OP-ED: Kail’s performance disingenuous at DEP environmental hearing
At the Feb. 27 House budget hearing for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), state Rep. Josh Kail declared it “outrageous” that residents – including his constituents – have the right to petition the DEP for a change in environmental rules.
As Acting Secretary Jessica Shirley explained at the hearing, the DEP’s “rulemaking” process allows ordinary people to petition the agency for a new rule or repeal of an existing one. And though a citizen’s petition does not by itself create change, if backed by scientific data, it can merit further review by the DEP’s rulemaking body, the Environmental Quality Board (EQB). She added that the board’s review includes legislative touch points and consent, as well as some legislators among its members.
Kail, in a textbook-perfect non sequitur, responded by declaring that DEP rulemaking includes “absolutely no legislative input,” and by apparently deducing from this that the agency’s time spent in rulemaking is “wasted.”
Kail’s response sparks multiple questions: Why would any legislator call listening to residents a waste of time? Does Kail truly believe that the people of Pennsylvania should have no voice in evaluating regulations?
More broadly, why would any legislator be outraged by a state agency’s lawful, democratic, 40-year-old process for ensuring public input – a process that’s protected by the First Amendment?
These questions raise the broadest one of all: How do we keep the government of, by, and for the people from becoming an abstraction for our legislators?
The answer is to hold them accountable. And how? By following the money.
One of Kail’s targets is a petition that spotlights our region’s dire need to put some safety and health-saving distance between frack wells and our homes, schools, and hospitals. We are long overdue for a common-sense setback policy that has repeatedly been kept – by industry-lobbied legislators – from even reaching the floor for a vote.
It doesn’t take much research to guess why Kail would oppose protective buffers for residents who live near fracking. Before his election, he was general counsel for a fracking-support company near Canonsburg, where the Ewings Sarcoma cancer-cluster controversy arose in 2019. According to 2019 and 2020 reports, Kail owned a stake in his brother’s fracking-services company before donating $6,000 to his 2018 campaign.
Donors to Kail’s 2018 campaign also included two more companies tied to oil and gas. And by 2020, donations from bigger oil and gas companies like Consol Energy, Marathon Petroleum, EQT, Energy Transfer, and Range Resources had climbed to more than $18,000. Little wonder that Kail sponsored the pro-fracking House Bill 1102 in 2020. In 2024, a donor to Kail’s campaign was drilling company CNX.
Any citizen who values their access to the rulemaking process of any agency should question Kail’s disingenuous performance on Feb. 27.
So should any resident of Kail’s 15th Legislative District, which includes Shell’s fracking-fed, pollution-spewing plastics plant, as well as half of Washington County, which – isn’t it ironic?- just happens to be the most fracked county in Pennsylvania.
A link to the text of the hearing can be found here: https://paenvironmentdaily.blogspot.com/2025/02/house-dep-budget-hearing-republican-rep.htm
Lois Bower Bjornson is Clean Air Council Southwestern Pennsylvania Field Organizer and a Washington County resident.