Coal billionaire announces run for West Virginia governor
West Virginia billionaire, Jim Justice announced that he is running for governor of the state. Justice has spent his career at the helm of his family’s coal and agriculture businesses and said he would take an annual salary of $1 if he is elected.
The jump into the political sphere is a departure for the 64-year-old, who has never held elected office and coaches high school basketball in his spare time. While his recent clashes with other companies and regulators have received some attention, he is best known for restoring the Greenbrier, a resort in the southeast corner of the state that hosts a PGA tournament in July and attracts celebrities year-round, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The West Virginia GOP wasted little time launching a website attacking Justice who changed his political affiliation to Democrat from Republican in February. The site said Justice had received special tax breaks and had been “bad for coal safety and the environment.”
“The Democratic Party in West Virginia is desperate. They looked for the biggest checkbook in the state and they found Jim Justice,” said Conrad Lucas, chair of the state GOP.
Justice said he would help address the painful coal industry downturn and added, “we’ve got to do more than just coal.”
Political experts said an opening for Justice to run was created when Sen. Joe Manchin, a popular Democrat, announced in April that he would remain in Washington rather than run for governor, an office he held from 2005 to 2010. Democrat Earl Ray Tomblin, who currently holds the post, has reached his term limit.
It is not yet clear where Justice stands on many policy issues and how he will differentiate himself, not only from Republicans but from his Democratic rival as well.
West Virginia faces a host of problems, including the steep loss of coal mining jobs and related tax revenue. The state has the lowest worker participation rate in the country and regularly leads the nation in overdoses amid widespread prescription-drug abuse.
Justice is the only full-time West Virginia resident listed on the ranking of billionaires by Forbes magazine, which estimates his fortune at $1.7 billion. After college, he started working in his family’s coal and grain businesses. When his father died, he inherited the operations, including Bluestone Coal Corp. In 2009, he sold some coal operations in West Virginia to Mechel, a Russian company. He bought back some coal operations in February. His coal mines today operate under the privately held James C. Justice Cos.
Justice will have to withstand attacks that include assertions that his companies in some cases failed to pay contractors, as has been alleged in lawsuits in the past several years, and his companies’ environmental records.
Justice’s coal operations had more 250 outstanding violations at one point last year, according to Chris Holmes, a spokesman for the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. But he said that Mr. Justice has paid about $2.2 million in civil penalties. As of February, he had abated nearly all of the violations.
