Brian Helton took the Oath of Office to become WV 9th District State Senator

CHARLESTON, WV (WOAY)- Now that the 2024 election is well behind us, elected officials have started taking the oath of office, being sworn in, or having their inaugurations. Well, Brian Helton took the oath of office on Tuesday, January 14th, to become West Virginia’s newest state senator for district 9.

“We’re getting ready to have the greatest comeback story ever for southern West Virginia,” said Brian Helton, WV State Senator District 9.

Helton has officially joined the other 33 senators in West Virginia’s capitol. While he’s honored to join the ranks, he’s more excited to hit the ground running and grow our economy.

“We need to make sure in southern West Virginia we have an economic revival by rebuilding our workforce with technical skills and training for our young people,” said Helton. “And we have to get a handle on our opioid crisis to rebuild our workforce.”

Since he was appointed as the chairman of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Disorders committee, he’ll be able to be more involved with that.

“I’m looking forward to approaching this from a new standpoint. What we’ve done so far over the past decade, it’s not working and we’re not really seeing the progress in southern West Virginia,” explained Helton. “So my job will be to come up with new solutions and innovative ways to tackle this problem where we take our young people. So many of them are addicted right now and we get them on a path to true recovery that’s going to be focused on long-based programs that involve counseling, involve different methods and we’ve been doing up to this point.”

Helton says we have great momentum at all levels of government. So he is looking forward to working with local leaders on top of working with the other state legislators.

“We have great mayors, we have great city officials right now. We have county commissioners that are second to none. So together, we’re all going to work together from the legislative standpoint and from our public works and all of our county levels and city levels to make southern West Virginia have a revival like never before,” said Helton.

 

Sponsored Content