Monongalia County Republican Executive Committeeman, District 1

Precinct 16 Serves Voters in Morgantown’s Wiles Hill-Highland Park Neighborhood

Populations change, bounds change. Change is a common currency. It’s often said that elections have consequences, and we hold the same to be true for consolidations.

Morgantown’s Third Ward was once the Fourth Ward, which is why your property tax maps may be confusing; it’s also the reason our local community center, the former Wiles Hill School, is officially known as the Fourth Ward School.

The Wiles Hill Community Center where Precinct 16 voters cast our ballots is a byproduct of change in the form school consolidation, and the Wiles Hill-Highland Park neighborhood changed when Monongalia County Schools closed the building and moved classes (and students) to Suncrest and North elementary schools.

After the school closed, it took nearly a decade to rebuild a sense of community and place among neighbors. And, in 2014, the community faced another change that could have again gutted our community.

In 2014, as a result of WV HB 4473–relating to establishing voting precincts and changing the composition of standard receiving boards–local county clerks and county commissions were enabled to consolidate precincts.

Whereas the old law set minimums and maximums stating, “Each precinct within any urban center shall contain not less than three hundred nor more than one thousand five hundred registered voters,” the new law stated, “any precincts with polling places that are within a one mile radius of each other on or after July 1, 2014, may be consolidated, at the discretion of the county clerk and county commission, into one or more new precincts that contain not more than three thousand registered voters in any urban center, etc.”

A change was proposed by the Monongalia County Clerk to consolidate Precinct 16. Confronted with the threat and armed with knowledge, Wes Nugent, who at the time was elected as City Councilor from Morgantown’s Third Ward, led an effort to alert neighbors and encourage neighborhood and civic leaders petition county government officials to stop the proposed consolidation based on a geographic hardship that would have been created for voters to walk (or try to use public transit) to easily reach their polling place to cast ballots.

With help from neighbors, who included Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, a unified front was presented and we succeeded to preserve our precinct and keep our local polling place. The Monongalia County Commission amended the 2014 precinct consolidation order to exclude Precinct 16.