Gina McCarthy’s EPA nomination a pleasant surprise to Canton colleagues

On the morning of March 4, Steven Anderson opened an email from a friend that immediately took him back to his days as an engineer for the Canton DPW in the early 1980s. In it was a link to a news story about Gina McCarthy, the former Canton health agent who, as Anderson would soon learn, had just been tabbed by President Obama to become the next head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Gina McCarthy

“I looked at the photograph and there she was right next to the president of the United States,” said Anderson, a lifelong Canton resident who is now the director of park operations for the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy. “I was really shocked to see [McCarthy] standing there with the president.”

While acknowledging that it had been a few years since he last saw his old friend and former colleague, Anderson said her nomination did “make sense” in retrospect — especially considering what she has been able to achieve since stepping down as the town’s first full-time health agent in 1984.

“It does make sense to me, because the same skills you hear people in Washington talking about, Regina had here in Canton,” recalled Anderson, who worked alongside McCarthy when the public works and health departments shared space at the former Eliot School — the site of the present-day police station.

Indeed, McCarthy, 58, seems to have made quite a name for herself in Washington following a three-year stint as EPA’s air chief, acquiring a reputation among insiders as a tough-talking, data-driven pragmatist who welcomes differing points of views.

“As assistant EPA administrator [of the Office of Air and Radiation], Gina has focused on practical, cost-effective ways to keep our air clean and our economy growing,” President Obama said at a press conference announcing his final Cabinet nominations. “She’s earned a reputation as a straight shooter.”

A popular pick among environmentalists and business leaders alike, McCarthy, according to the Washington Post, “helped usher through many of the EPA’s most contentious rules during Obama’s first term, including regulations curbing mercury and soot emissions from power plants.”

She also played a major role in crafting tougher fuel efficiency standards for new cars and trucks, and from 2004 to 2009, while serving as commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, she helped to modernize the agency while pushing for clean water and greenhouse gas reforms and engaging young people through her No Child Left Inside program.

“She’s very bright and also very disarming,” noted Anderson, who performed several septic system inspections with McCarthy while working as an engineer for the town. “She has a way of talking to people on both sides of an issue, being able to listen to both sides and then make an informed decision.”

During her time in Hartford, McCarthy got a studio apartment near her office but frequently went back home to Canton — the town she was raised in and where she also raised her three children along with her husband, Kenneth McCarey.

Prior to going to Connecticut she held several key posts in Massachusetts government, including deputy secretary for the Office of Commonwealth Development and undersecretary of policy for the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. In total she has worked under five Massachusetts governors, from Michael Dukakis to Mitt Romney, and she also worked for a time on the Stoughton Board of Health before landing a job as the town’s first environmental officer.

“She was a hot ticket,” recalled Henry “Linc” Munson, whose stint as the Canton town engineer coincided with McCarthy’s time as health agent. “She was well qualified and a hard worker — just an all-around good and fun person.”

Munson, much like Anderson, admitted that he was “shocked” to learn that McCarthy had been nominated to the nation’s top environmental post, although only to the extent that he had “lost track of her” over the years.

“The last I had known she was in Connecticut,” Munson said. “I knew she had made it to [DEP] commissioner.”

Alan Leary, who remembers McCarthy from his time on the Canton Board of Health, was similarly surprised by her recent nomination, although he too believes she was an “excellent choice” for the position.

“I had a feeling she was going to go places, but I had no idea she would go that far,” he said.

Leary, who was part of the committee that hired McCarthy back in 1980, recalled how the health agent’s job had originally been offered to another candidate but the woman backed out at the last minute.

“So we took Gina and never looked back,” said Leary. “And she was great. She was very bright but she was also very down to earth and was a great problem solver. She more or less was on the cutting edge as far as this region goes.”

Both Anderson and Leary remembered how she was particularly adept at handling the public health scare that gripped the town following the discovery of PCBs at Indian Line Farm and Toka-Renbe Farm.

“She was very skilled at it,” noted Anderson, who was a resident in the Ponkapoag neighborhood that had to be evacuated following the Toka-Renbe barn fire in 1982. “She was very calm and was very much a calming influence on the residents.”

To this day, Leary still vividly recalls getting a phone call from McCarthy on the night of the fire, and then having to go door to door asking residents to leave their homes.

The fire touched off a cancer scare as residents feared that contaminants inside the barn could have become airborne during the blaze. McCarthy, however, made sure to do her homework, and at a subsequent public hearing she did her best to separate fact from fiction and provide her honest assessment of the health risks associated with the fire.

“I turned it over to Gina and she took right over,” Leary recalled. “I think everybody left that night with all the knowledge they needed. It quelled the rumors and everything toned down after that.”

Now, more than 30 years later, McCarthy is expected to face a similarly anxious crowd — this time consisting of Senate Republicans who are wary of her nomination and what it might mean for the American economy if she follows through on some of the president’s more ambitious ideas for curbing climate change.

McCarthy’s confirmation, observers say, will not be easy and might not happen without a fight, although the odds do appear to be in her favor — strengthened by her popularity among varying groups, her reputation for honesty, and her well-documented political savvy.

As Anderson noted about his former colleague, “She doesn’t treat different people any differently. She levels the field. When she’s in a discussion, I think she’d be just as honest and direct with you as she would be with the president.”

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Posted by Jay Turner on Mar 14 2013. Filed under News. Both comments and pings are currently closed.