and he gave one of the best answers ever -- one day longer than the pittston coal company. that's -- and that's what they did and in february of 1990, they reached a deal and the health care benefits of these folks was saved. getting into politics, first at the local level and especially when i ran for lieutenant governor in 2001, i was kind of the big city mayor. people down there gave me a chance because they knew i had family ties in appalachia and the mine workers were so helpful to me and i tried over my time in political life to be helpful to them. i put a union president in my cabinet when i was governor they knew very well. i appointed a mine -- a miner who run my state mining safety agency. that agency had been run by folks from the management side or professional scientists or bureaucrats but never a miner running the state mining safety agency. and i worked with mine terse to build a power plant in virginia city in southwest virginia to try to show that coal can be used much more cleaner than it had been in the past. when i came to the senate in 2013, the economi