Two Former Secretaries Weigh In On Reported DEP Shakeup

Scott Detrow / StateIm­pact Pennsylvania

A Tioga County drilling rig.

Ear­lier today, the Pitts­burgh Post-Gazette reported on a major shakeup at the Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion: going for­ward, accord­ing to the arti­cle, DEP’s Oil and Gas Pro­gram will oper­ate as a sep­a­rate bureau, within the depart­ment. The new orga­ni­za­tion will report to Har­ris­burg, not DEP’s six regional offices, mir­ror­ing the Min­ing Bureau’s semi-autonomy.

We’re still wait­ing for inde­pen­dent con­fir­ma­tion from DEP on the news. In the mean­time, two for­mer depart­ment sec­re­taries are react­ing to the ini­tial report with vary­ing degrees of optimism.

“I think any­thing the depart­ment does to improve com­mu­ni­ca­tions and high­light [Mar­cel­lus Shale drilling] is a vast improve­ment,” said Dave Hess, who ran DEP dur­ing the Schweiker Admin­is­tra­tion. Hess served on Gov­er­nor Corbett’s DEP envi­ron­men­tal tran­si­tion team, and con­cluded “things were very messed up inside the depart­ment, related to oil and gas,” dur­ing the Ren­dell Administration.

Why’s that? “Pro­grams were not talk­ing to each other,” Hess explained. “Oil and Gas was not talk­ing to Water, and vice versa.”

John Hanger, who ran DEP dur­ing the last two years of the Ren­dell Admin­is­tra­tion, was more cau­tious. “The idea of hav­ing the Oil and Gas Pro­gram become stand­alone is poten­tially a good idea,” he said, as long as it meets two cri­te­ria. “First, it’s impor­tant peo­ple in the state have access to the pro­gram.” He wor­ried the cen­tral­ized struc­ture could iso­late Oil and Gas employ­ees from DEP’s regional struc­ture. Those six regional offices, he said, “are an attempt to make sure both the com­pa­nies reg­u­lated by DEP and the neigh­bors and cit­i­zens that live in the region that need rules enforced” are able to eas­ily con­tact regulators.

Hanger’s sec­ond con­cern: the size of the pos­si­ble lay­offs. “Regard­less of what kind of orga­ni­za­tional boxes peo­ple are put in, it’s very impor­tant that the staffing num­bers” are kept sta­ble, he said. Hanger over­saw a sub­stan­tial increase in the num­ber of DEP drilling inspec­tors, increas­ing the program’s staff from 88 to 202 peo­ple, dur­ing his two years on the job. “Our goal was to grow the Oil and Gas Pro­gram with the indus­try, so that as the indus­try became big­ger the Oil and Gas over­sight staff became bigger.”

We’ll have another post as soon as we receive more details from DEP.