'Ello Guvnah

The governor's Mansion in Harrisburg.

I have now had the privilege of interviewing (or participating in an interview with) a Pennsylvania governor five times -- three times with Gov. Ed Rendell and twice with his successor and our current Gov. Tom Corbett -- in my 15 years with The Mercury.

Thursday, however, was the first time it took place in the Governor's official residence, OK, the Governor's Mansion, in Harrisburg.

It's an impressive building, built with native Pennsylvania brick, with a lovely view of the Susquehanna River, on whose eastern shore it sits.

An enthusiastic and surprisingly knowledgeable tour guide, Corbett took a group of Digital First Media journalists through much of the elegant downstairs, showing us various formal rooms as well as his office, paneled with dark wood and graced with a fireplace every-ready to be lit.

(While we appreciated his time and interest, I don't think I was alone in thinking that certainly he had better things to do than show us around, but he was very gracious, so we let the thought pass unconsidered.)

We were there not as tourists but as journalists from our Digital First Media group because Gov. Corbett wanted to talk about pension reform -- a subject of vital importance to Pennsylvania's economic and budgetary health.

PA Treasury Secretary Charles Zogby gave us an hour-long

briefing on the pension crisis.

The hour-long briefing from Treasury Secretary Charles Zogby on how we got to this point of crisis, which preceded the meeting with the governor, was welcome, well-organized and informative. What the crisis essentially boils down to is a series of short-sighted and selfish decisions made with a hefty pinch of extraordinarily bad timing.

I don't envy Corbett the job of being the person who has to clean up this mess, left largely by his predecessor and the collection of rocket scientists known as the Pennsylvania General Assembly.

(I'll be working on a story looking at that issue in greater detail in next Sunday's Mercury. In the meantime, if you can't wait, I recommend Saturday's article by Jennifer Lawson at The Reporter, who was among those there.)

But what I am musing about today is not that crisis, but how the interviews in which I have participated illustrate for me how both men, Ed Rendell and Tom Corbett, approach the job of being governor.

Delaware County Daily Time Editor Phil Heron, right, did a 

pretty good job of keeping Corbett, left, on topic.

No matter what you tell yourself when you lie awake the night before, thinking of all the ways you will grill the governor, you will always find that politicians, especially those good enough to get to the governor's post, have an agenda of their own in agreeing to an interview.

And how they pursue that agenda in an interview, their style, says a lot, to me at least, about how they do their job and why they like their job.

In Rendell's case, it was a mastery of numbers and facts.

Unless you cover state government as part of your every day beat, it was easy for Rendell to overwhelm you with details about a question asked which left you feeling unqualified to ask a follow-up -- a kind of obfuscating fog of facts which, paradoxically, can be used to conceal the truth if need be.

He rarely had to refer to a briefing paper, taking the numbers off the top of his head and then spinning out a scenario about what would happen to those numbers if....

He had equal mastery, necessary for any successful politician, for names.

A champion name-dropper, Rendell would go for the upper hand in an interview by saying something like "oh the real expert in that is Joe Jones, do you know him? No? Oh well you really should talk to him about this..."

Corbett, on the other hand, uses a skill set born, no doubt, of his years as a prosecutor, a profession built on asking questions, not answering them.

Also a former school teacher, albeit 40 years ago, Corbett often responds to a question by asking you one.

Nancy and I outside the governor's mansion Thursday.

For example, when my boss, Nancy March, asked a question about educational reforms, he responded with "have you read the report?"

She wisely, and truthfully, answered that she had, but one is left with the impression that if she had said no, Corbett would have suggested she do so before wasting his time by answering the question; or spent time explaining the report's contents rather than answering the direct question those contents inspired.

He also uses a classic tool of politicians by answering the question he wants to answer, not the one you asked.

In August, some of you may recall that I wrote an analysis of the new Opportunity Scholarship Program.

This program begins with the state labeling schools with low-test scores as "under-performing," Pottstown High School being one of them, and then funnels business tax money to non-profit foundations which, in turn, grant scholarships of a maximum of $5,000 to low-income students of those schools.

The businesses pay roughly the same they would in taxes, but into a foundation of their choice instead of the state coffers, which would then be tapped to fund public education.

My analysis of the schools accepting the scholarships, called "vouchers lite" by many, showed that nearly 90 percent of the participating schools had a religious affiliation.

