Welcome back to EP Digest. Every Thursday morning, the best local news, events, and happenings from Morgan, Berkeley, and Jefferson counties — tailored to what you actually care about. No doom-scrolling, no algorithm. Just the stuff that matters in the Eastern Panhandle. Let's get into it.

Inwood Just Unionized Its Starbucks — the Second in West Virginia.

Baristas at the Inwood Starbucks voted 11–8 last week to form a union — the second Starbucks in West Virginia to do so. The first was Flatwoods, which voted 10–1 in July 2024 after an earlier organizing attempt fell short. Both stores now sit inside the Starbucks Workers United campaign, which since 2021 has notched union wins at 580-plus stores and roughly 12,000 baristas nationwide. The Journal got the story first.

The complaints driving the vote are concrete. Inwood barista Maverick Arnicar told The Journal that workers organized around inconsistent schedules, understaffed shifts, and hours getting cut for veterans while new hires kept coming on. One detail he gave is the kind that lands locally: a recent morning when he had eight drinks in the queue and was the only person on the floor. The headline ask from the new bargaining unit is a 4% annual raise, with scheduling and staffing close behind. Arnicar described some company pushback during organizing — he declined to detail specifics — but said the vote moved morale.

The wider context matters here. West Virginia has the deepest labor history of any state east of the Mississippi — the Mine Wars are a hundred years past but still in the bones — and that history has mostly meant blue-collar trades. A Starbucks barista unit in South Berkeley County is something different: service-sector retail, in a fast-growing exurban corner of the state, organizing inside a national chain. Arnicar framed it that way himself: "West Virginia has always been a union state. For us to be able to experience that not just in a blue-collar sense, but in my own workplace, I feel very proud of that."

What happens next: a union election win is the start, not the finish. Inwood now joins Starbucks Workers United at the bargaining table with Starbucks corporate — a national contract talk that has stretched on for years without a master agreement. Locally, the practical question is whether scheduling and staffing actually change at the Inwood store. Watch for that on a quiet Tuesday morning before it shows up in another headline.

What Local Government Worked On Last Week

Jefferson County Commission, May 21: a busy packet with a few items worth flagging. The County Administrator put a Hill Top House Engagement letter on the agenda — the long-stalled Harpers Ferry hotel project that has surfaced and resubmerged for nearly a decade. The commission also took up an updated Impact Fee Study (the developer-fee framework that funds growth-related infrastructure), considered Historic Resources text amendments to the Subdivision Regulations, and referred a new development application from M&A Investment Group to the Planning Commission for a Comprehensive Plan consistency review. May 21 agenda packet.

Shepherdstown municipal election: early in-person voting at Town Hall (104 N. King St.) closes May 30. Election results will be the next thing to watch. PNN.

Morgan County Board of Education adopted a $34.7 million FY27 budget at its May meeting. Annual school-district budget for Morgan County, in a year where every county is watching the state revenue picture. Morgan Messenger.

Next up at the JCC: the next regular Jefferson County Commission meeting is tentatively the first Thursday in June (June 4). The agenda packet typically posts a few days before. jeffersoncountywv.org.

The Class of 2026 Is Walking This Week.

Roughly 1,670 seniors are crossing the stage at six Eastern Panhandle high schools this week, with Jefferson and Washington still to come Sunday at Shepherd University. Panhandle News Network pulled the per-school numbers together. Here's the run of show.

A few patterns worth pulling out: roughly 48 EP seniors are heading into the military across the six schools that shared numbers. Musselman is the biggest class at 422, Paw Paw the smallest at 10. Spring Mills sends 241 kids to nine colleges and universities; Martinsburg sends 123 across 39 schools — a smaller post-secondary count but a wider spread. And Shepherd's Butcher Center hosts back-to-back Jefferson-county ceremonies Sunday afternoon, a quiet cross-county finale.

One other May moment: Unofficial start of summer landed last weekend — the 66th William H. Norton Memorial Day Parade in Paw Paw, flag retirements across the EP, and the first weekend of the year that actually felt like June. Orr's Farm Market is past full bloom and into early strawberry season; the Shenandoah Junction satellite is open. Orr's events calendar.

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Story, event, business, government, school, neighborhood, weird-and-wonderful — if it's local, we want to hear it. Saw a new sign go up? Heard about a meeting no one's talking about? Know of a shop opening, closing, or expanding? Spotted something on your street that turned out to be interesting? Send us a note at [email protected] — tips of every kind keep the Digest sharper than any source list could. We protect our sources, and we verify before we publish.

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