Decision 2026 | Kanawha County Public Safety Levy, explained

KANAWHA COUNTY, W.Va. (WSAZ) - Kanawha County voters will see a familiar levy on the ballot that is asking for property tax monies to fund the county’s emergency services agencies.

The levy funds agencies including the county Sheriff’s Office, local police and fire departments, the Kanawha County Ambulance Authority, and the county’s public transit system KRT.

County officials said the levy is the reason county agencies were able to respond so swiftly to Wednesday’s chemical emergency.

“If we don’t have a public safety levy that supports all this, then we don’t get that type of response,” Kanawha County Commissioner Natalie Tennant told WSAZ. “We get it delayed, we get a little bit here and there, but we don’t get the top notch that we saw last week.”

Kanawha County Sheriff Joe Crawford told WSAZ that his agency uses the money for special operations, like back-to-school safety, and to purchase police cruisers. He also noted that the county’s local police and fire departments especially rely on the funding to stay afloat.

“When a fire truck or an ambulance pulls up at your house or a cruiser pulls up in front of your house... you can say these funds are the cause of that,” he said.

“The good part about it is the way the funds are dispersed,” he continued. “Every year, they are getting these funds dispersed to help supplement equipment, training, things that are vital. Things we wouldn’t be able to do probably without this funding.”

KRT Executive Director Sean Hill said the county’s public transit system also depends on the levy, from which the system receives over half of its total budget.

“There’s not really an alternative for us if the levy were to fail,” he said. “It would be a real challenge for us, and I would be scared to tell you what KRT would look like without the safety levy.”

“I don’t know how KRT, the Ambulance Authorities, and [volunteer fire departments] around the county would really continue to operate,” he continued.

KRT was part of the response to the chemical emergency, bringing those contaminated to area hospitals. Hill said KRT is part of the county’s emergency plan, and they train for situations like Wednesday’s.

“We don’t pretend that we do it day in and out, like the police, like the firemen, like the EMS individuals,” he told WSAZ. “We recognize that our role is a little bit diminished there, but we do play a very important role when it’s these larger scale incidents that need people moved, a larger group of people moved quickly.”

Tennant added that the value of the levy is given back to the voters in terms of safety and transportation.

“I’ll pay that little bit to make sure that I can have safety in an accident,” she said. “That there are EMT folks, EMS, first responders who jump out of their vehicle and go straight to seeing someone on the ground and try to helping them. I might be that person on the ground. We all might be that person on the ground.”