So when I asked the governor if he felt having the state facilitate the movement of money that otherwise would have been tax receipts into religious institutions, he didn't bat an eye and instead answered a question he preferred.

"Are you asking me if I'm against school choice? No, I'm not against school choice. Competition is always good," he said.

This is, of course; not what I had asked him at all.

To my regret, I took that bait and asked him how school choice is benefiting children when those same test scores used to identify Pottstown High School as "under-performing," show that the "choices" at many charter schools, and cyber schools in particular, are no better than the public schools they are leaving.

He responded, no doubt with the troubled Chester-Upland schools in mind, that many of the new schools are safer and that the other schools are "just getting started" and will have to "do better."

And so we moved on.

With six journalists sitting at a table around a sitting governor, there is always another question on another topic.

But I have also come to the conclusion that unlike his predecessor, Corbett does not like doing too many things at the same time.

Rendell always had five or six irons in the fire. Some might say that's why everything he did was only half-done, and there is probably some truth in that.

But the opposite seems to be true of the current governor, who, as Phil Heron asked him, you would expect to be getting more done with his party controlling the governor's mansion, and both houses of the General Assembly.

As he said in response to questions about his latest Penn State bombshell, however, "I’m very cautious. When I know what I’m going to do, that’s when I announce it."

And he seems to approach other aspects of his job that way as well.

Only time will tell if its more effective.

Goodbye Andy

Photo courtesy North Coventry Township's Facebook page.
North Coventry Supervisor Andy Paravis, who died Friday, introduces
former governor Ed Rendell, right, during a 2010 visit to 

Camp  Fernbrook, the preservation of which was dear to Andy's heart.

"You should be writing about this. What's the matter with you?" said the deepest, most gravely voice you've ever heard rumbling over the phone line.

If I had a dollar for every time I heard that in a conversation with Andy Paravis, I wouldn't be struggling to get by on a reporter's salary.

As I prepared the story about Andy's passing Saturday, I kept hearing that voice in my head, and then the "heh, heh, heh" chuckle that always followed it.

I tell people who tell me I'm too liberal that I've voted for plenty of Republicans, and it's true I have.

But, being a resident of the borough, I never had the honor of voting for Andy Paravis.

My loss really.

As I spoke to people about Andy Saturday, the examples of his leadership kept popping up, and I knew I couldn't fit them all into the newspaper. (The story was already too long....)

But I also couldn't keep them to myself.

Although I am a huge fan of the work Andy did preserving forest, agricultural and open space, and firmly believe that to be his greatest legacy, my favorite memory of Andy had to do not with success, but disaster.

It was June, 2005 and the Schuylkill had blown its banks again, creeping into South Pottstown and making long-time residents shake their heads, and new residents wonder what the hell they were thinking when they moved there

I remember it was hot, very hot, and a town meeting had been called in North Coventry Elementary School where hot, unhappy people were looking for answers.

"People were on their last nerve," recalled Supervisor Jim Marks, who also remembered the day.

I've seen my share of such gatherings and they are a minefield for a public official. The slightest error in phrase or fact can be the trigger for shouting and angry recriminations.

But Andy, who I'm pretty sure had recently completed another round of therapy to keep his cancer in check, climbed up onto the stage without hesitation.

He spoke plainly, and plainly felt the anxiety of his neighbors.

When he didn't know the answer to something, he said so, but promised to find out.

And they believed him.

"We know you're doing all you can Andy," said someone in the crowd.

Color me impressed. Not that I wasn't already impressed with how dedicated and relentless he was about keeping as much of North Coventry green as he could.

But this was in a whole different category.

This was not policy, this was leadership.

It was evident, these people believed and trusted what an elected official was telling them.

When the crisis came, they believed him because they knew him, and they knew he had never lied to them, or prevaricated or side-stepped an issue they cared about.

This meant he could be blunt.

All the better.

"What's the matter with them over there in Pottstown?" he once asked me several years ago after a particularly lunk-headed vote. "We've been trying to figure that out for years," I replied with a sigh.

Although, being the Pottstown and Pottsgrove reporter, I covered few North Coventry meetings, I did see Andy regularly at the meetings of the Pottstown Metropolitan Area Planning Committee.

It was here, where matters of regional significance were discussed, that Andy most often sidled up after the meeting to tell me about some obscure state legislation that would make open space preservation worse, or better.

