The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection has issued one of Sen. Jim Justice’s coal companies notices of 11 delinquent penalties since July 21, extending the firm’s long history of owing the state after not paying fines for environmental failures, per DEP records.
The notices to the junior West Virginia Senate Republican’s Bluestone Coal Corp. indicate a $8,317 debt across nine mine permits covering roughly 145 acres combined in McDowell County.
Roanoke, Virginia-based Bluestone’s debt for delinquent DEP fines totaled $916,273 last month for 133 DEP disciplinary actions spanning September 2019 to April 2025, according to DEP data obtained by the Gazette-Mail.
The DEP issued the violations that have resulted in delinquent penalties for failures to submit surface water monitoring or rain gauge data or establish permanent markers to identify boundaries or entrances to permit areas.
Spokespeople for Justice in his Senate office did not respond to a request for comment. A Justice coal company attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
The latest delinquent notices from the DEP to the Justice family-controlled Bluestone firm came as the agency considered suspending or revoking other company mine permits.
The DEP was slated to hold a show-cause hearing at its Kanawha City headquarters Tuesday at which Bluestone would be tasked with demonstrating why its permit for the Poca No. 11 Contour Auger No. 2 Mine spanning 579 acres in McDowell and Wyoming counties shouldn’t be suspended or revoked.
But Bluestone withdrew its request for a show-cause hearing and submitted a comprehensive abatement plan that proposes to address all outstanding violations related to the permit, DEP spokesperson Terry Fletcher said Monday. The DEP is reviewing the plan, Fletcher said. Fletcher did not immediately provide the plan.
DEP oversight of the Poca mine has drawn the ire of conservationists — and a probe from federal regulators launched late last year that ended weeks into the Trump administration.
In a December 2024 notice to the DEP, the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement indicated it had reason to believe the DEP failed to comply with its own regulation by not promptly reviewing and acting on patterns of violations at the Bluestone Coal Corp. mine site, noting that 13 cessation orders the DEP issued since February 2024 were still unabated.
But in a February 2025 follow-up letter to the DEP, the OSMRE concluded the DEP’s response to its December notice that threatened to take over enforcement at the Poca mine was “reasonable and appropriate, with no apparent deviation from the approved program.†The OSMRE told the DEP it planned no further action and would monitor a DEP show-cause hearing process for 12 outstanding show-cause orders on the mine permit.
The OSMRE cited “relevant facts†of enforcement actions the DEP had taken against Bluestone, including patterns of violations the DEP said it identified and show-cause orders it issued after the OSMRE’s December 2024 threat to assume enforcement authority.
The DEP has issued Bluestone 23 violation notices and 19 cessation orders since the start of 2021.
Bluestone Coal Corp. owed the DEP $583,288 last month for 46 disciplinary actions on its 579-acre permit for the Poca No. 11 Contour Auger No. 2 Mine, according to DEP records.
The DEP opened another path to potentially revoking a Bluestone mine permit on July 23 by ordering the company to “show cause†why a permit covering roughly 36 acres near Gilliam in Wyoming County shouldn’t be revoked or suspended. The DEP issued the order in response to what it found was Bluestone’s failure to establish a permanent marker to identify the boundary or entrance to the permit area.
The DEP's latest delinquent penalty notices to Bluestone say the agency can’t issue any permit or permit revisions to the company as long as any civil penalty remains delinquent.
But when questioned about past DEP renewals of permits with lengthy histories of violations, Fletcher has said permit renewals aren’t the same as issuance of a new permit or a significant revision to an existing permit.
Justice business struggles continue Â
Justice’s family business and personal finance problems have piled up in recent months.
Last month, a judge recommended that a federal court grant a Swiss company’s request to require another Justice coal company to produce cashflow spreadsheets the judge said could help determine if the senator’s business transferred assets to other entities to hide them and avoid paying $1.5 million per a 2020 agreement.
U.S. Magistrate Judge C. Kailani Memmer’s recommendation filed in a Virginia federal court advised the presiding district judge to order Bluestone Coal Sales Corp. to produce the cashflow spreadsheets within 10 days for Swiss raw materials trader VISA Commodities AG.
Five of Justice’s coal companies again failed to provide retirees health care coverage in violation of a collective bargaining agreement, retirees and the United Mine Workers of America union said in an April 2 court filing.
The reported failures were the latest in a yearslong string of intermittent lapses in contractually promised health care and prescription drug coverage that retirees have said resulted in the loss of critical medications.
In another April 2 court filing, a Kentucky tobacco warehouse company and an affiliated firm said two Justice coal company executives, including Justice’s son, James C. “Jay†Justice, stopped paying a daily contempt fine amid their noncompliance with a court order to share evidence in the case.
The filing alleged the defendants’ tax returns and other documents prepared from a general ledger show Jay Justice owes James C. Justice Companies nearly $32 million for shareholder loans made to him.
The filing cites two April 2022 ledger entries the plaintiffs say show that despite James C. Justice Companies entered a what appeared to be a Virginia land transfer as a total loss in a 2016 asset disposal report, its affiliate sold the property six years later for a $10.1 million profit.
New London Tobacco Market and Fivemile Energy brought the case in 2012 after Justice’s Kentucky Fuel Corp. failed to mine coal under an agreement following the plaintiffs’ assignment of rights to mine coal in eastern Kentucky to the defendants in exchange for a cut of the mined coal.
Justice pledged to put his adult children in charge of his family’s business operations after becoming governor in 2017.
Martinsville, Virginia-based Carter Bankshares Inc., holding company of Carter Bank, reported in April that Justice entities had paid $56.8 million of a $301.9 million debt as of March 31, 2025.
Carter Bank scheduled an auction of Greenbrier Sporting Club property that featured prominently in the Justice business empire last year to help satisfy a nine-figure Justice family debt to the bank. The auction was later canceled, and the Justice family and the bank announced the settlement of the dispute, in which the bank has sought $300 million-plus in debt admitted by the Justices.
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