Tom Bloom, the president of the Monongalia County Commission, thinks he's found the answer to the budget problems plaguing counties across the state - county home rule.
Other officials aren't so sure.
"Only a moron would come up with that," said Kent Carper, the president of the Kanawha County Commission. "Look at our smaller counties. They can barely keep the lights on in the courthouse."
Home rule, a program that gives local governments autonomy from the state government, allowing them to enact policies specific to a city's need, is currently available to 26 cities in West Virginia under a pilot program.
The pilot program has also served as a way for cities to raise revenue as state funds are cut, usually via a sales tax. Bloom wants in on the cash. He's adamant about having that program expanded so that counties can opt in as well.
"We have unique problems and we have a lot of outside people coming in, using our services and leaving and they're not paying their fair share," Bloom said. "So we need to come up with a mechanism. And that is really the only mechanism right now that we can come up with."
Monongalia County is in the north-central part of the state, a region that has seen growth while the southern part of the state, like Kanawha County, has seen a steady decline in population over the past 20 years.
Because the counties vary so much in size, there is a fear that if some of the larger counties were successful raising revenue under home rule, the legislature might start shifting the tax burden onto counties.
"Right now I'm not sure that there's interest from a whole lot of counties to be added to the pilot program," said Patti Hamilton, the executive director of the West Virginia Association of Counties. "There's some concern that it's a means of shifting taxation authority to counties that may be better suited to a statewide source of revenue."
For Bloom, the differences in economy for the 55 counties in the state are a reason that certain counties should be able to exercise home rule. But for Carper, it's a potential threat to the finances of the smaller counties.
Sales tax is the most common way that cities have raised revenue through home rule. Currently, the cities are allowed to enact a maximum 1 percent sales tax, only if they reduce or eliminate their business and operations tax.
For most counties, the majority of the businesses are in municipalities, not in the unincorporated areas of a county. So for a county to impose a sales tax, there's the potential that it would be in addition to a sales tax that a city has already put into place.
In Monongalia county, the fourth largest county in West Virginia, only Morgantown is in the home rule pilot program and they have not implemented a home rule tax. In Kanawha county, five cities are under home rule and three of them have some kind of sales tax.
"I do not think it is a good idea to create more taxes that no one's ever heard of before in the state of West Virginia," Carper said. "It'll start out as this little 1-percent sales tax, the next thing you know you'll have a county income tax."
To Bloom, the fact that some counties don't want it shouldn't matter. The plan for the program that Delegate Joe Statler, R-Monongalia County, wants to introduce to the legislature would make it so that counties had a choice whether or not they wanted to opt in.
"If they don't want it, I don't see anything wrong with that," Bloom said. "But give the opportunity for those counties that are interested in looking at its problems, its concerns and trying to find the people in that community to come up with answers."
On the city level, where it's also an opt-in program, the cities who have opted for home rule have enjoyed it.
"The beauty of home rule as a true philosophy is that it's not an empowerment of government," said Lisa Dooley, the executive director of the West Virginia Municipal League. "It's an empowerment of the citizens of local government."
The pilot program has been expanded since it started in 2007 and some ideas that were generated in home rule cities have been adopted by the legislature and expanded statewide.
However, there is a difference in the structure of county and city governments. Every county commission in the state, excluding Jefferson County, has the same format, with three county commissioners.
Cities have much more leeway. They get to decide the type of city council and mayor that they want. In Charleston, there are 26 members in the city council. In Nitro, a city in the same county, there's only seven.
While cities tend to write and pass ordinances, almost like a smaller version of the legislature, counties tend to just carry out the orders from the state, basically as an extension of the state government.
"Our duties are so different from cities that there's some concerns that it's not fully applicable and hasn't really been planned out as to what exactly home rule would apply to in counties," Hamilton said.
In Bloom's eyes, the concerns are unfounded. The biggest reason he thinks that counties don't support home rule is because they're trying to stifle the growth of the north.
"It used to be a Democrat versus Republican problem in the state of West Virginia," Bloom said. "Now we're having the southern part of state versus the northern part of the state. Each have unique problems. And it appears that the southern part doesn't want to allow us to grow and, with the excess, come back and fix the problems in the south."
Reach Dan Desrochers at dan.desrochers@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-4886 or follow @drdesrochers on Twitter.