The increasingly disingenuous McCrory Administration
Posted on 3/5/2014 by Chris Fitzsimon
The McCrory Administration is on shaky ground these days. Its disingenuousness and cronyism are catching up to it as three recent news stories make clear.
Sunday, a front page story in the New York Times in the wake of the disastrous coal ash spill into the Dan River detailed how ideology has trumped everything at McCrory’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources. And that’s not an editorial assertion. It’s the inescapable conclusion based on interviews with current and former employees.
The report begins with details of a meeting last summer at which supervisors were reminded that the Republican General Assembly had cut their budget deeply and would cut it again if they didn’t start issuing environmental permits faster to companies who sought them.
Regulators are now paralyzed, caught between enforcing the rules designed to protect the environment and bowing to the political ideology of the folks Gov. McCrory appointed to lead the agency, Sec. John Skvarla—who wonders if oil is a renewable resource—and Assistant Secretary Mitch Gillespie, a former member of the state House who had a bull’s-eye in the window of his legislative office that framed the building where DENR is housed.
Now the bull’s-eye is inside the environmental agency and still aimed squarely at people insisting on enforcing the laws to keep our air and water clean. The New York Times story quotes former DENR employees saying that the regulators are terrified of doing their jobs and speak to each other in hushed tones in the hallways, worrying about offending their superiors.
Skvarla told the Times he was “speechless” to hear about it all. That means he either has no clue about what the people who work directly for him are doing or he is being disingenuous about the culture of fear and intimidation at the department that he oversees.
- See more at: http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2014/03/05/the-increasingly-disingenuous-mccrory-administration/#sthash.F6nbcjB6.YvkfbsAY.dpuf
= new reply since forum marked as read
