West Virginia lawmakers saw a new face for the first time in several years during this year's budget presentation from the West Virginia Attorney General's Office.
Attorney General Patrick Morrisey
told lawmakers they had every right to ask the Attorney General
questions, and he spent nearly the entire allotted hour outlining his
office's role and duties along with making the case for some
supplemental appropriations.
"We're
going to make sure this gets paid for," Morrisey said. "Of course there
are plusses up front for things we want to invest in, but we want to
make sure we have savings at the back end."
Morrisey said his office currently has 191 people, and 49 percent of
them are lawyers. He said about 20 members of former Attorney General Darrell McGraw left the office in December, and between five and seven other McGraw employees were dismissed.
"We're in the process right now of doing very thorough personnel reviews," Morrisey said.
Morrisey said the office is in dire need of a structure transformation so it can run like a modern law firm.
"This is not a big wish list," he said. "These are absolute essentials."
Morrisey
said he wants to reform how the office had traditionally hired outside
counsel. He said by hiring top-notch attorneys who can work most cases,
the state could ultimately save money on outside counsel fees.
He
told lawmakers there were no policies and procedures for how to govern
the office left for him, and he'd like to establish some "if I get hit
by a bus tomorrow, then the next person comes in and gets to see how the
office should be run on a day-to-day basis."
Morrisey
said with his first five weeks in office, he's mostly been "assuring
that the trains are running on time," and despite inheriting a
"significant backlog," the office is now caught up.
He also brought up trinkets, something he eschewed in a media conference last week.
"I
took issue in the past with the ways the consumer protection division
had spent money," Morrisey said. "I don't think it's right that an
office holder should have his name on a trinket and taxpayers should pay
for it, so that practice has come to an end."
Morrisey also repeatedly told lawmakers that he wants them to stop by his office.
"Members
of this committee may not always like everything I have to say, but I
will tell you that I will always be transparent," he said.
In terms of budget requests, Morrisey said the office needs to have a new phone system.
"Right
now we have 25 people over in our consumer division who don't have
voicemail," he said. "The numbers we're presenting to you today we think
are realistic."
Morrisey
said the underlying hardware that supports the phone system is not
functioning properly, so calls are frequently routed to the wrong
employees.
And,
Morrisey said technology throughout the Attorney General's Office is
outdated and ineffective. In a news release, Morrisey said while nearly
every other state office uses Microsoft Outlook, the Attorney General's Office uses a Novell platform, which is no longer supported by the manufacturer. The office also uses GroupWise email, which is not compatible with most other email programs.
The
price estimate Morrisey gave lawmakers was $965,000 for the upgrade of
office hardware and infrastructure, and about $98,000 per year for
annual maintenance, but he said any purchases would go through a
competitive bidding process, and he would open the request for proposal
process to the Legislature as well.
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