Movin’ On Up

Imagine a farm with strong, suntanned workers plucking vegetables from long rows and placing them in crates. Behind a distant fence, pink and black pigs root and grunt. Row crops, in another direction, give way to fruit trees. It might make you think of California—but now, set it down in hardscrabble Mingo County, West Virginia.

“People don’t think of Mingo County as an agriculture-based economy—and rightfully so, because our land is on the side of a mountain,” says Steve Kominar, executive director of the Mingo County Redevelopment Authority (MCRA). “But Mingo County is the warmest county in West Virginia, so our season is extended somewhat. With some flat land and a few organic ingredients—cattle waste, hog waste, and all that—we can develop some tillable soil so we can grow crops. And that goes in concert with the mindset we’re trying to change for a healthy lifestyle.”

Southern West Virginia, in one frustrated view, should just be evacuated. The coal jobs the communities developed around have been drying up for years: Mines close one after another, and county unemployment rates hover stubbornly above the state average. The lush and dramatic landscape, more vertical than horizontal, isn’t even all that habitable. Most of the flat places big enough to build on are taken, and they’re only flat because they’re in the floodplains. Dank, airless downtowns cling to the lower hillsides. Roads sidle between stream banks and slopes. Getting water and sewer service to homes out in the hollows has been an expensive, many-decades undertaking, and it’s still not complete.

Truth be told, a passive evacuation is already well under way. The most coal-dependent southern counties have lost a quarter, a third, even half their populations since 1980. But giving in to evacuation disregards how deep roots can grow over generations. Residents feel attached to their homeplaces, challenges and all. What if, instead of defaulting to diaspora, they could pull off something entirely different?

“Road to nowhere” may come to mind as you read this story. Or, “If we flatten it, they will come.” But to talk with the proponents of the King Coal Highway is to hear the people of a down-and-out region dreaming together a huge and vivid opportunity to thrive. Like many stories of development in West Virginia, this story could devolve to an epic battle between environment and jobs. But, like many such stories, it may not have to.

Momentum from the Mind

How the King Coal Highway came to be is a study in how necessity begets inventiveness, and how inventiveness can beget pavement.

It goes back to the 1970s. Looking for an economic boost, the Greater Bluefield Chamber of Commerce hit on the idea of a better road to Huntington. Two-lane U.S. Route 52 along the southwestern flank of the state meandered beside river banks and snaked up and down mountainsides, a four-hour drive to go just 110 miles as the crow flies. The Bluefield group eventually found success by joining interstate transportation corridor efforts. In 1991 Congress recognized the value of an I-73/I-74 North-South Corridor connecting the Great Lakes and upper Midwest with the coast of the Carolinas, traversing West Virginia along U.S. 52, explains Mike Mitchem, who’s directed the state’s King Coal Highway Authority since soon after it was established in 1999. And in 1995 the corridor was designated the number five high priority corridor in the National Highway System. Funding for study and route design came in several chunks.

Since then? Not a lot. Given two national recessions and a general dearth of infrastructure funding, the most significant stretch that’s been built is 80 miles in North Carolina. The National I-73/I-74 Corridor Association disbanded in ’99, then formed again in 2007 to reinvigorate the project. Efforts continue: A meeting of a Virginia Senate committee on the Virginia portion was scheduled for November 10, 2014, in Martinsville, for example.

Efforts continue in West Virginia as well, where the corridor, conceived in two sections, would cut travel time between Bluefield and Huntington almost by half. The proposed 55-mile north-south Tolsia Highway between Huntington and U.S. Route 119, or Corridor G, near Williamson has three interchanges and a couple short stretches built now.

And then there’s the proposed 95-mile King Coal Highway between Corridor G at its western end and I-77 at Bluefield to the east. One might think a project bearing the charisma of King Coal could charm anything it needs from West Virginia’s coffers, but the recessions have taken their toll here, too. So far, the Bluefield originators of the concept have an interchange, a bridge, and a couple short sections.

