WHEELING — The city of Wheeling encompasses 14 square miles and has 29,330 residents. The city of Morgantown covers 10 square miles and has 28,654 residents, which doesn’t include the more than 25,000 college students who live there nine months each year.
Wheeling is located along a river, the Ohio; Morgantown also is situated along a river, the Monongahela.
These similarities aside, the one area where Wheeling and Morgantown appear to be very different is in their approach to city government. For fiscal 2008-09, the city of Wheeling has a proposed $27.77 million budget; Morgantown, $22.33 million.
Wheeling has 415 city employee positions budgeted for the coming year; Morgantown, 220.
A key difference in the employment figures is that Morgantown has privatized some non-essential city services such as sanitation and emergency medical services, while Wheeling continues to provide them as city functions. Wheeling’s sanitation department alone has 10 employees.
Former Wheeling City Manager Will Turani offered City Council a proposal to privatize the city’s sanitation department in the late 1990s. The proposal never gained traction with council, however.
Also, Morgantown does not provide emergency medical services through its fire department — Morgantown City Manager Dan Boroff said a local nonprofit agency handles that service — but Wheeling does, which leads to Wheeling budgeting 45 more fire department positions than Morgantown. Wheeling’s fire budget is $7.03 million while Morgantown’s is only $3.82 million, for a difference of about $3.21 million.

read_more