Steve Williams turned Huntington around. Now he wants to give West Virginia a try

When Huntington Mayor Steve Williams took his oath of office on Christmas Eve 2012, he inherited a Rust Belt town with a long list of challenges.

Storefronts were boarded up. Drug overdoses were on the rise.  A pack of stray dogs menaced the streets for a few years.  Accounting of the city’s books showed the finances were going up – belly up.

Even Pullman Square, one of the anchor points for a fledgling downtown resurgence, had floundered.

But nearly 12 years later, Huntington is thriving. The city not only got the books straight, it improved the bond rating. The services for substance abuse have expanded.

And the pack of dogs is gone.

Now, Williams, who led many of these improvements, is mounting an uphill campaign as a Democratic candidate for governor. With a crowded field of well-known Republicans fighting it out, Williams has so far been more of a side note in the political chatter.

Now, with his opponent – Attorney General Patrick Morrisey – clinching the nomination, Williams moves into the spotlight as the two head for a November showdown.

In the primary, Morrisey pitched himself as a conservative fighter and ran on his record of going toe-to-toe with Democratic presidential administrations.

But Williams says he’s got one thing that neither Morrisey nor any of the GOP hopefuls had.

“I’ve done it and they haven’t,” Williams said. “I have been doing this every day since Jan. 1, 2013.”

But Morrisey has something Williams hasn’t – he’s run statewide campaigns before. His name is known throughout the state, especially in the populous Eastern Panhandle, where he resides.

And he’s got the money. Coming into the general election, he has nearly $700,000 in reserves. Williams has enough to buy a gently used Subaru Forester.

Not a ‘sound bites guy’

As the general election campaign starts, in an era of slick ads and social media,

Williams says he’s not a “sound bites guy.”  When asked to set aside 45 minutes for an interview, he cleared his afternoon schedule, and talked for twice that long .

He’s a man of qualifiers. Many politicians leave their statements as is, but he’s quick to throw in some nuance.

Right after he says he’s been doing the job for nearly 12 years, he quickly adds, “the only thing I’m not dealing with is the education system.”

But he’s clear on one thing – he’s a fiscal conservative.

Part of getting Huntington’s finances in order was making some tough decisions. For instance, Williams said they started accounting various retirement reserves into the city’s finances, resulting in a bond rating increase. Some employees got laid off; others were outright fired.

The city’s health insurance needed rejiggered – retirees were put on a Medicare Advantage Plan, a move Williams said resulted in them “screaming like stuck pigs.”

As the checkbook got balanced, Williams said he was able to get city workers raises – nearly 50% over his time in office. The fire and police pensions – an albatross for many a municipality – are in the black.

“I’ve made some hard decisions and folks stuck with me,” Williams said. “We’ve been able to be successful.”

Morrisey proposes cutting taxes to the bone to spur growth. But Williams said the government plays a role, becoming “a partner, not an inhibitor.” He said the government should invest in top of the line roads, broadband, sewer and water systems to attract companies.

“Maybe what we need to do is make sure rather than giving away, eliminating all our taxes to where we can’t afford to do anything, maybe we ought to just be as aggressive as hell and make sure that what we are doing is gleaming, brand spanking new,” he said.

To Williams, who made his living as a financial advisor, West Virginia is locked in a global competition, not the “backyard brawl” with neighboring states Morrisey has touted.

“Why would we ever shoot so low?” Williams said. “No. We’ve got to compete with the other side of the world.”

When the seam opens up

Williams is a football nut. His face lights up when he recounts his beloved Baltimore Colts defeating the Dallas Cowboys in the 1971 Super Bowl. And he shakes his head when he talks about the team’s move to Indianapolis.

Behind his desk in his corner office at City Hall sits a shelf filled with city accolades.

And footballs. And football trophies. And Marshall gear.

From 1974 to 1978, Williams played at Marshall as a part of the young Thundering Herd, during the rebuilding of the program after the 1970 plane crash.

A block north from his office is the mayor’s biggest trophy: the downtown entertainment district.

Today, restaurants, bars and boutiques line the streets. During the summer evenings, the blocks are filled with patrons and musical acts.

Williams said development downtown is part planning, then part action.

“All the years I was playing ball, there were sometimes that you’d be able to move immediately, when a seam opened up,” Williams said. “That’s very much what we have to do here – know where you’re wanting to go, but be prepared to act immediately.”

Since taking office, Williams had a goal to cut the business and occupation tax entirely. When COVID hit, the seam opened. The city piloted the cut first in the downtown area, before expanding it citywide.

“We thought we were going to lose $2 million, we ended up making about $3 million,” he said.

Talking about the city’s progress, Williams circles back over and over to one word: collaboration.

“As you’re communicating and you’re collaborating, you start building partnerships and establish trust, you know what the outcome of all this is? Hope,” Williams said.

The downtown renaissance was a direct result of collaboration, Williams said. Out-of-state owners, who kept properties as part of an investment portfolio, were encouraged to sell to locals. Those locals, in turn, invested into the city.

When Pullman Square was put up for sale in 2020, the city put in a bid and bought it.

