Former Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (when it was still called that) chief Gina McCarthy has gotten herself onto a hot seat for the Environmental Protection Agency where she’s hung her hat during the Obama administration as the EPA’s assistant administrator of the Office of Air and Radiation.

Politico reports that McCarthy had to answer for some ongoing griping about transparency and the difficulty journalists have had trying to speak to EPA scientists.

The Washington-based national political news organization quoted McCarthy during a panel discussion Tuesday held by the Union of Concerned Scientists: “There is no question that EPA carefully manages EPA’s business, which means that not everybody has the credibility within the agency to speak to everything going on within the agency.”

Interestingly, McCarthy as DEP commissioner, tended to make herself available to the media, and wasn’t especially known for mincing words.

Jan Ellen is CT Mirror's regular freelance Environment and Energy Reporter. As a freelance reporter, her stories have also appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Yale Climate Connections, and elsewhere. She is a former editor at The Hartford Courant, where she handled national politics including coverage of the controversial 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. She was an editor at the Gazette in Colorado Springs and spent more than 20 years as a TV and radio producer at CBS News and CNN in New York and in the Boston broadcast market. In 2013 she was the recipient of a Knight Journalism Fellowship at MIT on energy and climate. She graduated from the University of Michigan and attended Boston University’s graduate film program.

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