Ken Reed is the owner of five Reed Pharmacy stores in Berkeley Springs, Hancock, Hedgesville, Spring Mills, and Berryville. He also owns Top Shelf Liquor in Berkeley Springs.
Reed is running as a Republican for Morgan County Commission against Darren Barney and Jimmy Stewart.
Reed spent $500,000 of his own money on an unsuccessful race for Congress in 2014. He came in second in a seven person Republican primary. Reed announced his intention to run again for Congress in 2016, but pulled out after another Republican challenger from the eastern panhandle — Marc Savitt — entered the race.
Why did he then decide to run for County Commissioner?
“My wife asked me a couple of times if I would be interested,” Reed said. “Some people in the county had asked me to do it. I’m like — I don’t know if I really need to do that. But the more I thought about it, I think I would do an excellent job at this particular post. It’s basically what I do now. It’s 80 percent budgeting. The rest of it is maintenance, and buildings and appointing board members. That’s the majority of it. You have to make sure you get that right.”
Politics doesn’t enter into it?
“No. I’m doing this for the county. And I’ve pretty much kept this to myself — I feel like I owe this county. The 2014 run was brutal. Politics at that level is a brutal thing. Things could get pretty nasty in a hurry. And this county wrapped their arms around our kids and sheltered them a lot from the stuff that was going on out there. They protected our kids pretty well. There were telephone calls and stuff like that. The people of this county stepped up and sheltered them from the silliness that goes on.”
“Ultimately, it’s up to the voters of this county. I am offering my services to this county. Right now the county deals with a $5.3 million budget and 80 some employees. At one time, I had over 100 employees. This is not something I am not capable of doing. I’ve been doing it for twenty years.”
Reed said the number one economic development priority is the proposed gas line for Morgan County.
“My biggest fear is that they are just going to take that pipe through Morgan County and not let us use it and just let Berkeley County use all the natural gas,” Reed said. “We need a feeder station here. Natural gas is a cheap alternative.”
On the question of big box stores, Reed said that “all business should be welcomed and looked at.”
Reed said he was against “putting a blockade up” and saying to business — “you can’t come here.”
“You have to keep what you are doing well and sensibly bring in other businesses that will either complement it or work in a different sector all together,” he said.
Reed said he agreed that big box stores drive out small businesses.
“But it’s not Wal-Mart, it’s government,” Reed said. “These contracts in the pharmacy world have gotten so bad that it is driving everything vertical. You have to have 20,000 stores to even get into those contracts. It’s not the competition. If I could put a store in a Wal-Mart parking lot, I would do it every time. Because I could out service them, I could out hustle them, I can give a better quality product. But that’s not what is important now. It’s all cost driven. And that is extremely hard to compete with.”
How would Reed describe his politics?
“I was an independent for twenty years,” he says. “I don’t like partisan politics. I don’t like the nastiness that occurs on the fringes. When I ran for office, I ran head on into some of that. When you are in health care, my job is to help you. When you are in politics, it’s like flipping 180 degrees. You are fighting so much silliness out there because it’s about control. It took me a long time to wrap my head around it. There are whole industries that are built up around dividing people. We do better when we unite than divide.”