And in Mingo County, there is proponents’ shining prototype of what this highway could do for southern West Virginia: the “Red Jacket” section of about 12 finished miles of breezy, sunny mountaintop thoroughfare.

Let’s Take a Drive

The Red Jacket section is best experienced by first driving the old valley road, along Pigeon Creek. Heading south out of Delbarton on two-lane U.S. 52, we see after three or four miles where the new road comes down off the mountain at the right. We follow 52 to the left for now, heading east through the valley. The narrow, shoulderless road winds between the creek, just below us on the right, and the hills that push up steeply beside the westbound lane. Homes dot the creek’s floodplain, some across small bridges that might be called “makeshift.” We’ll have to slow down—we’ve caught up with a log truck and there’s no way to pass.

To see this in Google Maps, search for Delbarton, then zoom out far enough to also see Gilbert to the east. Google labels this valley road 252/57 and the new, southerly parallel section 52 and King Coal Highway. In reality, locals call the valley road 52, as they’ve always done, and the mountaintop road the King Coal Highway—or, actually, the Mike Whitt Memorial Highway. More about Mike Whitt further down.

After about 10 winding miles, we turn right to take new pavement up Horsepen Mountain. The wide road curves gently upward and soon comes to a stop sign. To our left, construction to complete a three-mile extension of the Red Jacket section. We turn right onto the King Coal Highway itself: two broad lanes, with a roadbed already in place for another two lanes and a utility corridor down the center. We drive west past dramatic roadcuts, then enjoy expansive views over the central Appalachian hills and well into Kentucky. After a few miles we whiz by an athletic complex on our left, then Mingo Central High School, a 2011 consolidation of four high schools. These structures are clearly visible in Google Maps satellite view. A little farther on, a descent and a right turn take us back to Delbarton.

There may be roads like this in other places but, for valley-bound southern West Virginia, it’s a revelation. “It’s gorgeous. It’s very panoramic. I’ve been across it a thousand times and I’m still in awe,” says Kominar. The Mike Whitt Memorial Highway has reduced travel time between Gilbert and the county seat of Williamson from as much as an hour to 30 to 40 minutes, says MCRA Deputy Executive Director Leasha Johnson, and it’s much safer.

Take note: On that entire stretch, there are no bridges. “It’s unique for mountainous terrain, but that’s where the valley fills come in,” Kominar says proudly. “And when you talk about bridges you talk about a maintenance problem forever. It just works out so well.”

The Red Jacket section opened in 2011 and the school is the only active enterprise up there so far. But, luxuriating as they do on 90 flat acres the likes of which didn’t exist anywhere around before this land was mined, the school and its athletic complex have energized the county’s vision for post-mine flat-land development.

Mike Whitt, Maverick

And that goes back to Mike Whitt. “Mike had a vision for Mingo County that was simplistic, but so true,” says State Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Randy Huffman. He encountered Whitt in the late 1980s, when he was relatively new at the DEP and Whitt was a Mingo County delegate.

“Mike’s premise was, ‘We cannot begin to revitalize the economy of Mingo County as long as it’s nasty,’” Huffman recalls. “‘The first thing we’re going to do is clean up the garbage.’ If you traveled in Mingo County in that period, you’d appreciate what he was up against. I helped with landfill tipping money, and he cleaned up over 400 illegal garbage dumps in Mingo County and it has stayed relatively clean. There was a change of mindset that had to take place.”

Changing mindsets was one approach Whitt brought to economic development. Spending OPM was another. “That’s Other People’s Money,” Huffman says. Whitt became the first director of the MCRA in 1990 and, as the King Coal Highway concept developed over the following decade, he put OPM to work. “Mike hooked up with Don Nicewonder, a coal guy,” he says. “They wanted to move all this material to mine coal. Mike’s point was, why move it twice?” Whitt and Nicewonder worked with landholding company Pocahontas Land and the permitting agencies to get the Red Jacket section permitted as a highway project, with permission to mine the coal that incidentally became available to offset the cost. Nicewonder would leave the surface as rough road grade and the state would come through and pave.