"What's the matter with you? You work at a newspaper, you're supposed to know this stuff," he would growl with that sideways smile of his. "You should be writing about this."

"Ahhhh, I'm just kidding ya, pal" he'd add after a pregnant pause, hitting me on the arm.

But he was just letting me off the hook. He was right. I should have been, or someone should have been writing about this stuff. It's boring, but vitally important.

We often lamented the decline of watchdog journalism together and I knew this was his way of pointing out that this was just another example of something that was slipping through the cracks.

I would tell Nancy (that's Nancy March, the editor at The Mercury) and we would agree something should be done.

Then, one of two things would happen.

John Strickler, The Mercury's photo editor, a lifer if ever there was one, would stride up to her desk and say "fire at ---fill in the blank -- I'm going" and we would forget about HB 365784B that we had just resolved needed exploration.

With a smaller staff, that stuff gets left on the cutting room floor when spot news happens.

The other thing that would happen is Nancy and I would both pause, and realize with four reporters covering  30 towns, three counties and nine school districts, we quite simply could not devote the resources necessary to do the job properly.

But that wouldn't stop Andy from trying again the next time he saw me. I would explain the above and he would say "come on, this is important."

Despite what many might think, 25 years of local journalism has not completely soured me on elected officials.

When you cover the issues and decisions they face, the taxpayers who want better services and lower taxes, the meeting gadflies who consume their meeting time complaining about not getting return phone calls, the boring meetings, often for little or no pay, you develop some sympathy for the shoes they walk in.

It doesn't excuse some of their behavior, ineptness or self-dealing, but it makes it understandable.

Nearly all those I've known, get involved out of a sense of civic duty, a belief that they can help, or, never good, the belief that no one can help but them.

I always had the impression that Andy, like many, got involved because something happened he didn't like -- the Town Square development off Route 100. That's not unusual.

What was, in my experience, was that his interest in public service did not evaporate once that issue was settled. More unusual, I think, was his discovery that he had an aptitude for this kind of work.

He said once that he remembered as a kid watching with dismay when a mall was built in Montgomery Township, right along the township line, so at least half the traffic, police and storm water impact was burdened on a neighboring town which got none of the tax benefit.

(Sound familiar West Pottsgrove?)

That was his driver, he said, for pursuing regional cooperation with such vigor.

And he walked the walk.

When the Pottstown Regional Comprehensive Plan was being developed, Andy's was the loudest voice insisting that commercial development had to be pushed into the borough.

He knew that the best way to keep open space from being developed, was to give that development an alternative place to go.

"Pottstown should be the center of the region," he said over and over as he tried to coax township officials from West Pottsgrove, New Hanover and Douglass (Mont.) away from the siren song of property tax revenues offered by strip mall and cookie-cutter housing developers.

But "local control" has a long and selfishly guarded tradition in Pennsylvania and officials used to being the bosses of their own kingdoms chafed at the suggestion that people from other towns should have a say in how THEIR town gets developed.

"Plays well with others" is not often a high grade among municipal officials in the Keystone state.

Andy fought the fight anyway, mostly because he was not selfish. he did not have an out-sized idea of his importance in the larger scheme of things, he did not crave higher office, he just wanted to make his little corner of the world a little bit better and he didn't care too much who got the credit, as long as it got done.

And in many ways, he was a better friend to Pottstown than many of the borough's own officials.

And I'm proud to say I considered him mine as well.

Andy had the bad luck to die in the midst of a news event that is bound to overwhelm the news of his passing. Part of me thinks he might have said "just as well" and not wanted people to make a fuss over his absence.

But when the news of Newtown has faded, too soon and too likely overshadowed by another gun-fueled tragedy, Andy's absence will still be felt in the regional conversation.

His death leaves a big hole in greater Pottstown's political and environmental landscape; one I only hope someone else will step up to fill.

Seems to me we owe him that.

What the Frack Pennsylvania?

AP Photo

Environmental protesters in Harrisburg protest the state's
"frack-friendly" policies.

Don't you love it when someone agrees with you?

All I can say is it's about time.

About a year ago, when the Marcellus Shale debate was a little hotter, I recall Dulcie Flaharty, the executive director at Montgomery County Lands Trust, talking to the Pottstown Regional Planning Committee.

