"The State Treasurer’s Daily Role"

What does a State Treasurer actually do day to day? This conversation dives into leadership, building strong teams, managing taxpayer dollars responsibly, and making decisions that impact everyday West Virginians—from schools and roads to creating opportunities across the state.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:07

So what does the state treasurer actually do on a day-to-day basis?

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Well, day-to-day basis, it's it's a leadership job. It's i it's it's really a leadership job. It's it's setting the vision, it's it's uh not it's keeping the team motivated, uh trying to tell the team where we're going to go. Uh you know, you can tell a lot by a leader by by the team they attract, but you can tell just as much as can they retain that team. And so when I look at leaderships and look at leaders, I always watch not so much can they put a team together, but can they keep that team together? Uh because really good people, if you don't treat them right, if you don't give them the right opportunities and the right authority, they'll leave. Yeah. And the people that stay are the ones on everywhere else to go. So work real hard with the team, trying to make sure that they're doing they're going the right direction, they got the resources they need, and at the same time trying to put the vision out there. And just remind them the people paying our salaries, uh, you know, they live in McDowell County. They live on a two-run two-lane road somewhere. So sometimes you gotta you gotta just remember that we don't work for the suits that that are running up and down these halls. We really work for the folks that that live out in West Virginia.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Yeah, yeah, and that's the truth, yeah. How does your office impact everyday citizens of West Virginia?

SPEAKER_00 1:21

I think being a good steward of the financial situation, right? So to making sure that the that the monies are invested properly, making sure these programs are working the right way, having a big impact and and and a big weighing in on the on the budget issues, right? What we do in this building uh impacts West Virginians positively or neg negatively. Do we have you know, do we are we are spending money prop properly? Do we have the good schools? Are we paying teachers enough? Uh have we fixed the darn roads? I mean, all that stuff impacts people's lives. Um, most people in West Virginia, when I when I talk to people, that's one of the reasons we travel a lot, is they they want a few things, but they don't want a lot, right? They want good schools, they want good roads, they want to make sure the safety net is appropriate, and they want to make sure that we're not in the way of jobs coming to West Virginia. And other than that, they just want left alone. Yeah. Yeah. But but trying to focus on the things we're supposed to do and then trying to weigh in on things that we're we're not supposed to do. We need to get out of because we're not very good at it.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

Yeah, yeah. What level of control or input do you have on the state budget?

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Not a lot of control, but a lot of input. I have as much input as I want to have. Right. So so when I was uh Secretary of Revenue, my job was to put the budget together.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

So so I did that two and a half times, uh basically three times, uh, which gave me a lot of knowledge on on the budget. And I probably spent more time on the budget and learning the budget than anything else when I was Secretary of Revenue. And and again, it's it's you know, we have a finite amount of money. Uh we're West Virginia, right? So we're never going to have an overabundance of money. Uh our per capita income is like $50,000, $51,000, $52,000, right? So try to do that math if you've got two kids, right? And and so so West Virginians are working really, really hard to pay pay the taxes. We they need to make sure that we run government as efficient as government can be. And so so that's where I weigh in on the budget. And I spend a lot of time talking about it the but uh from state government, we've expanded over the years to doing things that we just should not be in. And so we need to con contract, contract. Like I was at a group this morning, I got to speak to a group with respect to workers' compensation. Uh, you know, go back 20 years ago, 20 years ago, West Union ran the workers' comp program. And we didn't get out of the workers' comp business because we were charging employers too much, and we were. We didn't get out of that business because we weren't making money, no, we were losing our shirts. We got out of the business because we couldn't pay the bills. Yeah and no cash reserves. Uh that's probably the biggest tax cut. We talked about the governor's justice tax cut, but that's probably from a business standpoint, a really big tax cut because we've saved employers millions upon millions of dollars. We need to do that in some other aspects of state government. We've just got too big, too bloated, and we're inefficient, and we could put those monies to use in better places.