Cawley Says Commission Will Debate Recommendations in Public

• Scott Detrow
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  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

The Twittersphere has lit up, with news the Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission will keep its recommendations for Governor Corbett top-secret, after tomorrow’s meeting.
I’m still waiting for a call back from Lieutenant Governor Jim Cawley’s spokesman. But in the meantime, the Post-Gazette’s Laura Olson has filed a blog post quoting Cawley, who promises hours of public debate during tomorrow’s meeting.

Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley, who chairs the commission, and his spokesman Chad Saylor say there’s been a misunderstanding. Tomorrow’s meeting has at least four hours set aside for discussion of proposed recommendations and consideration of additional ones.
“They’re going to be debated,” said Saylor of the recommendations. “Each work-group is going to present what came out of their work-group sessions.”
Saylor cautioned that there won’t be a final product by the end of Friday’s meeting: the wording could change somewhat as they “go back and gussy up” the report before it heads to the governor on July 22. And the list of proposed recommendations won’t be distributed following the meeting.
However, the recommendations will be talked about publicly before they are voted, and any removed from the set offered by a work-group will be noted specifically, he said.

So it seems like we’ll have a general idea of what the recommendations will be after tomorrow’s session — but we’ll need to wait until Friday, July 22^nd, for the report’s full details.
Want to know more about the commission and its goals? Check out our Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission topics page, as well as the preview of tomorrow’s vote I put together earlier this week.
And another friendly reminder: you can read every non-secret detail of tomorrow’s meeting here at the StateImpact website, where I’ll be liveblogging the debate and vote.

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