A funny thing happened in the West Virginia Department of Agriculture when Kent Leonhardt took office earlier this year, but state taxpayers aren’t laughing.
The new Commissioner of Agriculture reports he found tens of thousands of state-owned potatoes in a warehouse, rotting away.
Why, one might ask, did the state own tens of thousands of potatoes in the first place? It seems the previous Commissioner of Agriculture, Democrat Walt Helmick, who served one term in the role before being defeated by Leonhardt in last November’s election, wanted to expand West Virginia’s potato production.
Helmick opened a state-run potato aggregation center amid great fanfare just 17 months ago, according to an article in the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington. “Helmick called it a $475,000 investment to help small farmers reach larger customer bases and to leverage existing agricultural resources as one way of diversifying West Virginia’s economy,” the newspaper reported.
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Helping farmers in West Virginia expand their markets is a great idea and is the role of the state Department of Agriculture. But Helmick had the state taking an errant approach and wasting taxpayer money. (We won’t even get to the issue of purchasing four breeding cows from Oklahoma for $33,000 or the $160,000 chicken processing trailer.)
So the new Agriculture administration quickly, and rightfully, cut the state’s losses on the boondoggle of a potato processing center.
“I am not sure you could say that this facility really ever opened,” state Agriculture spokesman Crescent Gallagher told the Herald-Dispatch. “It was used only a handful of times and never really got up and running.”
An audit of the Agriculture Department after Leonhardt took office shows the potato processing center cost the state more than $1 million. Leonhardt said he thinks the program would have worked better using a different model.
“It appears to be totally government run and funded, and with the state being in a budget crisis situation, I am not sure if this program is the best use of taxpayer dollars,” Leonhardt said. “It should have been run by private individual farmers in a co-op situation and not be a burden on taxpayers.”
And therein is the new — and correct — philosophy for a state agency. The agency must help the state’s industry, but not become an operating part of that industry.
“I’m not going to have products that the state is holding onto,” Leonhardt told MetroNews radio talk show host Hoppy Kercheval Tuesday. “We’re going to have businesses that are flourishing and creating income for West Virginia residents, and ultimately tax dollars for the state treasury. The other way, we were using state dollars to buy products back, and that just doesn’t seem to work.”
By connecting maple syrup producers with more consumers, production of the West Virginia product has risen 33 percent, Leonhardt said.
“The Maple Syrup Producers Association is doing it with their own dollars, but the Department of Agriculture is helping them market,” he said.
Meanwhile, Leonhardt said a deputy commissioner is attending the National Association of Agriculture Commissioners meeting in Colorado working to get more West Virginia agriculture products involved in trade deals with Mexico and Canada.
Give credit to former Commissioner Helmick for being willing to experiment to grow the state’s industry, but stewards of taxpayer money need to be ever careful before investing hundreds of thousands or more of taxpayers’ dollars on government-owned money pits.
“We have to be sure we know what we are doing when we do it,” Leonhardt added.
Thanks to Leonhardt and other new players in state government for bringing a better approach and being better stewards of our dollars while working smartly to grow the state’s agriculture industry.