“When Federal Highway Administrator Mary Peters visited in May 2004 for the groundbreaking, she said it was one of the most innovative partnerships in transportation she’d ever seen,” MCRA’s Johnson says. “The cost to the state of West Virginia and the federal government of constructing and paving the 12-mile section of the King Coal Highway under that public-private partnership was $65 million, which represented a savings of about $290 million.” There’s not enough public money anywhere to cover the $28 to $32 million it takes these days to build new highways in this topography, Kominar says. “Public-private partnerships are a unique way of doing it, and that’s exactly what Mike Whitt pulled off.”

Whitt succumbed to a long illness in 2011, not many weeks after the Red Jacket section opened to traffic. He’s remembered for his clean-ups and for his instrumental role in creating the Hatfield-McCoy off-road trail system, but he’s probably most dearly remembered for the section of road now named for him. Coal mine companies and county economic developers don’t always work so well together, Huffman says. “The way that gets done is to have a maverick like Mike Whitt.”

Building on Whitt’s Legacy

Figuring prominently in the county’s plans is the TransGas Development Systems plant that was proposed in 2008 to turn regional coal to 18,000 barrels of gasoline per day. Permitting challenges and the slow economy have put the plant behind its 2013 and revised 2015 opening dates, but Kominar says the developers are moving forward. Located on a post-mine site near the Red Jacket section, the plant would employ thousands during construction and perhaps 300 permanently, in a county where 800 or 900 are currently out of work. Related enterprises would locate in the surrounding area and employ hundreds more.

Where would all those workers live? The MCRA thinks a nearby 1,300-acre post-mine site is perfect for a planned community. “It’s going to have some nice apartments, lower-priced starter homes for younger married folks, working-class housing for the middle incomes, and I think some more expensive housing out on some of the edges,” Kominar says. The community would be unified through walking trails, greenspace, and a central shopping district. This would be a place where people could move up out of the floodplain, he says, and where children educated out of the area could return, and where workers at new enterprises could live. “There’s not a demand for this now,” he says, “but if this coal-to-liquids plant was announced tomorrow, we’d be behind.”

The MCRA is also excited about the potential for distribution. A new industrial runway built recently on post-mine land near the highway could work well with the Heartland Intermodal Gateway that will serve doublestack trains some 50 miles away at Prichard beginning in 2015—and, of course, with the entire I-73/I-74 corridor.

But what gives all this real power is that the MCRA isn’t alone in envisioning solutions to the county’s problems. “We have a lot of diabetes, hypertension, obesity, all those factors, and we started identifying stakeholders and assets in the county and ways to work together,” says Donovan Beckett. A Williamson native who went away to West Virginia University and the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine, Beckett felt called back home a decade ago to make a difference. He started a free clinic in 2011 and later expanded it into a Federally Qualified Health Center.

Collaborations Beckett has helped instigate have brought about a farmers’ market in Williamson that expanded in each of its first four seasons and, in 2014, added a mobile market that visits other parts of the county; they’ve established a community garden that has 42 beds and a waiting list. Their Lunch Walk Program for getting people moving has been adopted by a clinic in Marin County, California, and their monthly 5K that at first attracted 20 or 30 people now gets 300.

This is what Kominar meant when he referred to farming as part of a healthy lifestyles vision for the county—it’s not lip service, it’s a many-faceted effort that has real momentum. “We plan on developing our economy based on agriculture as much as we can,” Beckett says. “We’re working with veterans to start getting them some agricultural training on these sites next year and develop entrepreneurship skills and create ways for them to make a living.” He mentions an earlier pilot program that developed a grape, peach, and apple orchard on post-mine land. “It’s a perfect case study of what we want to do—turn agriculture into an economy.”

The three-mile leg of the highway that’s still under construction will open access to a post-mine section where these leaders envision bee-friendly species on the steep slopes, orchards on the walkable slopes, and animals and crops on about 2,000 acres at the top. “We can build an agricultural park there second to none,” Kominar says.

The highway, and the developable spaces near it, are fundamental to that vision.