She got into what I will politely call an animated discussion with Kurt Zebrowski, who is a member of the committee from New Hanover Township, about Marcellus Shale.

This map shows where Marcellus Shale is located.
There's none in Rhode Island.

Zebrowski argued that if Pennsylvania enacted an "extraction tax" on the well drillers, LIKE EVERY OTHER STATE WHERE IT OCCURS, that the drillers would go elsewhere.

And I remember thinking: "Like where?! They have to go where the resource is. They can't drill in Marcellus Shale in Rhode Island, where there is none."

But I remember thinking something else as well:

"Why, having invited the coal mining industry in with open arms a century ago, and now finding our taxpayers paying the clean up the mess they left behind, would we not require this generation's equivalent from paying up front?"

The answer, as it so often does, comes from campaign finance records.

But don't take my word for it.

RED ROCKS: This photo of iron oxide on dead streams in PA is the
one NPR used to remind its readers that we've been through this
before, with the coal industry. And we're still paying.

Here are some "fast facts" from the National Institute on Money in State Politics web site which did the digging newspaper people used to do. (Click here to find out more.)

• Fourteen Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission members and several of their spouses contributed a combined total of $442,347 to Corbett's campaigns for attorney general (2004, 2008, 2010) and governor (2010).
• Almost all contributions to Gov. Corbett from Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission members came from either current or former oil and gas executives and lobbyists.
• In the 2010 election, donors from the oil and gas industry favored Tom Corbett by more than 10:1, giving his campaign $1.3 million while only contributing $130,300 to his opponent, Dan Onorato.
• Energy sector donors contributed a combined $768,438 to the legislators sitting on the House and Senate Environmental Resources & Energy committees.

Mercury Photo by John Strickler

 Ed Rendell speaking in North Coventry in 2010

So forgive the cynicism, but color me unsurprised to find out that Pennsylvania has dragged its feet on regulating and taxing this fast moving industry.

I remember our former Gov., Ed Rendell, when he came to North Coventry in 2010 to speak just before his term was up, warning that if an extraction tax was not enacted before Corbett was sworn in, little or no action would occur for the first five years, "because that's when the majority of the gas is extracted."


And now, the venerable National Public Radio, in this excellent report, has begun to look into the pollution we can all look forward to when these companies dissolve, leave town and leave taxpayers to pay for cleaning up the mess -- just like the coal companies did.

As it turns out, the danger is not so much what they pump into the ground, to fracture rock that used to be sea bed, but what's in it when it comes back out.

The wastewater was first -- did you guess? -- just dumped into streams. Then sent to wastewater treatment plants, which are not set up to take care of the chemicals and minerals found within.

The real risk from fracking is the wastewater.

Now, they're trying to recycle it. But eventually, it will have to be disposed of.

This is the quote that caught my eye: "Are we really going to let this happen to Pennsylvania again?" asks David Yoxtheimer, a hydrologist at Penn State who grew up here. "Are we going to make sure that we have enough money and that these companies' feet are held to the fire to make sure that once their operations are done, they put everything back together, tidy it up, and make it look like nothing happened there in the first place?"
I think we all know the answer to that question.

If you have any doubts about where the government's loyalties lie in this matter, read this lead paragraph from a March 27 article in The Atlantic magazine.:

Under PA law, doctors now cannot
tell their patients about the dangers
they face from fracking and what
might have made them sick.

"Under a new law, doctors in Pennsylvania can access information about chemicals used in natural gas extraction -- but they won't be able to share it with their patients. A provision buried in a law passed last month is drawing scrutiny from the public health and environmental community, who argue that it will "gag" doctors who want to raise concerns related to oil and gas extraction with the people they treat and the general public."

The magazine continues: "A 2010 congressional investigation revealed that Halliburton and other fracking companies had used 32 million gallons of diesel products, which include toxic chemicals like benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene, in the fluids they inject into the ground. Low levels of exposure to those chemicals can trigger acute effects like headaches, dizziness, and drowsiness, while higher levels of exposure can cause cancer."

See if you can guess what kinds of symptoms people whose water may have been polluted by fracking are experiencing?

There has been talk about whether imposing an extraction tax would help plus some of the hole in Pennsylvania's budget, and it's a legitimate discussion.

But for my money, and soon enough, it will be my money paying for it, I think any money the Commonwealth collects from these companies should right into a fund to pay for the clean-up and health problems we all know are coming.