Bob Henry Baber: Flood Fraud, Guilty Plea, and Removal From Office

Bob Henry Baber is a former mayor of Richwood, West Virginia, an Appalachian poet, and a onetime Mountain Party candidate for governor and U.S. Senate who was sentenced in October 2021 to one to ten years in prison for defrauding the city of money meant for flood recovery. He pleaded guilty to a single felony count of obtaining money by false pretenses and reported to jail the day he was sentenced.¹

The Flood Fraud Case

On June 23, 2016, nearly nine inches of rain triggered flash flooding across twelve West Virginia counties and killed at least 23 people. Richwood, a town of roughly 2,000 in Nicholas County, lost eighty homes and had another hundred damaged, and its combined high school and middle school building was wrecked.² Between 2016 and 2018, the city received more than $3.1 million in federal disaster relief, including about $2.57 million in FEMA public assistance grants.³

West Virginia State Auditor John B. McCuskey spent 18 months examining what happened to that money. His office found that roughly $518,000 in FEMA grant funds had been moved into the city’s general fund and become “untraceable,” and that more than $900,000 in project funds involved questionable expenditures or missing documentation. The city had received about $500,000 to repair its main water intake and performed only a $400 temporary fix, routing the rest to debts and salaries. Over $468,000 went to a “recovery team,” and officials used government purchasing cards for personal expenses.³ The auditor said officials had “unfettered discretion” to pay nearly $500,000 to themselves, family, and friends.⁴

Special Prosecutor Steve Connolly later told the court that Richwood officials had set up what amounted to a “shadow government,” an “incident command team” that decided who got paid and how much on the assumption the federal government would reimburse it all.¹ Four Richwood officials were arrested in April 2019: Baber, former Police Chief Lloyd Cogar, former city clerk Abigail McClung, and Christine Drennen, who had served as city recorder and later as mayor.³

The Guilty Plea and Prison Sentence

On August 2, 2021, Baber pleaded guilty in Nicholas County Circuit Court to one felony count of obtaining money by false pretenses. He admitted pressuring the city’s payroll clerk, Abby McClung, to cut him a check for $2,443.64 for “volunteer flood recovery work” he claimed to have done before being sworn in as mayor, a period during which he was sometimes out of state. Prosecutors dropped additional charges, including allegations tied to illegal purchases on his state-issued purchasing card.⁵

“It was a terrible lapse of judgment to press for payment for volunteer flood recovery work performed before I was sworn in as Mayor,” Baber told the court. “I clearly and unequivocally recognize it was illegal, wrong, and unethical.”¹ He said his actions had caused “pain” and damaged the town’s recovery.⁶

At sentencing on October 12, 2021, Connolly asked for probation, calling Baber “forthcoming” after receiving his target letter. Nicholas County Circuit Judge Stephen Callaghan rejected that recommendation. “At the time that you committed this crime you were the mayor of the town and people of the town voted for you and entrusted you to carry out things to the greatest efficiency for them and the community and you abused that,” the judge said, imposing one to ten years. Baber did not speak and reported to Central Regional Jail the same day.¹ He was ordered to pay restitution to the city and potentially the full cost of the state’s forensic audit.⁵

Baber was the only person convicted in the probe.⁷ Drennen, McClung, and Cogar were placed in pretrial diversion programs in exchange for cooperating with the investigation.¹

Removal From Office in 2018

The criminal case was not Baber’s first legal reckoning. On July 20, 2018, a three-judge panel removed him from the mayorship at the request of the Richwood City Council. Judges Paul Blake Jr., Robert Richardson, and David Wilmoth found that Baber had used city funds to reimburse personal power and cellphone bills, “blatantly disregarded” state purchasing-card rules by letting unauthorized users spend on his card, and run equipment on city-funded electricity in a personal building he said was being used to store flood-relief donations. The panel also cited personal travel expenses and a country-club liquor purchase for a party honoring a visiting attorney, and concluded that city business under Baber was “disordered” in a way that fostered financial mismanagement.⁸

