Post-Gazette: A Major DEP Shakeup In The Works

Scott Detrow

Recent Stories

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.

September 19, 2011 | 12:43 PM

A big change may be coming, in the way Pennsylvania regulates natural gas drilling.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is first with news the Department of Environmental Protection‘s Oil and Gas Program may be spun off into a stand-alone organization:

The state Department of Environmental Protection plans to change the way it administers its Oil and Gas Program and plans to lay off workers from some of its other programs as part of an extensive reorganization unveiled to departmental employees Monday.
The long-awaited reorganization’s major change is the creation of a new stand-alone Oil and Gas Bureau for the program that oversees regulation of booming, and sometimes controversial, Marcellus Shale gas development in the state.
The administrative structure will be similar to that of DEP’s Mining Bureau, with the new Oil and Gas Bureau reporting directly to DEP administrators in Harrisburg and not to the regional offices.
The Post-Gazette has learned that DEP Secretary Michael Krancer announced the upcoming reorganization in an email to DEP employees Thursday afternoon and its details were scheduled to be unveiled at employee meetings today.