KENOVA – Members of the Ceredo-Kenova Business Association learned on Monday about bills recently passed into federal law that could help businesses locally.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., was at United Bank in Kenova Monday as the guest speaker at the association's regular meeting. During her speech, she touted the long-term highway bill and Every Child Succeeds, but also blasted President Obama's Clean Power plan, calling it "damaging" to the state of West Virginia and an overreach in regard to regulatory requirements.

"Through regulatory executive orders he is putting in regulations he could not get Congress to vote for," Capito said. "Give us some time. Give us the technology and research to develop so we can burn coal cleaner and more efficiently and more effectively and use our natural gas resources. But, he is on an environmental path that has caused enormous destruction to the state of West Virginia.”

Capito also mentioned several pieces of federal legislation she thinks will bode well for Ceredo, Kenova and Wayne County, such as the highway bill and Every Child Succeeds, which she deemed a "redo" of No Child Left Behind.

The highway bill aims to provide $2.8 billion to West Virginia for infrastructure improvements, which is simply "good news for business people," she said.

"This is the first time we've passed an elongated five-year highway bill in many, many years," she said. "It provides enormous pots of federal dollars paid for by your gas tax dollars and allows the governor, the secretary of transportation and people like me to be able to help plan long-term projects like the Tolsia Highway, the completion of Corridor H and Route 35 in Mason and Putnam counties.”

When Capito voted for No Child Left Behind in 2002, she said the legislation sought expectations from schools that had never been seen.

"It ended up getting wrapped up in, as a lot of bureaucratic things do, too much oversight from Washington and too much of Washington telling West Virginia and Wayne County how to educate," she said. "This new bill we have passed, bipartisan, is called Every Child Succeeds and basically puts the responsibility of education back to the states, back to the local school boards and back to the parents, who I think know best.”

Every Child Succeeds also has a heavy emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, education, which are the "jobs of the future," Capito said.

Capito briefly talked about West Virginia's lack of broadband coverage and how it hampers the ability to build a good business as well as the benefit of telemedicine for people in rural areas of West Virginia.

Speakers scheduled for the association's April meeting are Del. Don Perdue, D-Wayne, and Del. Doug Reynolds, D-Cabell, the latter of whom is a candidate for West Virginia Attorney General. May speaker will be Joe Holland of Joe Holland Chevrolet in South Charleston.

After opening remarks from Ceredo-Kenova Business Association President Don Ferguson, Otis Adkins, mayor of Ceredo, talked about Capito's family's history of serving West Virginia in an elected capacity. Her father, Arch Moore, was a 12-year congressman and West Virginia's first three-term governor.

Capito was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates in 1996 and 1998. In 2000, she was elected to the United States House of Representatives.

In 2014, Capito became the first woman elected to the United States Senate from West Virginia.