SEN. JOE MANCHIN AND HIS WIFE DIRECTED MILLIONS TO THE WILDLIFE AREA SURROUNDING VACATION CONDO – Daniel Boguslaw (The Intercept) / July 18, 2022
While upending climate legislation, Manchin directed over $15 million in federal funding to protected wetlands where the couple owns property.
ON THURSDAY, after months of negotiations, Sen. Joe Manchin said he would not support even a stripped-down version of the reconciliation package to invest billions of dollars in federal funds to combat the climate emergency — a version that was written to appease him. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., believed that he was close to reaching a deal that would satisfy the whims of the senior senator from West Virginia while also passing a vast climate investment package, drug pricing legislation, and new taxes on the wealthiest Americans to pay for the new spending. After the story broke, Manchin backtracked, claiming that July’s inflation numbers would be the deciding factor on whether he could support what President Joe Biden once hoped would be his signature policy achievement. Democratic leaders said Manchin had told them otherwise, and remaining hopes to pass significant climate legislation were dashed.
But while Manchin has sabotaged federal efforts at combating climate change, he has used federal dollars to preserve his own corner of the world. Public records reviewed by The Intercept show that even after Manchin’s decadeslong efforts to upend environmental policy that would undercut the fossil fuel companies funding his political campaigns (and the waste coal industry generating his personal fortune), he and his wife, Gayle Manchin, have directed millions of federal dollars to a small, pristine valley in West Virginia where the couple owns a condo. Hundreds of miles north of the coal communities decimated by the mountaintop removal mining that Manchin fostered in the state, the Manchins’ Canaan Valley residence sits in an unadulterated watershed, surrounded by the Dolly Sods Wilderness, the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge, and Blackwater Falls State Park.
The couple purchased the condo in Davis, West Virginia, in 2011, according to the deed. In 2018, Manchin used his spot on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee to secure $7 million to rebuild the visitor center at the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge, less than a mile from his condo. In addition to conference rooms, museum-style exhibits, and a bookstore, the new space also houses offices for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which maintains the valley’s natural landscape and stocks the streams that Manchin, an avid trout fisher, wades in.
CONTINUE > https://theintercept.com/2022/07/18/joe-gayle-manchin-condo-climate-canaan-valley/
