Editorial: On the W.Va. food tax, new WVU board members and Jack Burnett

West Virginia's sales tax on food dropped from 4 percent to 3 percent on Tuesday. That's half the rate of 6 percent only a few years ago.

So maybe 3 percent is better than 6 percent, but it's still too high. For one thing, if the idea was to make food stores in West Virginia's border counties more competitive with those in Ohio, it's not working. Managers of some grocery stores in counties that border other states say they haven't seen a sales increase since the tax has gone down, according to The Associated Press.

Of West Virginia's neighboring states, only Virginia has a food tax. It taxes food at 2.5 percent, which is less than what West Virginia charges.

Taxing low-income people for buying food is just wrong. The Legislature shouldn't just reduce the food tax. It should eliminate it.

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West Virginia University is getting three new members for its Board of Governors.

The new members are Ray Lane, a WVU graduate and managing partner of a venture capital firm; Oliver Luck, a former WVU football player who is president of the Houston Dynamo soccer franchise and former chief executive of an agency that built and managed three major sports and entertainment venues in the Houston area; and Charles M. Vest, a former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

All appointments were effective Tuesday. Soon, the WVU Board of Governors will appoint an interim president and then a permanent replacement for Mike Garrison, who is stepping down from that office on Sept. 1 over a master's degree scandal involving Heather Bresch, daughter of Gov. Joe Manchin.

The three new members remain outnumbered by those who saw nothing wrong with how Garrison handled that situation. Nevertheless, they could bring a new attitude that will result in the changes that will prevent such a travesty from happening again at West Virginia's largest tax-supported university.

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Jack Burnett, a long-time photographer for The Herald-Dispatch, died last week at the age of 80. Although Burnett had been gone from the newspaper for many years before his death, he left good memories with the staffers who remember him.

Burnett was a member of the generation of photographers that worked with black-and-white film in the days that color in newspaper, especially in local photos, was rare.

He was a gentleman to those who worked with him, and his own work spoke for itself.