Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Accolades for Commissioner McCarthy

How is Gina McCarthy doing as head of the Connecticut DEP. Rick Green of the Hartford Courant thinks she’s doing just fine. He writes:

Credit Gov. M. Jodi Rell on this one - she ignored the political hack tradition and hired the best candidate, conducting a private-sector style search and luring McCarthy from an environmental post in Massachusetts.

"The development that is happening everywhere is an indication the state needs to step back and think," McCarthy told me. By creating an Office of Responsible Growth, she said, Rell is sending a loud signal that environmentalists should be a part of this debate.

I’ll join in the praise if her patron, Jodi Rell, has enough influence to get ample money back in the Clean Water Fund.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Newhall Watchdog said...

Thanks for publishing your blog, and for raising the issue of Gina McCarthy's tenure at DEP. This is a topic that has received very little attention.

Now that the topic is open, I think that there are several other concerns with Gina McCarthy's record that should be evaluated here. You might take a look at what PEER wrote about here when she was first nominated:
http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=463

Many of these problems (the punitive reorganizations, the failure to set standards and testing appropriately, and the excessive reliance on private contractors to do work that should be performed by public servants.

In general, it is very important to distinguish between the fluffy PR that McCarthy puts out ("No child left inside") and her actual record. Another site to take a look at is the blog of my neighborhood, which is in the midst of a long-standing struggle with the DEP:

http://www.newhallinfo.blogspot.com

I agree with you (and Mr. Green) that McCarthy is better than her predecessors in this post, but that really isn't saying much. I think the bar should be a bit higher for a public servant.

The Newhall Watchdog

11:29 AM  

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