really need is some new roads. We need not to just expand what we have, but we need to put some new routes in, bypasses.”
Berkeley County, like the rest of the Eastern Panhandle, has to compete for job prospects with some of the wealthiest counties in the nation in neighboring Virginia and Maryland.
He talked about the challenge to offer competitive wages. “We don’t have very many state troopers. We only have 17 state troopers to take care of 135,000 constituents in Berkeley County,” Hardy said. “We probably should have about 42 troopers.”
“Department of Highways workers, we we have 17 workers. I believe we have 43 slots,” Hardy said, saying that having CPS workers has “always been a challenge” “That’s a very tough job and doesn’t pay very well. We’ve gotten our jails kind of under control with some legislation that was for critical needs but we just really struggle in those areas.”
This week, House Speaker Roger Hanshaw mentioned the idea of locality pay once more as a way to recruit and retain state employees. “It will be part of the conversation. It always is. We’ve started down that road before. We’ll no doubt be talking about it again,” Hanshaw said.
“We know that we are still understaffed with certified qualified teachers in many of the classrooms in West Virginia,” Hanshaw said, calling the situation unfortunate and and unacceptable.
“We’re not competitive in some jurisdictions of West Virginia with surrounding counties. Particularly in that, that Washington, DC metro area locality pay has been a tricky one for us,” he said, adding, “We’ve never been able to get consensus around exactly what it means and how it should be implemented.”
“But we’ll no doubt be talking about it again,” he said.
