Tennant

ELKINS — Natalie Tennant is traveling the state, meeting with voters and talking about how she can help businesses if elected to the West Virginia Secretary of State’s office in the Nov. 3 General Election.

“The Secretary of State’s office has such an important role in helping businesses, and that’s why I’m running again, because this current Secretary of State has burdened our businesses,” Tennant, the Democratic nominee for Secretary of State, said in an interview at The Inter-Mountain offices. “He put a fee on businesses that I had taken off.

Tennant, who previously served as the Secretary of State from 2009-2017, said she had eliminated a transaction fee for businesses while she was in office, but the current Secretary of State, Republican Mac Warner, has reinstated the fee.

“I worked really hard to modernize the office and have online services,” she said. “When you filed your annual report and did it online, it saved you time and money, it saved the Secretary of State’s Office time and money. There had been a transaction fee, and if you used online services you had to pay that.

“Well, I looked at that, evaluated how much it would cost us if we absorbed it, compared to what we were saving in not having to manually do it. So I absorbed it and took the fee off of businesses,” Tennant said. “Well, he snuck it back on. And he said, ‘I’m doing it for technology.’ And I said, ‘I already modernized the office!'”

Tennant said she streamlined the Secretary of State’s Office to make it more efficient and cost-effective, but she believes Warner is making things more complicated and expensive for state businesses.

“He’ll say his crowning achievement is a one-stop business shop where he has four agencies under one roof,” she said. “That sounds great. The problem is, he’s misappropriating funds. It’s not supposed to be under one roof, it’s supposed to be under an electronic web-based portal that I worked with Republicans and Democrats on to make it one place where businesses could go. They could get to the Secretary of State’s office, Tax and Revenue, Workforce and Labor, and get anything they wanted online.

“He hasn’t done anything on that. The blueprint is there that I put in place, the design that I put in place. He ignored that, and he’s spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a building that, one, can’t be used right now, and two, would force someone from Elkins to have to drive to Charleston, just to be under one roof. So that’s a misappropriation of funds, and that’s how you’re hurting businesses.”

Prior to her election as Secretary of State, Tennant was a television reporter and co-owner of a video production company. She is a graduate of West Virginia University, where she earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees. She also served as the first woman Mountaineer mascot.

“I was Secretary of State for eight years, so I know what businesses go through, I know the struggles and the successes they may have, and that’s why I’m running again, to get things done for businesses and to stop unnecessary state spending,” Tennant said.