Adam Culver, a local teacher who has lived in the area for 20 years, said Williams’ team approach has paid off.

“It’s not perfect, but the trend is upwards,” Culver said. “ I believe that’s not quite because Mayor Williams is some godsend, but because he is smart enough to surround himself with good, intelligent people who want to help the community.”

Councilwoman Tia “Fix” Rumbaugh likens Williams to the “captain of the ship.”

Sitting in a French-inspired cafe at Huntington’s Heritage Station – a collection of shops in an old train station commemorating the town’s railroad origins – Rumbaugh, who has represented the downtown district since 2020, said if something doesn’t align with the mayor’s vision “you might as well throw it overboard.”

“If you want something big and monumental to change how the city does business … you have to have the endorsement of Mayor Williams behind it to make sure that the wind is behind the sails of that project,” she said.“Otherwise, it will be calm waters and no wind. Your boat is not going to go anywhere.”

‘Oh God, that was hard’

Bertie Gillette sits on her front stoop in the West End of Huntington, pulling weeds out of the crack of her walkup.

She’s lived off-and-on in the area for 60 plus years, and she’s seen the toll of the drug crisis.

She even had to turn her own kids out on account of the drugs that pervaded the streets.

“I told them, see that road? Hit it. If you’re going to do drugs, hit it. Oh God, that was hard,” she said.

In a city that for years has been stacking trackmarked bodies from drug overdoses,  Gillette’s story is fairly commonplace.

As the drug epidemic raged in Huntington, so did the growth in recovery resources.

A few blocks from Gillette’s front door is the administrative offices for Recovery Point, a rehabilitation program that’s been operating since the early 2010s. Director Reggie Jones said Williams has largely been “a friend to recovery.”

But it hasn’t been easy – Jones described the relationship between the city and recovery home operators as “a little contentious” at times.

“Overall, I think the mayor has been positive for recovery, and has been willing to entertain our concerns and help us work through issues and we try to be the same for the city,” Jones said.

One of the big concerns is people coming in from out of state to seek recovery in Huntington. Sometimes, they wash out and wind up on the streets.

But Jones is quick to point out that there are positive cases too, people who graduated from a recovery program, set roots in the city and go on to be productive and tax-paying citizens.

For a sober living home to open in Huntington, Williams said it needs to be inspected by police, fire and code enforcement. Then it’s up to just one signature: his.

“I have no problems with individuals opening sober living houses or treatment facilities, so long as they are doing it to help people heal,” Williams said. “But there are some that are doing it for all the wrong reasons.”

Williams said Huntington had to rely on itself to combat the opioid epidemic. He described an effort between nonprofits, churches, the university, the city and the two hospitals to help stave the suffering.

And even with all that, it’s still not enough – a trip in the southern or western blocks of downtown will reveal homeless encampments. The problem still exists in Huntington, as it does across the state.

That’s partially why the city went its own way in seeking damages in the opioid lawsuits. While Morrisey settled other cases for nearly $1 billion, Williams said he believes Huntington and Cabell County’s decision to go it alone will ultimately pay off.

That case resulted in a loss at trial and is now on appeal.

“We’ll get a boatload more than what we’d get through the current distribution that is occurring,” he said. “We felt that if we are ground zero, then let’s make sure that we’re setting a standard that the rest of the nation will be able to follow.”

So far, Morrisey hasn’t gone into too many details on how he’ll handle the state’s drug abuse crisis. He says he’ll use the West Virginia First Foundation to leverage more money from the private sector. And Morrisey as governor would use his position to put pressure on the federal government to crack down on fentanyl.

‘We don’t put up with this’

Williams is pretty socially progressive, at least for a West Virginia politician. As Rumbaugh put it, Williams holds views “you wouldn’t necessarily expect an old white dude to have.”

While Morrisey’s campaign has vilified transgendered West Virginians and supported continuing the state’s ban on abortion, Williams has largely been supportive of LGBTQ+ and women’s health rights.

Under his watch, the city launched in the “Open to All” campaign, to promote inclusivity across the city’s businesses, churches and nonprofits.

“Anybody who seeks to marginalize individuals because they don’t look like you or they have a lifestyle that is different from yours or there are certain things that are present in their life that we don’t understand and can’t be defined,” Williams said. “Anybody that seeks to marginalize those individuals, as far as I’m concerned, they don’t have a place here.”

“We don’t put up with this,” he added.

Williams called for abortion rights to be put up to a referendum in the state, something his Republican counterparts have rejected. But when asked point blank whether or not he’s pro-choice or pro-life, Williams said “I’m neither.”

“I respect the individual freedom of women to be able to make the decision that is right for them and their family and their life,” he said.

Throughout his campaign, Morrisey has billed himself as the most conservative, the most pro-Trump and most pro-coal of all the Republican candidates. Partisanship, for Morrisey, has been a point of honor.

Williams said while he’s a proud Democrat, for him party and ideological purity doesn’t matter.

“I had two letters after my name, Steve Williams: West Virginian,” Williams said. “That’s it.”

Steve Williams turned Huntington around. Now he wants to give West Virginia a try appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight , West Virginia's civic newsroom.