Political Career Before the Fall

Baber ran repeatedly on an environmental and anti-coal platform. In 2004, he was elected mayor of Richwood as the first Mountain Party candidate to win elected office anywhere in West Virginia.⁹ During that first term he secured $4 million for cleanup of the Cherry River plus another $1 million for sidewalks, historic repairs, and worker raises, and he received the National Wilderness Society’s “Hero” award in 2007 for pushing to expand the Cranberry Wilderness. He resigned that year, saying later that it was “the hardest job I’ve ever had” and that he “couldn’t stem Richwood’s decline.” An attempt to impeach him during the term had failed, and he said it was unrelated to his departure.¹⁰

He entered the 1996 Democratic primary for governor but withdrew to back front-runner Charlotte Pritt.¹⁰ In 2011 he ran for governor again as the Mountain Party nominee in the special election to replace Joe Manchin, calling for doubling severance taxes on coal and natural gas to raise $400 million for broadband and roads, strict fracking regulation, and treating healthcare as “a right, not a commodity.”¹¹

He then ran twice for the U.S. Senate on the Mountain Party line. In 2012, against Manchin and Republican John Raese, he received 19,517 votes, roughly 2.96 percent.¹² In 2014, against Shelley Moore Capito, Natalie Tennant, and Libertarian John Buckley, he received 5,448 votes.¹³ He used the races to argue for a transition from coal to solar, calling mountaintop removal mining “the complete annihilation of an ecosystem.”⁹

Poet, Editor, Grant Writer

Alongside politics, Baber built a long record in Appalachian letters. He helped found the Southern Appalachian Writers’ Cooperative, served as consulting director of the Appalachian Poetry Project, and edited the 1994 anthology Old Wounds, New Words: Poems from the Appalachian Poetry Project, which collected work by ninety poets from six states.¹⁴ His own 1994 book A Picture from Life’s Other Side contained poems against strip mining; he said he had been fired from Concord College after the West Virginia Coal Association pressured the college president over them.¹⁰ He later published a novel, Pure Orange Sunshine, co-edited the photography book Heroes Among Us about West Virginia veterans, and identifies himself as the Poet Laureate of Richwood.¹⁵ He has also been a contributor to Southern Exposure magazine and was a member of the Soupbean Poets in the 1970s.¹⁶

Professionally, Baber worked as a grant writer at Glenville State College, where he reported raising more than $20 million over his career.⁹

1
WV MetroNews. Richwood’s Baber Begins Prison Term; Judge Rejects Probation Recommendation
2
Reveal News. From Bad to Worse: Towns Can Lose Damaged Institutions in FEMA Loophole
3
WV Legislature Blog. Flooding Committee Hears Updates on Richwood RISE
4
Insurance Journal. Former Richwood, WV Mayor Pleads Guilty in Flood Fund Case
5
WOWK-TV. Former Richwood, WV Mayor Could Serve Up to 10 Years for Fraud
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WCHS-TV. Former Richwood Mayor Baber Pleads Guilty in Flood Fraud Case
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WCHS-TV. Former Richwood Mayor Bob Henry Baber Is Sentenced to Prison
8
WV Gazette-Mail. Judges Remove Richwood Mayor Baber From Office
9
WV MetroNews. U.S. Senate Candidate Says Race Cannot Be All About Loving Coal and Hating the President
10
HuffPost. Taking on Big Coal
11
League of Women Voters of WV. WV Governor – October 4, 2011 General Election
12
WV Secretary of State. Bob Henry Baber – 2012 General Election Results
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WV Secretary of State. Bob Henry Baber – 2014 General Election Results
14
Amazon. Old Wounds, New Words: Poems from the Appalachian Poetry Project
15
Bob Henry Baber. Bob Henry Baber – Official Website
16
Facing South. Bob Henry Baber – Author Page