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Road Poll: Road repairs may not help Justice campaign

Some old-timers with the West Virginia Division of Highways understood years ago that gubernatorial election years meant good paydays. Most incumbent chief executives understood that the more potholes voters had to bounce and crash through on their way to polling places, the less likely they were to want to keep current state officials in office.

So, in the months leading up to a gubernatorial election, DOH employees were likely to be earning more overtime pay than normal, as they hustled to repair roads.

That phenomenon is on display this year, as Gov. Jim Justice engages in a crash program to repair secondary roads. The problem is, it may not be working for him.

With the summer construction season drawing to a close, many Mountain State residents are not happy with the progress they are seeing, a new public opinion poll has disclosed. The MetroNews West Virginia Poll found “members of the voting public are not satisfied with what they’re seeing in their primary and secondary roads,” Rex Repass, president of Research America Inc., told MetroNews. His firm conducted the poll, of 501 registered voters.

Repass reported two-thirds of poll respondents expressed some dissatisfaction with the road repair campaign. A whopping 42 percent said they were very dissatisfied.

Justice certainly is entitled to point out the deplorable condition of many secondary roads and bridges did not materialize overnight. Getting our highways and byways back into reasonable shape will take time and money.

But Justice took office in January 2017. The summers of that year and 2018 passed without the major, cost-intensive push to repair roads that is occurring now. Why didn’t the Justice administration tackle the problem sooner?

DOH veterans may have an answer to that: In 2017 and 2018, there was no re-election campaign on the horizon.

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