May 25, 2016 2 min read

In late 2014, I was nominated to serve on the Citizens Advisory Council of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection by state Rep. Brandon Neuman and appointed by Samuel Smith, then the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, at the same time that Gov. Tom Wolf appointed John Quigley to head the DEP. While reading about Quigley’s resignation last week, it struck me the cards are fully stacked against Pennsylvania’s miraculous new oil and gas industry.

Quigley’s actions during the past year are troubling:

• He used private emails to bully environmental groups that did not fully support his goals of eliminating all energy sectors in the state.

• His involvement with his previous employer, PennFuture, in running radio ads against state Sen. John Yudichak, the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, who did not support Quigley’s overreach.

• In January, Quigley terminated the Citizens Advisory Council’s executive director. No reasons were given, and the council was bullied into accepting the firing of a productive, longtime DEP employee.

• In February, the Citizens Advisory Council demanded a meeting with Quigley. He met with our executive committee and basically told us to sit down, shut up and if we made any waves, he would get rid of the committee, which was founded and made law by Act 275 in 1971.

• Under Quigley’s leadership and with the administration’s tacit approval, this agency has worked to halt the state’s economic development projects, like those that our state’s natural gas sector has brought to the commonwealth, that small businesses like mine depend on to survive and continue employing Pennsylvania workers.

Now that Quigley is gone, we need to demand better from our leaders in Harrisburg.

The Wolf administration prides itself on openness and transparency, and yet they have allowed the DEP to operate as a rogue agency for over a year now, with an environmental activist at the helm who views anyone in his party who disagrees with him as apostates.

Our focus must be on making Pennsylvania attractive for capital investments, so will this administration find someone who shares this goal?

Mark D. Caskey

Washington

Caskey is the president and founder of Steel Nation, a Washington firm that serves the oil and gas industry.