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Thornton Cooper, a native and resident of South Charleston, Kanawha County, West Virginia, is the Democratic candidate for Kanawha County Clerk in the general election to be held on November 2, 2010.

He is running against a Republican incumbent.

Mr. Cooper is currently a member of the Kanawha County Democratic Executive Committee. He was elected to that committee in 2006 and 2010. His current four-year term on that committee runs to the middle of 2014. Mr. Cooper is also a member of the Board of Directors of Glendale Pool, Inc., a nonprofit corporation that operates a swimming pool in the Montrose section of South Charleston.

A lawyer and a retired state employee, Mr. Cooper, 60, said that, if he is elected, his top priorities would be the following:

The Kanawha County Clerk is the chief elections officer of Kanawha County and is in charge of maintaining and copying many public records, including deeds, wills, leases, birth certificates, and death certificates.

Mr. Cooper welcomes contributions from individuals who support his candidacy.

Mr. Cooper was born and raised in South Charleston. His brothers Tom (now deceased) and John and he attended public schools there. After graduating from South Charleston High School in 1968, Thornton Cooper attended Yale University. In 1972 he graduated from Yale with a B. A. in Political Science. Between 1975 and 1978, he attended the West Virginia University College of Law, where he received his law degree (Juris Doctor) in 1978.

His parents were Thomas R. Cooper, Sr., an electrical engineer and draftsman at the Union Carbide Technical Center, and Virginia Watson Cooper, who taught English and Latin at South Charleston Junior High School, Stonewall Jackson High School, and George Washington High School. Thornton Cooper has two (2) sons: Jeremy, 28, who graduated from Charleston Catholic High School and Oberlin College, and now lives in Preston County and is a student at the West Virginia University College of Law in Morgantown; and Timothy, 24, who graduated from George Washington High School and West Virginia University and is a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Public Service and Social Causes

Between 1972 and 2006, both inclusive, Thornton Cooper worked for 30 years in state government. At the end of 2005, he retired from the Public Service Commission of West Virginia after nearly 25 years at that agency as an attorney and administrator. During much of that time he was involved in the regulation of private companies that collect and transport solid waste in West Virginia. From January to December 2006, Mr. Cooper also worked on a part-time basis for that agency as an independent contractor. During those twelve months, he wrote four instruction manuals. Prior to working for the Public Service Commission, Mr. Cooper worked for the West Virginia Department of Highways and the West Virginia Human Rights Commission.

Furthermore, during his life, Mr. Cooper has also been involved in many social causes for which he has received no compensation. Here are a number of examples:

Between 1979 and 1995, he served as an officer and/or member of the Board of Directors of the American Lung Association of West Virginia, Inc. For over 30 years, he has been a strong supporter of nonsmokers’ rights.

During the past three decades, he has also worked (often successfully) for the passage or defeat of a number of proposed amendments to the West Virginia Constitution. In 2005, he was one of the first individuals to speak out against the proposed Pension Bond Amendment, which, if approved, would have authorized the state to borrow billions of dollars to invest in the stock market. The voters ultimately rejected that ballot proposal. If the proposed Pension Bond Amendment had been ratified, the state might be billions of dollars further in debt than it already is.

Mr. Cooper has also run as a Democratic candidate in several primary elections.

In 1983 he drafted the language for a proposed amendment to the City Charter of South Charleston that would have divided that municipality into a maximum of eight (8) single-member wards. He also organized the petition drive that put that proposal before the voters of South Charleston, who approved it later that year. The South Charleston City Council then adopted an ordinance putting into effect a redistricting plan that he had authored.

Between 1986 and 1998, Mr. Cooper was a frequent citizen participant in meetings of the Kanawha County Board of Education. He frequently challenged expensive school-consolidation proposals that were brought before the school board and offered what he considered to be cost-effective alternatives. As a result of his comments and suggestions at the school-board meetings, the Charleston Gazette began to refer to him as a “gadfly”. Eventually, he was selected to serve on a “Blue Ribbon” citizen committee that offered consolidation proposals to the school board.

Following the 1990 Census, Thornton Cooper proposed redrawing the boundary lines of Kanawha County’s magisterial districts and reducing their number to four (4) districts of nearly equal population. The Kanawha County Commission later approved his proposal, which was so close numerically that only one precinct had to be moved after the 2000 Census.

He also served for a number of years on the Staunton Elementary Local School Improvement Council (LSIC) until the school board voted to close that school in 2001.

In the fall of 2002, Mr. Cooper caught a ballot mistake that, if not corrected in time, would have reduced the amount raised by Kanawha County’s proposed bus and ambulance (renewal) levy by 99.99%. The ballot mistake was then corrected and the levy was approved by the voters of Kanawha County.

In 2004, he also mounted a legal attack on Charleston’s one-dollar-per-week “user fee” on individuals who work in Charleston. Mr. Cooper considered the “fee” to be an unlawful, regressive capitation tax on workers and also a form of “taxation without representation”. Although the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the legality of the “fee” itself, that Court agreed with Mr. Cooper that the notice about the proposed “fee” that had been given by the City of Charleston to its residents had been inadequate. Accordingly, that Court also required the City of Charleston to hold an election in 2006 whereby voters who lived in Charleston (but not voters who lived outside Charleston) were allowed to vote. Of those who voted in the resulting special election, a majority voted in favor of the “fee”. Later, the Charleston City Council doubled the “fee” to two dollars per week.

In January 2010, he spoke in favor of a proposal for “satellite voting” in Kanawha County, whereby voters in Kanawha County would have had the option to vote early in person in voting stations in Belle, Elkview, and Saint Albans, in addition to the Kanawha County voters-registration office at 415 Quarrier Street in Charleston. That proposal was supported by all three (3) members of the Kanawha County Commission and by the Chairman and members of the Kanawha County Democratic Executive Committee. After the Chairwoman and members of the Kanawha County Republican Executive Committee decided to block this “satellite voting” proposal, Thornton Cooper, a Democrat, announced his candidacy for the Kanawha County Clerk’s Office.

In the summer of 2010, he announced that, if Governor Manchin is elected to the United States Senate, Mr. Cooper would initiate a legal proceeding to ensure that the voters of West Virginia would be able to have a special election in 2011 to elect a new Governor to serve out the remainder of the gubernatorial term.