Is Pennsylvania’s Ethics Commission looking into the $20,000 Governor Tom Wolf accepted from natural gas giant EQT during the 2018 campaign cycle as part of its ongoing investigation of his Deputy Chief of Staff Yesenia Bane? It’s one of the blanks yet to be filled in after a bombshell report from The Guardian filled in many others regarding Wolf’s role in the approval of Energy Transfer’s controversial Mariner East 2 pipeline.
Bane’s ethics were called into question in late 2016 when StateImpact PA reported that her calendar revealed she was regularly involved in matters related to her husband’s clients. John Bane was an oil and gas lobbyist working for Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney until weeks before the story broke. He went to work full-time for one of his clients as Senior Government Relations Manager, a position he still holds according to his LinkedIn profile. The company is EQT.
In the wake of the StateImpact PA report, Yesenia Bane was stripped of her responsibilities related to the Department of Environmental Protection, the agency that oversees oil & gas activities in Pennsylvania. However, a text exchange between Bane and DEP Secretary Patrick McDonnell first reported by StateImpact PA and central to The Guardian’s investigation that occurred in early 2017 shows that she was still involved in at least some oil & gas issues.
The pipeline was approved days after the exchange despite remaining deficiencies in Sunoco/Energy Transfer’s application. According to a statement made in a deposition by a senior official at the DEP, the environmental review was supposed to continue for several months before being cut short. It’s impossible to say what would have happened had the regulators been able to complete their review. What did happen because they weren’t is a long list of drilling mud spills that contaminated water, sinkholes, and property damage that resulted in permit violations, temporary shutdowns, fines, and criminal investigations by the District Attorneys in Chester and Delaware Counties, as well as Pennsylvania’s Attorney General.
A December 2017 StateImpact PA story reporting that the ethics complaint had been filed against Bane that led to the investigation was the first to call her Wolf’s Deputy Chief of Staff. She’d previously been referred to as Wolf’s Special Assistant. PAMunicipalitiesInfo.com is just one website that calls her that as well and lists Obra S. Kernodle, IV as the Deputy Chief of Staff. Governor-elect Wolf announced that Kernodle would be his Deputy Chief of Staff in December 2014. Wolf appointed Kernodle to the Southeastern PA Transit Authority, or SEPTA, board in May 2017 to fill a vacancy left when Representative Dwight Evans stepped down. It would appear that sometime between May and December of 2017, after the first StateImpact story about Bane, after she was stripped of her oil and gas duties, and possibly after the ethics complaint had been filed, she was promoted. However, Governor Wolf’s website states, “Yesenia Bane assumed duties as Deputy Chief of Staff to the governor of Pennsylvania on January 20, 2015.”
Why does Governor Wolf’s website provide false information about Yesenia Bane’s role in his administration? Why would Wolf promote (very quietly, apparently) someone whose ethics had been called into question?
Many questions remain about Wolf, Bane, and the industry’s influence on this administration. On the day the Ethics Commission announced its investigation of Bane, Wolf announced his “Citizens First” ethics reform package that sought to, among other things, “curb special interest influence.” Perhaps the most pressing question for Pennsylvanians is, “When does that start, Governor Wolf?”